Accidentally made my entire piece for piano instead of Alto Sax
So I finished making this piece but I realized at the very end that I made the entire thing for Piano when it was instead supposed to be for the Alto Saxophone. Whenever I try to change the instrument to Alto Sax, it transposes the entire piece when the piece was made for the sax. I don't know how to change the instrument and make sure that the music doesn't transpose. Could someone help?
Comments
IF... your concern is playback, go to the mixer (View - scroll down to mixer). When the piano come up, scroll down the sound column until you see alto sax. Click on it. The notes and key will remain the same and you will hear the alto sax.
In the future remember to set the instrumentation first in creating score click on "choose instruments" and the proper staffing will appear along with the instruments. You could also edit from there.
In reply to IF... your concern is… by penne vodka
i was actually planning on transposing the piece into oboe but since it's for piano and the piece is written for sax I'm afraid the transposing won't be right
In reply to i was actually planning on… by ClassyPenguino
You will need to transpose it up a major sixth to put it back into concert pitch like the oboe uses. This should also put the notes into the oboe range. Once this is done, you can do an instrument change to an oboe to set proper sounds and show proper range.
The reason changing instruments transposes the notes is that the "main" use of the change instrument feature would be for cases where you've already entered music correctly for the intended instrument, and now you wish to hear it played by a different instrument. So MuseScore does what is needed in terms of transposing to make sure it sound the same. In your case, though, you actually entered it for the wrong instrument. so the default behavior is indeed not what you want. It already will sound in the wrong key played on the piano, and when you change to alto sax, it will continue to sound wrong. So you will, as mentioned above, need to transpose the music to sound correct. Then you can change instruments all you want and it will continue to sound correct, and MuseScore will continue to transpose the music as needed to be written correctly for each instrument. To transpose the music, Ctrl+A to select all, then go to Notes / Transpose and enter the correct transposition (down major sixth).
For the record, I just the exact same thing a couple of days ago :-). I was taking music written for alto sax and wanted to transpose it for tenor. I started entering the music using the Jazz Lead Sheet template, meaning it was going in as written for alto but using piano, meaning I was actually entering the wrong key, which I realized around the time I finished and wanted to transpose. But no problem, I transposed it using Notes / Transpose, and then when I did the instrument change, all was good.