On Jun 30, 2007, at 3:29 PM, Will Denayer wrote:
"Bbsus(add2)" or "Bbsus4/2" (without the slash and with the "4/2"
stacked vertically, like "6/9") is pretty widely used and understood
in pop music. But I'm not sure if that's the chord that's actually
intended here. "Bb(add9, sus4)" is a bit ambiguous -- it's possible
that what's really wanted is "Bb9sus." The difference is, "Bb9sus"
has a b7 (Ab) in it and "Bbsus(add2)" does not.
I'm sorry for asking, but wouldn't it be easier to just notate the
whole chord?
Best, Will
There might not be room, and in a leadsheet format it is not usual.
It also means that the player has to work out voicings before and
after the written-out chord that will lead in well, so that kind of
thing is only used when a chord symbol is unwieldy or non-descriptive
of the actual harmony.
A major chord with a suspended 4 and 2 is not that uncommon; it's
just that the symbol takes up so darn much horizontal space if it
isn't stacked, and Finale does not include a whole slew of chord
suffixes that are quite common and difficult to make yourself. This
one is a good example.
Plus, as Hiro pointed out, jazz theory is young. Furthermore, there
are all kinds of chords that have been in common use in jazz for the
last thirty years or so that don't have concise chord symbols. I ran
into one of these myself recently, and it sounds quite conservative,
but I was knocking my head against the wall trying to come up with an
easy symbol for it.
It went like this:
C69 (in the instruments, it was voiced in five voices from the
bottom: C below middle C,E,A,D,G)
Bar 2, voiced from the bottom, G,F,Bb,Eb,G
What to call bar 2? As you can see, it comes from the middle 3 voices
going up a semitone from the tonic chord, while the top voice stays
the same and the bass goes down a 4th. I would dearly love to call it
Db69#11/G, which reflects the voice leading, but the solo instrument
uses a lot of Dnats, so that would not be right. Some would argue
that it is just a G7b13#9 missing the 3rd, but the melody uses NO
Bnats and a bunch of C's, so that wouldn't describe it properly
either. I could call it Ebadd9/G, which includes all the right
pitches, but it is not really an Eb chord at all; it is a G chord (G
aeolian really, depending on what school you went to) and so Eb
anything isn't really descriptive of the situation. I finally went
with Gm7(b6), reflecting its modal origins, but I knew that it was a
poor reflection of what was actually going on. At least I could count
on them using the right chord scale, which was more the point, I
guess, so in that way I communicated what I needed to.
I run into these kinds of semantic issues all the time with chord
symbols. We just don't have the language necessary any more to
describe what we need to.
Christopher
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