As Chris says, I find the geometric chord symbols infinitely
preferable, as they are instantly recognizable, contain fewer "bits"
of information for the brain to process, and are widely prefered in
the jazz education market and by jazz musicians under 40. I find the
argument that "a triangle is easy to mistake for a circle" a bit
ridiculous. If your triangles look like circles, you're doing it
wrong. Human beings are quicker to recognize geometric shapes like
circles and triangles and plus signs, etc, than they are at
recognizing letters, let alone abbreviated words.
Furthermore, even for clients that prefer non-geometric chord symbols,
I find the suffix "Maj" really distracting and ugly and unnatural to
parse. I think it's the mix of uppercase and lowercase. For me, the
all-uppercase "CMA7" is clear and reads quickly (not as quickly as
"C∆" but we've been over that). But "CMaj7" just looks awkward,
clumsy, and cluttered, at least to my eye. For non-geometric minor
chords, I use all lowercase: "Cmi7". "Cm7" is okay too but I find the
dot on the lowercase "i" helps, and the "i" is so narrow it doesn't
hurt to throw it in.
Of course, this system does not work very well with the JazzFont,
since in that character set there's no visible difference between
uppercase and lowercase characters (other than size)! But it works
just fine with other handwritten fonts, or with Bill Duncan's chord
font.
Cheers,
- Darcy
-----
[email protected]
Brooklyn, NY
On 10 Jun 2009, at 7:05 AM, Christopher Smith wrote:
On Jun 10, 2009, at 6:30 AM, dhbailey wrote:
Carl Dershem wrote:
A triangle over a straight line is easy to mistake in the usually
bad light on a bandstand.
cd
It's also easy to mistake a triangle for a circle in dim light, if
the suffixes aren't fairly large.
It's so much clearer to use Maj7, minMaj7, Dim (for full
diminished), m7b5 (for half-diminished).
But of course, what some might think is clearer is irrelevant when
a person is asking how to change things.
Thanks for providing the how-to on that issue, Carl.
While I mostly agree with you, I would have to go with dim7 for a
fully diminished chord, as dim alone would mean a triad. Same goes
for circle versus circle7.
In a common-practice jazz situation most players would automatically
play a fully-diminished seventh chord when confronted with "dim",
but often in pop material that isn't appropriate, or may even
introduce a bum note.
Another advantage of the alpha-numeric system is the suffixes can be
easily typed with ASCII characters, say in an email or a Word
document. That doesn't seem to bother Darcy, though, who has the
geometric system completely under control and has selected nice
pointy triangles and thick dashes so they don't get confused in dim
light, like you can with the JazzCord versions of those symbols.
The main disadvantage of the alpha-numeric system is the suffixes
can get a little long at times. Compare a slashed circle to m7(b5)
in terms of real estate, for example. Sometimes the essential
quality can get confused, too, say with m7(b13 11 b5) (stacked, of
course) you may miss the b5 in one glance. Slashed-circle (b13 11)
is instantly more clear.
Christopher
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