Hi tz1 - sounds like a perfectly valid feature request to me.
If you tag this thread as a feature request, it would make it more obvious that’s what you need.
Hi tz1 - sounds like a perfectly valid feature request to me.
If you tag this thread as a feature request, it would make it more obvious that’s what you need.
Variations across and even within countries/regions and styles/genres certainly do occur. I suspect, though, that there may sometimes also be “random” variations introduced by single publishers, and that may have no connection to a tradition.
I was struck by your example, @tz1. As a U. S. musician reading music with chord symbols (mostly jazz) for ca. 46 years, I can’t recall ever seeing either alternate bass notes in lower case or all chord symbols written in italics. Interesting variation — I’m curious, is that something you’ve seen in all or much of the lead sheet music you’ve encountered? How about others of you out there?
In my experience it’s not random variations, but quite common, and I see a lot of this notation- lowercase and italics
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But in jazz notations / books - influence from American jazz notation - it occurs that notation is what you usually see.
I attach a image from a opera song book - published in Denmark
This notation variant is also common in German hymnals (if it’s an edition with additional chord symbols). Additionally, major and minor chords are distinguished by upper and lower case letters, respectively. Here’s an example:
BTW we don’t have a lot of publisher of note books i Denmark.
And there’s not totally agree on italics or not, but bass tone in lowercase is common.
Heres an example from another editor.
These are great, thanks for the ever-ongoing music lesson we call “life”! (Or is it a life-lesson we call “music”?)
I looked through a 1976 small-format jazz fakebook I brought back from Russia in 1990. Your observation is reflected, @tz1: the chord symbols seem to jibe with what I see in U.S., though I can’t find an alternate bass note anywhere in the book. (I do know that I need to go shed my H7 piano voicings, though…
.) As I think about it, there’s a nice visual logic in distinguishing upper case = chord / lower case = single note.
@Martin90, it’s so interesting to see the chord symbols include case distinctions. I much prefer using cases in Roman numeral analyses (to “all-caps”), but I suspect I’d get confused glances on the bandstand here in the U.S. if I did that with lead-sheet chord symbols.
Yes, that’s indeed an interesting topic. During my entire (classical) music education we exclusively used upper/lower case letters for major/minor distinction. It’s also the default in many music theory textbooks. Therefore, that’s burnt into my brain. Other notation variants are not difficult to follow but don’t seem as natural too me as the classic one.
Exactly ![]()
I think (please correct me if I’m wrong, fellow Doricians) it might be more helpful to the Dorico team if you tag the original thread with the feature request rather than make this new one. Seeing the conversation about the notation practice globally might be valuable to the team as they prioritize their development efforts.
Yes - but I don’t know how to do it ![]()
I am from the Faroe Islands and this practice of writing altered bass note with lower case letters is also common here. It seems like there are better possibilities to customize chords symbols in Dorico 6, but I would love to have lower case altered bass notes as an integrated part of Dorico.
Another feature seen in this example is to use “-” where the same chord is played with different altered bass note in succession (Ex. Em , -/d). I would also be happy to see this feature as an integrated feature in Dorico.
The example is from a faroese songbook called “Syng” from 2012