Chiff and Fipple Forums

jeffrey armbruster wrote:Thanks again for all of your replies. sorry about the wording of my question. Just to be clear: I bought a book of Baroque pieces with written guitar part and a soprano recorder part. Since I play alto, I was wondering what would happen if I played the soprano part as written on my alto recorder. (primarily,would it clash with the guitar and would I run out of range...). As you see my music theory is essentially non existent. My thought was that I would need to 'transpose' notes played on an F alto to match what would be played on a C recorder.

In any case I'm going to copy one small piece for my guitar teacher to learn. The recorder part is in a narrow range that my alto can easily play. I'll re read this thread to grok if playing the notes as written for a soprano on my alto will work with a guitar part written to accompany a soprano recorder. (and now that I think about it my guitar teacher will know this.)

thanks all!

--Jeff

cboody wrote:If you don’t care about the octave you can just play as written, jumping thing up an octave when the notes go too low.

If you want to reproduce the pitches that the soprano recorder would sound play everything up one octave. If what is notated is too high you will have to shift to the lower octave.

Reading things up an octave sounds difficult, but really is quite easy. You’ll find it a skill worth developing.

Peter Duggan wrote:

jeffrey armbruster wrote:thanks again! Actually I just played through real quick some of the pieces in the book and they have a narrow range, so this may work with my alto/

What's the top note, Jeffrey? If the range is narrow, transposing the written part up the octave to sound at soprano pitch might work.

AuLoS303 wrote:You'll be playing in a different key, which might sound ok for some notes but others will clash.

No, it'll be the same key playing soprano part on alto using alto fingerings, but will sound an octave down unless transposed as I've just suggested above. It would be a different key playing soprano part on alto using soprano fingerings.