19 votes

Why don't guitar chords and staff notations match each other?

Good question! They do! The situation you're running into is that your chord diagram doesn't match the G7 you've provided on your music staff. On the staff you provided, the notes are all separated by ...
MLunzy's user avatar
  • 221
15 votes

Why don't guitar chords and staff notations match each other?

“Root position” means that the lowest pitch is the root of the chord, but it says nothing about the other notes. The staff-notation chord is shown in “close position” – the most compact arrangement of ...
Aaron's user avatar
  • 82.4k
7 votes

Why don't guitar chords and staff notations match each other?

Very simple answer is - they don't have to. Root position tells one fact only - the lowest note - of any chord in root position, is the root. That's how inversions work as well, 1st inversion has ^3 ...
Tim's user avatar
  • 190k
6 votes

When was the term "scale degree" coined? Or where did it originate?

Scale and degree ultimately come from Latin words meaning "ladder" and "step," respectively, so the concept of "scale degree" is several centuries old, predating even the ...
phoog's user avatar
  • 20.4k
2 votes
Accepted

Two categories of scales

This is a question about musical jargon. Language questions like this often have two aspects that can be usefully teased apart. The first is descriptive -- we would like to know how people in fact use ...
helveticat's user avatar
2 votes

Two categories of scales

A scale is basically any set of notes portrayed in an organised manner. Hence ascending and descending. How else could a set of notes which belong together be shown? So it doesn't really matter which ...
Tim's user avatar
  • 190k
2 votes

What makes the Hungarian rhapsodies sound... Hungarian?

More generally, how can a piece of music be made to sound, for want of a better word, foreign? The answer is: both technical means and local culture (and its characteristics) produces a certain idiom ...
John the First's user avatar
2 votes

When was the term "scale degree" coined? Or where did it originate?

According to one of the online dictionaries, the first use of the exact term "scale degree" stems from 1889 but does not give the source. The term "degree" itself seems to date ...
ttw's user avatar
  • 25.1k
2 votes

Different meanings of "third"?

A third is an interval. The concept of a 'third' is very closely tied to the concept of a 7-note diatonic scale using all the notes ABCDEFG, each possibly sharpened or flattened (even multiply). A ...
PiedPiper's user avatar
  • 19.5k
1 vote

What chord do we get by raising the fifth of a minor triad?

Raising the fifth of a major triad gives an augmented triad. For example, you can get from C (C-E-G) to C+ (C-E-G♯) by raising the fifth. Correct. ...C-E♭-G♯, which is enharmonic to C-E♭-A♭ Not ...
El Ectric's user avatar
  • 375

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