Tchavolo Swing and chord notation

nelson84

Hey Michael or anyone else out there who can help. I'm going through this book and while it has amazing amounts of useful material, some notation I find in fake books for chords is alien to me, especially when trying to figure out those chords in gypsy jazz-ish positions....for example...I found this chord sheet for Tchavolo Swing: http://www.visi.com/~mpv/charts/Tchavalo%20Swing.pdf

and I have no idea what D-6 is, i mean I know what a D6 should look like, but what does the hyphon mean? some notations have pluses, some have triangles....its very confusing to me. Is there a good book that talks about the basics for notation like this and how to construct a gypsy jazz chord out of notation like that?
thanks so much!

-Nelson

Jack

Hi Nelson,

That's a D minor 6 chord. Here are some general notation examples:

-(minor)
+(augmented)
Triangle (major 7th)
7 (dominant 7)
circle (diminished)
circle with a line through it (half-diminished aka minor7b5)
6(sixth)
9(ninth)
-with a triangle (minor chord w/a major seventh)

There's probably some I'm forgetting, too.

best,
Jack.

klaatu

A - (hyphen or minus sign) is a common notation for a minor chord, so D-6 would be D minor 6. + would represent augmented. The triangle is used to designate major 7. A circle is a diminished chord and a circle with a slash through it is half-diminished.

klaatu

Oop, Jack beat me to it.

klaatu

What book is that, by the way? Looks like a great chart. I'm looking for charts like that for our violin player. The usual chord charts don't do him a lot of good.

Jack

You can also find some symbol charts here:
http://tsmp.org/keyboard/lias/pdf/Symbols.pdf
http://www.petethomas.co.uk/jazz-chord-symbols.html

best,
Jack.

nelson84

hey thanks guys, that helped....i found that chord chart on this site, its actually all violin sheet music, check it out:

http://www.visi.com/~mpv/charts/

Jack

I'm pretty sure it's just a collection of charts someone made themselves using Finale or Sibelius. There are some good finds, but some mistakes too if I remember right. Still worth a look!
http://www.visi.com/~mpv/charts/

best,
Jack.

Jack

Gaaaaaahhhhhh! So many overlapping posts, and the edit button has gone missing!

klaatu

Jack wrote:

Gaaaaaahhhhhh! So many overlapping posts, and the edit button has gone missing!

Indeed, Jack. I wonder whatever happened to the edit button? I looked for it after realizing that we had overlapped, to no avail.

The site does look useful - thanks for the reference. Our group used to consist of two guitars and a bass, and we got along OK with chord charts. However, our new violin player is classically trained and new to jazz improv (but coming along nicely), and lead sheets are helpful. I make my own using Music Time Deluxe (a decent notation program WAY cheaper than Sibelius et al), but it's time-consuming, so it's nice to find that someone has been kind enough to post theirs. Even if there's a mistake here and there, it's a big help.

Stackabones

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