Question:
Explain please how to transpose using the bass clef.

I know to add 3 sharps but could you give me examples?

I want to play more in my church.   I realize they are playing in concert c…. I can transpose my alto up major 6th and write out the music.  I heard of playing the bass clef notes but adding 3 sharps… I’m not quite i understand exactly how… Was wondering if you could give me examples….

Played through high school and college.. but haven’t really played in several years just picking it back up.

Practices, ” not very often….”

Likes to play gospel… soft jazz… contemporary praise

-Cheryl, Florida

My response:

You have a lot of the information that you need, so you’re actually very close to understanding how to transpose from bass clef to what you would read on alto sax I think.

Theoretically, you could read the note in bass clef and then take it up a major sixth or down a minor third, but that ends up being more work. Requires a bit of thinking, especially if you do not read in bass clef too much.

However, there is a simpler way to do it that works especially well if you would usually read music in treble clef.

(You may still want to go up or down an octave or two.)

The difference between reading bass clef and reading treble clef is where the notes are placed on the staff. The ‘C’ in bass clef looks like an ‘A’ on the treble clef. So the notes for bass clef are placed on the staff a space or a line below relatively.

We see here a middle C in Treble Clef. Next, we have the same note written in bass clef, it looks like an altissimo A on saxophone. If we take it down one octave, it looks like the A above the staff, and if we take it down another octave, it looks like an A in the middle of the staff. It’s the connection between the first note in treble clef and the final note in bass clef that we want to focus on. The C in treble clef looks like an A in bass clef.

We could write the note in bass clef first and see that in the opposite order.

Notice that we did not worry about any key signatures yet. We did not have to since C and A are already a minor third apart.

Here is the more practical way to look at it though, and we’ll also look at the effect of the key signature

Here we see what looks like a ‘C’ on the left and what looks like a ‘C’ on the right. It’s actually an Eb though on the left since there are three flats in the key signature.

If we simply read the bass clef music it’s almost right, we just need to change the key signature.

So what you do is add three sharps to the key signature. If there are no flats or sharps, that means you have three sharps. If you have some flats, then the sharps ‘cancel out’ some of the flats. So if you started with three flats in the bass clef music, you would end up with zero flats, if you started off with two flats, you would end up with one sharp, ec.

So you can almost just read the bass clef part on alto sax, you just change the key signature a bit.