Compose Yourself: Transposition, Chuck-Berry Style

As promised, transposition on the guitar is on the menu for this month. Last month, we defined transposition as “moving melody or harmony up or down in pitch to a new key or a new range of notes.” No matter what your instrument or style, it is highly desirable to become an expert at transposition because it enables you to adapt to other players in a group setting, or to accommodate the vocal range of individual singers. It also annihilates the “difficult key” barrier, sharpens your ear, and elevates your Musical I.Q. (Imagination Quotient).

Who wouldn’t want all that?

A lot of guitarists, apparently, since “licks and tricks” far outweigh transposition as a topic of interest in the guitar world. (Jazz guitarists, who absolutely must be comfortable in every key, are a notable exception.) So what’s the problem? Simple: The guitar can be an angel or an absolute devil when it comes to transposition, and guitar players, as we all know, just wanna have fun.

That includes me, by the way, so let’s start with the angels. When it comes to ease of transposition on the guitar, there’s no finer illustration than the day that Chuck Berry recorded “Johnny B. Goode” at Chess Records, Chicago, Illinois, in 1958. This was no ordinary date: It marked a milestone in the ascent of the electric guitar to preeminence in pop music. First, it was a song about a rock-star guitar player. Second, there was that often-imitated, but never-surpassed opening lick. Third, Berry’s song was to become such a cultural icon that it was etched into Voyager’s “golden record” and launched into deep space in 1977, in hopes of making the hit parade on Zeta Reticuli.

True, I wasn’t hanging out at Chess Records when Chuck showed up to make music (and cosmic) history that day, so I don’t know for sure, but it’s been said that he arrived with every intention of playing “Johnny B. Goode” in the guitar-friendly key of A. The band, however, had other ideas. They liked Bb better.

Hm. What to do?

Keep in mind that the back-up crew included legendary songwriter-bassist-bluesman-record producer Willie Dixon (b. 1915), so the younger Berry (whose “Maybellene,” released in 1955, was already a monster hit) might have had diplomacy in mind when he agreed to go for Bb, but it was the guitar that made it easy to be gracious.

What Chuck did that day is called a “chromatic” or “exact” transposition. It means moving melody and harmony to a new range of pitches, keeping all the intervallic relationships the same. The net result of a chromatic transposition is that everything sounds exactly the same in the new pitch range. (That’s not entirely true, because Bb is an interesting and unusual key on guitar, allowing raunchy tritone hammer-ons, among other things, but that’s another story.)

On the piano, chromatic transposition from A to Bb means moving every note up one key, or one half step. The fingering remains roughly the same, but it can be tricky because two white keys go black and three black keys go white. By the way, a few “chromatic pianos” have been built in an attempt to alleviate this difficulty, but they barely show up on Google, so one must assume they haven’t been a resounding success.

On the guitar, however, chromatic transposition is completely natural: You keep the fingering the same, and move everything up one fret.

The guitar capo, a string clamp that fits over the neck of the guitar, works on the same principle. It simply holds the guitar strings down at a new fret, effectively shortening the neck and allowing you to play in a different key while keeping your fingerings the same. For example, if you learn an E blues that goes E7 – B7 – A7 on the open strings, you can play it in the key of F by clamping a capo on the first fret and playing exactly the same chords. They have mutated into F7 – C7 – Bb7, but you don’t even need to know that. It’s all taken care of by the capo.

So here’s how Chuck Berry must have accommodated the band that fateful day (assuming he didn’t just retune his guitar). This is not the whole intro. I’m simplifying it down to the basic chord shapes in order to focus on how easy it is to make the key change.

String numbers are in parentheses. String (1) is thinnest (highest notes), and string (6) is thickest (lowest notes):

The Chuck Berry Chromatic Transposition: Step 1. Play A major at the fifth fret

Hold down the following strings and frets and play:

(1) 5

(2) 5

(3) 6

Technical tip: Flatten your index finger across strings (1) and (2) at fret 5, pinning both strings at once. Play string (3), fret 6, with your middle finger. You are playing C#, E, and A from the low note on string (3) to the high note on string (1).

The Chuck Berry Chromatic Transposition: Step 2. Play Bb major (same fingering, 6^th fret)

Just slide your fingers up one fret:

(1) 6

(2) 6

(3) 7

You are playing D, F, and Bb, from  the low note on string (3) to the high note on string (1).

Conclusion? We guitar players have it easy, as long as we are able to slide the fingering up or down the neck. This is the guiding principle behind “moveable scale forms,” such as the “C scale form,” shown below. Moveable scale forms are a powerful tool because they enable you to play in any key without changing the fingering. They can do much, much more than that, too, as will be shown next month.

The C scale form is a moveable form, but it’s best to begin with the open-string version shown in Ex. 1 below.

Performance tips

Use fingers 1, 2, and 3 on the left hand (forget about the pinky). Use the index finger for any note on fret 1 (these occur on strings 6, 2, and 1). Use the middle finger for any note on fret 2 (these occur on strings 5, 4, 3). Use the ring finger for any note on fret 3 (these occur on strings 6, 5, 4, 2, 1). This keeps the technical part of playing the scale really, really simple.

Play a C major chord before you begin, and you will see how the scale tones cluster around it. Everyone knows C major, but for the record, it’s (string/fret) 5/3, 4/2, 3/0, 2/1, 1/0:

Ex. 1) Play the C Scale on Open Strings

Start playing on string 6, the thickest string:

(6): 0-1-3 (note names and sol-fa syllables: E, F, G; Mi-Fa-Sol)

(5): 0-2-3 (A, B, C; La-Ti-Do)

(4): 0-2-3 (D, E, F; Re-Mi-Fa)

(3) 0-2 (G, A; Sol-La)

(2) 0-1-3 (B, C, D; Ti-Do-Re)

(1) 0-1-3 (same as string 1: E, F, G; Mi-Fa-Sol)