Re: Chords and what they mean

[David Kastrup]

Johan Vromans <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sun, 20 Sep 2015 14:02:06 +0200
> David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> > On paper, we all write Am to designate an A-minor chord. However, in
>> > LilyPond we write a:min.
>
>> Probably because it is usually written as a:m instead.  "m" and "min"
>> are aliases.
>
> True, although that was not what I intended to state. See below.
>
>> > So what is the big deal to write c:sus4 when you want to designate
>> > your flavour of Csus?
>> 
>> Well, your premise is faulty, so it's not really relevant for the c:sus
>> interpretation.
>
> The point that I wanted to make was that you need to write chords
> differently in LilyPond anyway, using colons and periods. So translating
> c:sus into c:sus4 would hardly make sense.

I think it is not an outlandish expectation, once you see how a:maj and
a:dim and a:min work, to have c:sus turn out a recognizable suspended
chord rather than a power chord (which is anything but a suspended
chord).  It's not hard to learn c:sus4 for sure.  But anything that
works according to naive expectations without causing other problems
leaves more time to learn more important things.

> OTOH, a full translation of Am into a:m (and so on) would be interesting.

That's not really much of an option because it's far outside of the
lexical entities otherwise composing LilyPond input.

-- 
David Kastrup