Question that I received about transposition for alto sax.

Hi Neal

Please can you help me out, I am having a very heated debate with a soon to be ex friend lol… We are debating about transposing an alto sax into a standard “c” tuned guitar that is playing in the key of “F” …

I say the notes i need to play are: C# E F# G AB C C #

He says that I need to play : D E F# G A B C# D

Please can you let me know who of us is the idiot

Many thanks and kind regards

Matthew

If the guitar is playing in F, that means D on the alto sax.

Just like an Eb on the guitar would be a C on the alto sax. Eb to C is down a minor third. F to D is down a minor third.

It sounds like your friend is right.

You wrote, C# E F# G AB C C # though. I see two sharps and both C and C#…. I don’t understand what you mean by that. How did you get to those notes?

-Neal

Basically I was saying that after having given it some thought I was probably wrong and felt like an idiot, now that you have confirmed it, I really feel like and idiot lol

Basically the way I had worked it out was I wrote down the c scale, bad worked out what I would have to play on the sax to get that, and with that sax “c” scale, I started at F and made everything there on 3 half steps down, where as I should have taken the f scale and done that, but yes I feel silly now haha

Thank you for your help

Regards

Matthew

You just got mixed up about how transposition works, but since you had this debate with your friend, I think you will probably remember it well from now on!

-Neal