Guitar chord diagrams in Notation products

Hi Mark

The idea of a user-inputed database is very good. However, I'm not too sure about the idea of voting for different fingerings. Whether one chord is more suitable than another is to do with context and style. One fingering is not "better" - but only better in a given context.

The context is to do with the chords before and after any given chord. You know from the piano that the most flowing chord sequences depend on minimum movement, as opposed to all being in root position and jumping around the keys.

The same is true for guitar. If you play a chord of C around fret 3, and the next chord is A, you would aim to find the chord around the same fret, or maybe a fret lower or higher.

You wouldn't want to jump to the tenth fret, as the musical flow is broken. However, there is nothing intrinsically better or worse about an A chord on fret 10 - it is still the notes A C# E, but is just somewhere else on the guitar.

In the future an intelligent program may be able to voice the whole of a piece with regard to minimum movement (which is a similar principle to good voice leading), but really that's not at stake here. There is no such thing as a good or bad voicing or fingering, but whatever is best for each individual context.

As regards to the database, I'm not too sure that separating the chords into style categories would necessarily work. Although folk people do TEND to play a G chord open, for example, they do sometimes play it closed, and to be honest, a database based on style would be a bit too arbitrary for that reason.

All I would want is this sort of database:

A (all the chord shapes of A submittted)
A add 2 (A add 9) (all the chord shapes..)
A sus 4
A diminshed
A augmented
A 6
A 7
A 9
A 11
A 13

Then all the same for B, etc, etc. That would satisfy 99% of users.


What should be remembered is that chord diagrams are not just used for chords per se, but also to suggest fingerings at tricky parts in a piece of music.

So having these chord boxes as fingering guides would also be a key feature: when there's not a chord as such, but a tricky bit of fingering that needs visually explaining.

So it would be good to be able to create a chord box at will and place your own dots on it to explain fingering, even when if music doesn't need chordal accompaniment.