Kanbaru 🌟 (one hikari of too many)this is one of those times where we realise that we will have to get relatively deep into the music theory weeds for “good-sounding guitar chords” to make sense
according to some chord identifier web app, this is Em7 -> Esus4 -> Dmaj7sus2\E ^^;;
I Can't Believe It's Not Zero!@hikari chord identifier app is sus: calling something with no F# any kind of “Dmaj7” SMDH.
@steve ah, thank you for giving me another reason to distrust it
@hikari the trouble with chord identification tools is they lead us to want to name every stack of notes at each moment in time as it’s own “chord” instead of stepping back and asking “where are we now, and when does that actually change?”
Chris Liscio@steve @hikari are we talking chord recognition (from audio) or “suggest some nice chords” tools? Both might share some components (e.g., transition probability matrices), but they are applied in very different ways.
I happen to have more experience on the recognition side, but am happy to try and answer questions about either.
(Edit: on second read, it might be neither! 😂)
@steve @hikari Yeah—context is everything. A bag of notes, even when you arrange them by “pitch height”, cannot be reliably named. Rootless voicings, dropping the third, and other such changes to chords in practice make this a fool's errand.
FWIW, chord recognition infers symbols within a fixed vocabulary, and your performance/accuracy is helped if you allow it to say "not in the vocab.” A polyphonic note detector that names the output pitches would be painful to use in practice.
Steven Woolgar@woolie @liscio @hikari
- Piano pretty much never plays the root unless you don't have a bass player (because the bass will cover it)
- The fifth doesn't really add anything, so why bother
- F# C# would be the most minimal "shell voicing", but that's just an open fifth so it sounds boring and makes voice leading awkward
- So toss in the 6th (B) or 9th (E) or both, they don't really change anything for a maj7 but open up opportunities for voice leading to do something.
- Piano pretty much never plays the root unless you don't have a bass player (because the bass will cover it)
- The fifth doesn't really add anything, so why bother
- F# C# would be the most minimal "shell voicing", but that's just an open fifth so it sounds boring and makes voice leading awkward
- So toss in the 6th (B) or 9th (E) or both, they don't really change anything for a maj7 but open up opportunities for voice leading to do something.