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Old 08-16-2019, 11:31 AM   #94
brainwreck
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Quote:
Originally Posted by superblonde.org View Post
I'm not sure Diatonic is the best description for that. That was a particular scale, right. Diatonic means the "good named" notes are a subset of a particular scale. So it is best to name the scale at the start.

I think it would be best to think in terms of a typical jazz chart ("chord chart", which lists only chords above the single-line vocal melody, or maybe does not show melody at all, it only shows rhythmic slashes like "| / / |"). That chart is going to have a starting tonic. All the chords on the chart will follow that specification. If the key changes because of modulation...no problem, it's obvious, because the 0 chord suddenly becomes the 2 chord, then goes back to 0 chord again when original tonic is restored.


Is this any different from how a MIDI app would internally represent the music? There's no way that Band In A Box is using static strings "| E-7 A-7 | D-7 G7b9 | C6 A-7 | D-7 G7 |" for the internal representation of a score and then modifying the strings anytime the user wants to transcribe to a different key. The software is converting it to a relative numeric index, I would guess, maybe A=0, or maybe using MIDI note numbers with C=60 (applying the root note number as same data as the chord name).
Maybe I'm missing what you intend to say. The Major scale (a diatonic scale) was used as the simplest example of showing notes in a base-12 notation. Maybe you are saying to explicitly state a mode as a key, rather than saying that a piece of music is in 'C Major' or 'A minor' for example. And if a mode is stated as a key, are you saying that the root of the mode would be note '0'? I hope not.

Whether some chord symbol system is used or not, we still need to be able to direct;y notate pitches of chords within the line(s) of music. I might be missing what you are saying here, too. As has been discussed by others above, there is a place for chord charts and a place for precisely defining a chord voicing. But both are needed.

What I was getting at in my last post is whether pitches of chords within notated music should be relative to the key or relative to the root of the chord as in traditional music theory. Because if we use the traditional way with a 12-tone system, that certainly mucks things up. In other words, we can't say that a Major triad is 1-3-5 in a 12-tone system (relative to relative). But if we say 1-4-7, are we talking about in relation to the chord root or the music key root?
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Last edited by brainwreck; 08-16-2019 at 11:39 AM.
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