Transposition for the Dummy Composer

Cleveland playing a trumpet?

We'll be honest here: nobody on staff here at the Antisocial Network has had any music lessons in longer than we'd like to think about (and none have had any composing or theory classes). Oh, sure, several of us played in high-school bands and a couple have tried desperately to learn the guitar (several times), but the truth is most of our musical expertise plays out in the car or the shower these days. So it goes. But that doesn't mean that we're so completely out of it that the instructions by eHow.com's Cleveland van Cecil (yet another freelancer nom de plume intended, we suspect to protect the guilty) didn't strike a sour note. Get it? a music joke? Whatever. Anyway, Cleveland is definitely not the person we would ask to explain "How to Change Trumpet Notes to Match Guitar Chords" at OurPastimes.com, nosiree, Bob...

Though we can be reasonably sure Cleve took a music appreciation class to get that BA in Liberal Arts of his, apparently he didn't ever actually take a music class. That's why, when performing a copy-reword-paste job on his question, he got something wrong. 

Let's start with his introduction:

"Most trumpets are B flat instruments, meaning that a 'C' note played on a trumpet sounds like a concert B flat. To compensate for this, music for a trumpet is transposed up one note to match the 'C.' The guitar is a C instrument, meaning that it plays a true concert pitch."

That's nominally true. There are other trumpets, too (D trumpets, though they seem rather rare); and one should probably mention cornets as well, since they often play the trumpet parts except in real orchestras. So, though van Cecil got this bit right – or perhaps more accurately, since his source got it right – he didn't read all the way through that source to find an important statement: "The [B♭ trumpet] sounds one whole step lower than written, so parts for it must be written one whole step higher than concert pitch." So, you see, if Cleveland had read that line, he would have been aware that the sheet music for the trumpet part is already transposed to the key of C. In other words, if the composer wanted the trumpet part to play a middle C, he or she would have written the note as a D. Got that? Well, van Cecil didn't get it: otherwise he wouldn't have told his readers to

1. Look at the musical notation and identify the key... 
2. Look at the trumpet note and lower each note one full step to match the guitar notes.

Oops... that means that, although the composer intended to hear a concert C and therefore wrote a D, you've now lowered the note to a B♭. Let's hope you like dissonance...

No, the original question was obviously asked by a composer, not by someone trying to read music – heck, the whole transposition thing is completely transparent to players! The real answer is completely the reverse of what Cleveland told us: write the guitar part, which is in the key of C. Then for the trumpet part (assuming it's a B♭ trumpet) write all the notes one step higher than the guitar – if the guitar is playing a D major chord, write an E for the trumpet; if the guitar part is playing an E, write an F♯ for the trumpet. Yeah, there's an octave of difference: so sue us...

Is that so hard to understand? No, it's not – but our "experienced" freelancer with his liberal arts degree didn't get it, even though our way out-of-practice musicians got it, and they're mostly scientists. But at least they're not the Dumbass of the Day, like good old Mr. van Cecil...

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