Chord Names and Symbols (popular Music) - Advantages and Limitations

Advantages and Limitations

Any chord can be denoted using staff notation, showing not only its harmonic characteristics but also its exact voicing. However, this notation, frequently used in classical music, may provide too much information, making improvisation difficult. In fact, although voicings can and do have a significant effect on the subjective musical qualities of a composition, generally these interpretations retain the central characteristics of the chord. This provides an opportunity for improvisation within a defined structure and is important to improvised music such as jazz. Other problems are that voicings for one instrument are not necessarily physically playable on another (for example, the thirteenth chord, played on piano with up to seven notes, is usually played on guitar as a 4- or 5-note voicing that is impossible to play on piano with one hand).

As a result of these limitations, a shorthand which describes the harmonic characteristics of chords is used in pop music and jazz. This notation has an advantage of being more easily expressed in plain text and in handwriting than the relatively complicated process of writing chords on a staff. It is also faster to read.

The first part of a symbol for a chord defines the root of the chord. The root of the chord will always be played by one of the instruments in the ensemble (usually by a bass instrument) – failure to include the root means that the indicated chord is not being played. By convention, the root alone indicates a simple major triad, i.e., the root, the major third, and the perfect fifth above the root. After this, various additional symbols are added to modify this chord. There is unfortunately no universal standard for these symbols. The most common ones are to be presented following here, below.

This notation does not easily provide for ways of describing all chords. Some chords can be very difficult to notate, and others that exist theoretically are rarely encountered. For example, there are 6 possible permutations of triads (chords with three notes) involving minor or major thirds and perfect, augmented, or diminished fifths. However, conventionally only four are used (major, minor, augmented and diminished). There is nothing to stop a composer using the other two, but the question of what to call them is interesting. A minor third with an augmented fifth might be denoted, for example, by Am+, which will strike most musicians as odd. In fact, this turns out to be the same as F/A (see slash chords below). A major third with a diminished fifth might be shown as A(♭5).

Usually, when composers require a chord that is not easily described using this notation, they will indicate the required chord in a footnote or in the header of the music.