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Old 09-08-2019, 05:39 PM   #419
superblonde.org
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Quote:
Originally Posted by n997 View Post
The simplest would be "minimal voicing closest to clef, without ledger lines", so for example on a treble staff Am/E would start from E above middle C, then A, then C.
This is another illustration of lack of good notation, since most of my own Am/E would be open voicing for SATB, not closed voicing (close spacing) on piano, these are very different, and the chords could be either complete or incomplete too. Or there could also be "bass voicing" where the E is way down the octave like E2 and the Am is up at A5, typical in bass pedaling etc. So my Am/E could literally be the simultaneous playing of: E2 A3 C4 A5. Or, in a different context, it might be E2 A3 C4 C5.

There are dozens of possibilities for voicings, though the common ones, the notation should allow that, rather than every combination being called "Am/E" with the actual position of the individual notes remaining a mystery.

As mentioned previously in this thread the lack of adherence to scientific pitch names really bugs me . The better description would be A5m/E2 for example (if and only if the use of numbers for chord quality can be dispensed with so that the octave number is the only number used, or some similar alternative... aka if "figured bass" notation were replaced)

This notation improvement to specify octave in the chord name would go a long way towards reducing ambiguity on guitar, where various guitarists will play songs completely differently because they want to position their hands at their favorite spots on the guitar neck (ie typically it's the open-chord version of a song vs the mid-neck version of a song).



Fundamentally, and I should bring this point up more, "music theory" is not a theory, it is a hypothesis, a description of physical laws of acoustic waves, and the current music hypothesis and method of describing the hypothesis has a bunch of limitations.
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