The Transpose Button; A Fatal Error.

Ok, so a funny moment happened earlier during band practice and it's worth mentioning because our keyboard player, Marcus wants to forget that this ever happened to save any future embarrassment. We rehearse the jazz standard, "Misty" as a part of our setlist in preparation for the gig next Thursday. The song is originally in the key of Eb Major, but to suit our session vocalist Lauren, we've transposed it down by a perfect fourth to Bb Major. It took me a short while to transpose the chords in my own time outside of rehearsal so that I could figure out a new bass line, whilst my friend Marcus here simply presses a button to change which key he's playing in. In fairness he does sight-read from the score which is an amazing skill but, this transposition function is a lazy approach and I'm not quite sure why they co-exist on electronic pianos. Just because they could? Maybe.

Anyway, imagine this; we had just finished practicing, "Misty" after a couple of goes and had decided to run through Mary J Blige's "Family Affair". We have our own intro for this song and then we're all straight in for the same thing over and over again until the end of time... I mean, the song. Hannah, our drummer counts us in on the high-hat. Intro into the verse. Something doesn't quite sound right. What's going on?? It sort of works, but sounds completely different to how we had been playing it before although we we're doing it all the same. We all suddenly realised what was wrong. The transpose button was still on from playing "Misty" and we all burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter. I've never laughed so much in a practice session through all my experience. It's musical mistakes like these that are the best, just maybe not on stage. It took us a while to calm down, to switch off the transpose function and start again. The irony is that AS had mentioned that this can be a typical problem on stage, remembering to switch off the transpose function when starting a new song. I guess it's better to experience hiccups like this now rather than on stage next week.

I don't think I will ever forget this, nor will I let Marcus forget this either!