On Jan 22, 2007, at 12:46 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
However, my point is that WHY can't y'all agree on ONE name for
each chord?
Why several names, regardless of your "musical point of view?"
There are a
lot more part time old geezer musicians like me than ALL of the
musicians in
ALL of the orchestras in the world, and we buy and play a lot of
music. Not
symphonies, that is certain, but LIVE music.
To make things worse, a lot of old music was published with ukelele
chords, rather than "guitar" chords. The difference was sometimes
enough to make a really bad bass line, such as an Em ukelele chord
symbol where the piano was actually playing Cmaj7 (Em is the same as
the top three notes of Cmaj7, the only difference being, you guessed
it, the bass note).
In that case, they were writing for the ukeleleist, not for the
bassist. Even in today's modern, "enlightened" age, when arrangers
have gone to school and learned a consistent method, a chord like
Bbmaj7/C presents a minor conundrum to the bassist, as there is no
5th mentioned at all in the chord symbol and he has to infer that it
is G. It gets worse for chords like B/C, which is really a Cdim(maj7)
chord, so the poor bass player has to just know that.
And of course you are right that many times a G7(#11) is called a G7
(b5), but the D is a better note than the Db for the bassist, whereas
if the chord is a Gm7(b5), then the D will never sound right. It's
just part of what you have to know as a bass player.
Christopher
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