Changing Keys Without Changing Already Written Notes

• Sep 12, 2019 - 00:50

Hello,
In the jazz band that I am in, one of the songs that we are playing is missing a piano part that was lost. The piano part is still in the score so I went and took photos of the piano part in the score so I could copy it over to Musescore 3 manually. All that I am doing is copying. The piece is in C major but it switches into Bb major at the solo section and then switches back to C major. I forgot about the key change and wrote the whole piece without ever changing the key. I noticed this when I saw that one of the whole measure chords had a natural sign next to an E even though it is in C major. If I had switched it to Bb major, that note would normally be a Eb and the accidental would change it to an E. Now here is the problem, I went and added the key change to Bb major and it added or subtracted accidentals to all of the following chords to make them in the original key of C major, even though I changed the key to Bb major. I was wondering if their was a way to change the key without changing the notes. I could just delete it all, change the key, and wright it again, but I was wondering if their was a better way to do this.

Thanks,
Noah


Comments

If I'm understanding correctly, you wrote a bunch of notes with a key of C, including some B's and E's that should have been Bb's and Eb's, because you missed the key change. Now you want to change the key signature to Bb, and fix the pitches of the notes you entered incorrectly. That's not hard. First change the key, then select the range of notes affected, press Alt+Shift+Up follow by Alt+Shift+Down. These are the "transpose diatonically" commands, and this trick returns everything to the original pitch but without accidentals.

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