Cubase 14 Chord Editor "j7" notation


The chord function in Cubase is amazingly powerful and useful.

Maybe I’ve lived a sheltered life, but I had never come across the “j7” symbol before. I didn’t find it mentioned in the Cubase documentation. I eventually found a few mentions of it via Google search. Enough to figure out it stands for ‘major 7th degree’ - or natural 7 - not dominant 7th degree or flat 7. It would have been clearer if they’d just labelled it ‘maj7’ instead of ‘j7’. There’s enough width in that column to fit in an extra two letters. So you can have a major or minor triad, with either a natural 7th or a flat 7th extension.

And while it’s kind of / sort of appropriate to call the extensions ‘tensions’ – it’s probably more common to call them ‘extensions’.

And that’s something obscure that I learned about Cubase in the last hour.

Be good to put something in the Cubase documentation about the meaning of the ‘j7’ notation.

Hi,

Here is the description of the major seventh chord.

As the 2nd column already says major, it doesn’t make sense to use major again in the 3rd column. In this case, I have seen “j7” in other occasions too.

Above link is the only discussion I found on the internet.

The ‘j’ in ‘j7’ is an abbreviation for ‘major’. (What else would ‘j’ stand for if not that?)

The ‘7’ above it in that column stands for the flat 7 (dominant 7).

Not really:
The second column refers to the basic TRIAD type (major, minor, etc.).
The third column refers to the TENSION type (major 7, minor 7, etc.).
So we could choose a minor triad with the major 7.

Hi,

That’s right, but then it’s not a maj7 chord.

Honestly, I don’t know, how to do it to fulfill all use cases.