Originally Posted By: Guitarhacker



Chord symbols are there in sheet music for other folks, mainly guitar players who can not read the notes on the staff. If you're usng them to play the song, your accuracy is going to be diminished from someone who can read the music.


Hi Guitar Hacker,
With respect, you make my point.

The title of the thread is "Chords don't tell you what you need to know", I still hold this is true. I was meaning when used for improvising. If your trying to play along to a new song and you come across a chord you cant tell what notes are going to be 'in' and what notes are going to be 'out' by looking at the chord symbol. The example I used in the original post is an A7 appearing in a C progression. You have to make some calculations to realise that the C# needs to be handled with care.

Just because a system has been around for a long time it does not mean its a good system. yes its true, that as you study music sometimes it can reveal that the complexities of the notation system are there for a purpose, but not always. There are lots of things that could be a lot easier to understand.

Music is a language, similar to 'natural' languages, like English or Chinese, it has evolved from a number of diverse forms and usages. As these languages evolved in various ad hoc settings, for purposes that are now sometimes defunct they bring with them redundancy and unnecessary complexity.
We use words to spell, but there are lots of illogicalities in the English spelling system that make it hard for learners to master the art. Similarly in music there are lots of attributes that make it hard to master reading and writing music. They are simply historical anomalies.
The problem is that even if you can invent a new system that does away with the problems, it's hard for such a system to gain universality - e.g. Esperanto.

If a person simply learns English, in order to speak it - to perform the act of listening and speaking - then they might not realise that the system they are using is full of contradictions, they simply use it. Its only when its pointed out that cough and bough and bow are inconsistently spelt, that it comes to their notice. If a person points out the illogicalities in music it does not necessarily mean they simply have to understand its rules better.

When improvising, sight reading a series of chords, if you come across an Am7 chord it does not tell you that it is a Phrygian, Dorian or Aeolian minor, so you have to calculate it's context to find out what kind of ninths and sixths to use. If you use the wrong kind, they can stand out like a sore thumb. All this takes time and effort.
As an off the cuff example, If the chord symbol was simply AP(for Phrygian) or AD, or AA you would know both the scale and the chordal tones and would be able to improvise more freely and quickly.

The whole system comes from the needs of medieval monks scratching church modal needs onto parchment, gradually a uniformity of script was built, and this was extended and modified.

Imagine a learner, looking at a note on a staff. The note is on the middle ledger line. What note is it? Well that's a legitimate question in my book, but...

It could be a B - if its treble clef, or it could be a D if its bass clef. Its even possible that it could be the French Violin Clef, or The C clef or the Sub bass clef - each giving different notes. Additionally, it can raise a semitone, or lower a semitone, and this can either be indicated next to the note or elsehwere. It can even be raised or lowered a tone by the presence of a double flat or sharp.

If the instrument is a transposing instrument, for any one of these clefs, it could be termed a "B", or an "A", but it actually might be another note entirely, so that when you as an Alto sax player refer to a specific note, then your tenor sax friend refers to the same pitch using a different name from the same system, your French Horn player again something different and your pianist yet again some other pitch, using the same term.

The student's question was a simple one, "what note is that?" but the answer is unnecessarily complex, in the same was as bough, bow (bend) and bow (ribbon).
It's my personal view that the system we have handed down to us, often does not tell us what we need to know, or makes it obscure so we have to derive simple essential information (like what note is this) by calculation.

IMO

Z

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