2. Background

Popular chord notation systems in use today describe the pitches of the component tones of most chords relatively to a reference major scale starting at the chord root. For example, the symbol

Ab6(9)(#11)

usually means “take the root triad from the Ab major scale, add the scale’s  6^th , 9^th and 11^th degrees, then increase the pitch of the 11^th by a halftone”.

Simple as it seems, virtually all current notation systems lack rigorous syntaxes and consequently suffer of one or more serious inconsistencies. The most famous of them – and the most terribly confusing for beginners – arises in the conventional notation of dominant chords, in which an unmodified “7” normally refers to the flattened 7^th of the major scale. Quite curiously, the major 7^th takes about a dozen different, sometimes exotic, representations, more or less justified by local usages, nationalities and personal tastes of authors and editors.

Another frequent source of confusion is the treatment of omitted or implicit tones. For example, in some systems, the symbol “C9” simply means adding the major 9^th to the C major triad, while in many others it implies the inclusion of the minor 7^th as well. The reader is rarely warned about the correct interpretation, and in most cases must learn it by trial and error, according to the context.

A big challenge that common chord notations have to face is the trend-off between clarity and conciseness. The chord symbol in the above example is quite explicit and unambiguous, but at the cost of being cumbersome and slow to write, either by hand or by typesetting. In fact, typing and positioning fairly readable chord symbols is typically one of the most time-consuming stages of popular music score editing.

In this article, a new notation system for describing harmony in popular music is presented. It works with special symbols called chordgrams. The example below illustrates how chordgrams represent harmony changes in comparison with typical “fake book” chord symbols:

As regards chords, chordgram notation is free from inconsistencies, compact, easy to learn and fast to read and to write. In several aspects, chordgrams are similar to ordinary notations. First, they  are primarily designed to represent tertian chords (those formed by stacking successive thirds from an underlying scale or mode). Such chords are the most frequently used in popular music, including jazz and other harmonically dense styles, such as 50-70’s Brazilian popular music. Second, they are limited to a representation of the chord in its fundamental position, without imposing an exact distribution of the upper voices. Also, they make use of the major scale as a reference to represent chord tones.

However, chordgrams have some attractive features that make them an appealing auxiliary or alternative notation for ordinary chord symbols:

-         Uniform, fixed-size symbols for all chord types;

-         Fast handwriting;

-         Explicit representation of the chord tones;

-         Language-independent symbols;

-         Easy and fast learning, both for beginners and experienced users of ordinary chord notations.

But chordgrams are not limited to chord notation. As it will be shown later, one surprising side benefit of chordgram notation is its ability to reveal, in a very explicit and natural way, the relationship between the represented chords and their subjacent scales or modes. This makes it a helpful tool for analysis and improvisation. Actually, chordgrams can be used to represent complete scales and modes, in a straightforward way and without loss of clarity and conciseness.