Using Modulation on a Synthesizer

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Ben Anderson with Expert Village, and I'm here today to talk to you about modulation, modulation on a keyboard. What modulation is is the adjustments of pitch sound in pitch resonance. Technically, in classical music, modulation is used to change from one key to another. A keyboard can do that with a switch called a modulation switch, or what's also known as transposition. On this keyboard, there is a transposition switch. If I play one chord, for example, a C-Major chord, and if I go here over to the transposition switch, I turn it on and I hold it down, it will then give me a note value and I can determine how many pitches I want that sound to change up or down. So, let me set it to one pitch down. Now, if I play that same chord again, every note that I play has moved down a half-step by what you hear. You can do this in many, many different other ways. I can bring it up, and I can bring the pitch up an entire octave. So, it would be almost as if I was playing what I currently am now, but up a position higher--one octave higher up. So, if I play this again, the sound is the same pitches that you heard before, except an octave higher. So it's a really cool tool to use if you're playing live, especially if you learn a song and you only know how to play in a certain key, but you want to be able to change it to a different key instead of having to relearn the song that you know already in that new key. All you have to do is determine what key you want to put it in, press a couple buttons, and there you have it. So, a couple months ago I was playing a show with my band, and we were learning a song in an original key, and we found our lead singer was having a hard time hitting the high notes. The song was originally in this key, so we had to make an adjustment. So, one thing that I had to do was I just go over to the transposition button, determine how much lower we were going to set the song for him, and then I didn't have to relearn how to play it. I played it the exact same way, but it sounded different."