How To Transpose Music:
You may be able to play a song in the key of G Major for instance.
If you have the song mastered, you may want to give it a little more variation so you can play it more than once and not have your listening audience get bored with what your are playing.
After playing the song in G Major, you can decided to play it in a different key to give some flavor to the song or make it more interesting.
Of course to do this you can select any key you want, but musically we usually choose from a few different options, and you can hear this on some songs on the radio or CD’s.
Here are some of the more common options you will see and hear in key changes (Music Transposition):
Option #1:
Shift the song up a half tone or one fret. This would mean going from the Key of G major to the Key of G# major or Ab major (same thing). In the new key all the notes in the song would just shift up one fret. (or put the capo on the first fret-dare we say cheating?).
Option #2:
Shift the song up a whole tone or 2 frets. This is more often done than Option #1, above. This would mean you go from the key of G Major to the Key of A Major. In the new key all the notes in the song would shift up two frets. (again you can cheat and put the capo on the 2nd fret – same thing).
Option #3:
Shift the song to the next sharp key. This would be from G Major with 1 sharp, to D Major with 2 sharps. This gets a bit more difficult and requires that we either transcribe the song on paper in the new key or we work it out by playing by ear.
Option #4:
Shift the song down to one less sharp. This would be from G Major with 1 sharp to C Major with 0 sharps or all naturals.
Most often key changes or transposing of music happens using Option #3 or Option #4. In our example song, I have used Option #4.
How Do We Transpose:
Well before computers and notation software similar to Guitar Pro, this was done either by ear or my manually changing all of the notes by hand, also know as transcribing the score. You can and should know how to change it by hand and you should eventually know how to transpose by ear, which many musicians including myself do all of the time.
With the software, if you have the selection already written down and documented, it just takes one or two mouse clicks and “Voila” it is finished. Not so with the manual method.
Transposing Manually:
First you need to know how many steps it is between the keys you are using. In this case the distance between the key of G and C is G-G#-A-A#-B-C (remember that there is not a B#). So that distance is 5 half steps or five frets. You can do this on your guitar if you like too.
So to play in the Key of C rather than the key of G you have to raise every note that is played in the key G five half steps. Yep every one. Usually this was done by having the original score printed out and a blank score to record the new transposed melody. Yuuuuuuuk you say? Yes I know pretty boring. That is what makes the computer so convenient, but convenient does not make us learn what and why we do it.
You just have to do a lot of note counting and you can do that. Keep in mind that you do the exact same thing with the rhythm chords. You count up or down the exact same number of half steps to get the different names.
In a later lesson will will have an assignment where the song is presented to you in one key and you will have to transpose it into another key. But – that will be later. 
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