I’m not being elitist about anything, but coming from a math/science background and reading the Wikipedia page I linked to, I can’t help feeling that if somebody devises a theory based on the link between chords and scales, but you needs 21 different scales (according to Wiki) to make the theory “work”, and it still only “works” for a subset of what are accepted as jazz master works, then to coin a phrase “there’s something wrong here”.
But if there are enough people out there who want to use it, I’m not trying to talk it down - so long as I can have baroque figured bass notation as well
OK, I think I now understand much better what you are suggesting
Great feature indeed, I would appreciate it too.
Thanks for your patient explanations.
And I do hope Dorico will offer this kind of features.
At the moment, from reading in this forum I sometimes fear that Dorico, because of its strong will to make things look almost perfect per default, could possibly prevent the user to freely decide how the score should look like.
I am quite curious to see by myself as soon as the demo is out.
That would be a crying shame and not what I think will be happening. Especially since Steve pointed out that Cubase has a perfectly working chord playback and customization engine. Just port that over and we’re all good!
Benji
Rob, the whole chord/scale thing developed for improvisation in order to give the musician a quick, workable subset of all the possible notes over a given chord, i.e. for real time use. It’s not a “theory”, just a “hack” to manage Jazz improvisation, and nothing is set in stone. But every scale has got its own unique “sound”, and sometimes I want to go for that. For example, a written Dominant 7 b9 chord sounds completely different when soloed over using altered scale, HM5, or half/whole tone scale. The decision what to use is with the improviser! Or, if not in real time, with the composer.
And: Luckily, music is only part math…
Thank you very much for that information. I assumed Dorico must have that capability. And to be clear, absolutely the ONLY thing I am suggesting in this thread is a more intelligent behavior for the:
Alt+ Up/Down Arrow
keystrokes. If the composer has chosen to add chord information to the score, and the composer uses the Alt+Up/Down keys, then the diatonic scale should be derived from the chord symbols if available rather than the key signature. Pretty simple concept, I’d think.
There are some nuances. For example, let’s say the melody has a sustained note that passes through several chords. Let’s say we are in the key of C and the melody has 8 beats of E. The chords change in half notes: Cmaj7, Bb7(#11), Amin7, and Ab7+. I copy that 8 beats (2 tied whole notes) of E to my harmony part and select them. If I hit Alt+Down twice, then I should get 8 beats of C, and that is also true today without chord awareness. Those 8 beats of C are reasonably compatible with the explicitly entered chords.
But let’s say I copy the 8 beats of E to a second harmony line and hit Alt-Down 4 times. Today, we would get 8 beats of A which is just plain wrong. With the chord awareness I am suggesting I would end up with 4 half notes: A, Ab, A, Ab. The point here is that the Alt+Up/Down process would need to break notes into pieces from time to time. As you continue up or down the diatonic scale, there can be cases where the adjacent notes would come back together, which raises a question if the notes should somehow be recombined. I would be perfectly happy with leaving them broken apart, as I could easily tie them later if that’s what I wanted.
I emphasize that under this scheme, nothing would be any different unless you entered chord symbols into the score, and in that case, the proposed behavior would always be at least as good and often much better than the key signature method. I also emphasize this is a big time saver for those harmonizing to chord-based music. I don’t expect the notation program to account for everything the orchestrator must consider, such as voice leading, but it would at least give us a quick, harmonically appropriate, starting point for the final voicing.
