There’s a real method to notation, and seasoned musicians will tell you quickly if your system is not ergonomic. But even with Logic, you’d have to go in and arrange chromatic tones to look correct on the page. Quite frankly, if composer came to me with a piano piece in the key of G-sharp major, I would tell him to get serious and transpose it to a key I’d like to read! Logic Studio is able to handle key as one of the global parameters, most likely because it has a “score” function which allows you to print an actual notated score of your tune. By default the intervals would remain the same, so all you’d need to do is just select them all and drag it until the bottom MIDI note is on the note you want as your tonic. Now, the only other way you’d be able to do it is if you stack the notes in C major in a MIDI clip and simply drag the collection of notes up and down the grid and compare what you get to the piano roll on the side of the clip. Notice how the G# skips the letters B and E? That’s no good, which is why I say you’d need to just know the scales and make the transfer in your head. One of the rules of scales is that each letter needs to be present in the scale in some form, whether it be sharp, flat, or natural. See how you have a doubling up of the C and G notes? That never occurs in a correctly constructed scale, as it is shown in the Ab version.

The problem starts becoming apparent when you have a flat-based scale like A-flat major. That works well because the notes all fit Ableton’s system. Since that is the enharmonic equivalent of B-major, you would have B-C#-D#-E-F#-G#-A#-B. So say you have a C-flat scale, where every note is flat. Like I said, you’d need to know the notes of the scale in your head and be able to quickly convert the enharmonics to meet Ableton’s deficiency.

E flat major scale midi