If you are transcribing something in order to play it on a transposing instrument (e.g. Trumpet in Bb, which we will use as an example here) then you may want to work directly in the transposed key. Simply using the "tuning" command to raise the pitch by a whole step is not a satisfactory solution as although it puts the piece into the key you want your transcription to be in, you will not then be able to play along with it on your trumpet.
What you really want is for the piece to play at its usual, unaltered pitch but you want Transcribe!ís spectrum display and piano keyboard to work in transposed pitch, so that when there is a concert Bb played in the piece, if you select it for spectrum analysis you want the peak to appear over the keyboardís "C" and if you button "C" on the keyboard you want to hear concert Bb - in other words you want the keyboard to be a transposing instrument having the same transposition as the trumpet.
This can be done using features of Transcribe! which have been in there since the very beginning, but I hadnít realized myself that they could be used for this purpose until a recent discussion with a trumpet player who asked whether this could be done. The idea is to take advantage of the fact that the Tuning command adjusts the pitch (and speed) of the track before spectrum analysis is applied while "Change Pitch and Speed" in the Faster/Slower command adjusts the pitch (and speed) of the track after spectrum analysis is applied, and it maintains correspondence between the spectrum and the keyboard by transposing the keyboard to stay in step. The original purpose of this was to provide a speed change facility back in the days of version 1 when we didnít have slowdown-without-pitch-change. These days I tend to use it only for changing the pitch up or down by an octave.
This may all seem a bit complicated but actually using it is simple enough. We set the Tuning command to take it up a whole step and "Change Pitch and Speed" in the Faster/Slower command to take it down a whole step. The result is that we hear the music at its original, unaltered pitch and speed but the spectrum and keyboard are transposed as we want. Note that if you shift-click a keyboard note then the box that pops up tells you the sounding (concert) pitch of the note you are hearing.
The commonest transpositions are :
Bb instrument : Tuning +2 semitones, Pitch and Speed -2 semitones.
Eb instrument : Tuning -3 semitones, Pitch and Speed +3 semitones.
and you will easily work out any others you need.
There is one slight irritation. Tuning changes are transcription-wide which means that they are saved with the transcription you are working on (good). However Playback speed adjustments are view-specific which means they are not saved and you will have to reset the playback Pitch and Speed adjustment each time you start work on the transcription.
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