I have a feeling that each of us would have trouble riding a tricycle.
Ed

I never thought about it - never having used a transpose button, but playing in F on the keyboard and having Eb coming out of the speakers would really be weird. Gives me the willie nelsons

I can read music and still play the right keys with a transpose button, but even something I have played perfectly all my life, from memory, goes up in smoke when the music is gone, and I can play NOTHING be ear when a keyboard is transposed

I used the transpose button once. I was in the house band at an open mike event when a guest singer comes up to the stage and announces she will sing "Crazy" in the key of A. I know the song but never played it in that key. It has so many chords including diminished and augmenteds, I decided to cheat and transposed the keyboard down 3 half steps so I could play in C. It was a train wreck. The bass player was lost so he stepped behind me to watch my hands (wrong).

The singer did a good job in spite of the band.

That's a difficult song to experiment with! I don't know how anyone can use that transpose button - it's the devil's button

That's the key to it I think. When reading notation literally, the button is useable. But the situation where it's usually needed is when playing from a song copy. These generally aren't MEANT to be played literally - it's a "glance at the notation then play the music" job.

Yeah. In jazz you can pretend you were trying a far-out substitution. Pop and Country demand the RIGHT chords!

The perfect place to bring up Spinal Tap's take on Jazz at about 1:25:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wscZhvj_lH4

It's all wrong notes.

And all the time I thought I just didn't get it.

Right. But also I like to show people from time to time what famous music, always played in a particular key, would sound like in a very different key, to highlight (perhaps) why thing really do sound better in the "right key". If I make a tritone switch, my memory is totally deactivated and I can't play anything. I have to use a score, and even then it is difficult.

Something I wonder about: my pitch is much more accurate when I read a score away from the piano. If I pre-hear, some kind of orientation kicks in and I am accurate enough to fool most people into thinking I have perfect pitch.

But when I hear a chord, at random, I am more likely to slip off 1/2 step in either direction. I will never think a G chord is an F chord, or visa versa, but I may get mixed up with Gb/F# on a piano when the default equal-temperament tuning is used.