What is keyboard mapping?
Most of our programming includes some amount of mapping. In simple terms, mapping is where the keyboard is programmed to sound different notes than those written on the page. That is, keys are mapped to different pitches.
Mapping is often as simple as an instrument being transposed by an octave, but could be as complex as playing entire chords with a single key or entirely different pitches altogether.
Mapping is most commonly used to make a passage or chord easier to play, or to make it sound more realistic. Mapping can also be used to avoid a difficult patch change.
In this excerpt from Spamalot, the notes in the upper staff are mapped to the cue notes in the lower staff.
When we add additional mapping to a keyboard part, we make every effort to do so in such a way that it’s optional; that is, the player can choose to either play the part as originally written or play our optional mapping instead. We also try to make the mapping as sensible to play as possible (e.g., playing only the top note in a passage) and we generally avoid mapping to chromatic scales.
When the mapping is too complicated to explain in the player notes, we include a mapping guide PDF with the programming.