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What chords do you need?

jefftk.com

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Re: What chords do you need?

#151

Post by hackernewds »

cactus2093 wrote: post #113
travisgriggs wrote: post #72

Completely tangential to the actual content of this blog, I really (really really really) appreciate the look. Simple dark text on light background. Obvious hyperlinks. Charts and tables that tell the story without distracting. Effective minimalism. I wish more of the internet looked like this.

Interesting, I really disagree. I do agree the page is refreshing compared to a lot of the internet these days, just because it has no ads and no glitchy, laggy SPA animations or slow loading times. But it's pretty extreme to pretend that none of basic design practices adopted over the past 30 years have any merit whatsoever. This design is not good. The black text on white is too much contrast. The default browser t…

Agree I'd hate for the internet to look like a corporate Google Doc. An interactive New York Times article is very pleasing to read (minus all the ads)

Re: What chords do you need?

#153

Post by jancsika »

lb1lf wrote: post #143
jancsika wrote: post #76

Another way to put this is that for most pop music , you could often degrade gracefully to three triads of major or minor quality. But even for something discussed previously on HN-- the Beach Boys "God Only Knows"-- this doesn't work. Wilson really wants a half-diminished seventh chord at the high point of the melody. One could perhaps degrade to a diminished triad in the accompaniment, but he's literally singing th…

Francis Rossi, of Status Quo fame/notoriety, depending on who you ask, quipped when presented with some award or other - "Wow! Twenty-five years. Three chords. Thank you!" I love it when people do not take themselves too seriously.

Look, I'm just a caveman. I fell in some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts.

But there is one thing I do know:

When composers want to emphasize the chord they're about to play, they will often choose a new chord consisting of notes within a step or half-step of the original. And they will quickly play that new chord as a way to smoothly introduce the chord they wanted to emphasize.

Whether it's Mozart in the retransition of the G minor symphony, Wagner in a transitional phrase of the interminable Götterdämmerung, or a folksy award winning singer-songwriter, that new chord counts as a chord. And that new chord must be added to the sum total number of chords used in the song.

Thank you.

Edit: the Mozart chord is G-G#-B-Eb, as a kind of "neighbor garbage chord" of a dominant seventh in G minor. For Wagner, I can't remember what key it was in, but it's a half-diminished seventh chord with a pedal-tone a minor third below the root. It's function is as a neighbor chord to a dominant seventh built on that same pedal-tone. Not sure about OP's reference but I bet I could find an interesting transient chord in there, too.

Edit2: Oh yeah, the Wagner reference is indeed Wagner, so you can be sure it gets sequenced with at least three iterations in case you missed it the first time.

Re: What chords do you need?

#154

Post by javajosh »

jefftk wrote: post #50
klodolph wrote: post #34

A couple notes > While it's almost always I, IV, V, and vi, we have both II/ii and III/iii, differing on whether the third is major or minor. This might be a bit confusing as written, because the slash "/" is normally used in roman numerals to indicate secondary chords. For example, the II chord may be written as V/V. (V/V is always II, but not the other way around... the "/" notation indicates that the chord is func…

> This might be a bit confusing as written, because the slash "/" is normally used in roman numerals to indicate secondary chords. Sorry, that's not something I'd seen. Edited the post to switch to "or". > The terminology "open chords" is also a bit unusual. The term "open chords" usually refers to chords that use open strings (strings that are not fingered). Looking some, you're totally right. I'm confused where I p…

power chords ... call them chords without thirds.

Not a guitarist, but I always assumed "power chord" referred to lots of doubling up over octaves, not the absence of a third.

Re: What chords do you need?

#155

Post by javajosh »

alar44 wrote: post #121
mgkimsal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, I remember McCartney saying he started to realize there was some musical control you could have in a song, not just having to play "root of the chord" bass notes. "Yeah, as time went on, definitely bass, I started to think, Wow, you know? Once I realized that you didn’t have to just play the root notes. If it was C, F, G, then it was normally C, F, G that I played. But I started to realize that you could b…

100%. Every Little Thing She Does by the Police has only two chords in the verses but Stings choice of bass notes make it sound like 8+, root notes be damned.

Whenever I hear that song, I wish the intro would just go on and on and on.

Re: What chords do you need?

#158

Post by zwegner »

jefftk wrote: post #96
analog31 wrote: post #12

There's also a huge pile of chord charts published online for the jazz standards and the Great American Songbook, that would be interesting to analyze.

Are any of these machine readable? As long as I don't have to transcribe them by hand I would enjoy looking at them!

Quite a few jazz tunes have chords here: http://songtrellis.com/changesPage

Some of the chord charts are machine readable (available as just plain text), while others are images, but looks like all/almost all of them are available as MIDI as well.

Re: What chords do you need?

#160

Post by analog31 »

jefftk wrote: post #96
analog31 wrote: post #12

There's also a huge pile of chord charts published online for the jazz standards and the Great American Songbook, that would be interesting to analyze.

Are any of these machine readable? As long as I don't have to transcribe them by hand I would enjoy looking at them!

I've kind of lost touch. My "fake books" were all hand written and photocopied.

Even the better players were becoming so dependent on them, that it was detracting from the music, so I went cold turkey and learned the tunes.

An app called "iRealPro" has chord changes in a strange format, and somebody once created a Python library to decode it.

There was once a book called "pocket changes" with just chord changes, and I think it was converted to text format, but can't find it anywhere online. The changes are an outgrowth of a quirk in the copyright law, where the melody and words can be copyrighted, but not the harmony.

Wish I could be of more help.

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