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A.1 Chord Names
Symbols and Constants
Notational notes: In printed music a “diminished” chord is sometimes represented with a small circle
symbol (eg. “FO”) and a “half-diminished” as a small slashed circle (e.g., “CØ”).
A half-diminished chord in MmA is specified with the notation “m7♭5”.
A.1.4 Slash Chords
Charts sometimes use slash chords in the form “Am/E”. This notation is used, mainly, to indicate chord
inversions. For example, the chord notes in “Am/E” become “E”, “A” and ”C” with the “E” taking the root
position. MmA will accept chords of this type. However, you may not notice any difference in the generated
tracks due to the inversions used by the current pattern.
You may also encounter slash chords where the slash-part of the chord is not a note in the chord. Consider
the ambiguous notation “Dm/C”. The composer (or copyist) might mean to add a “C” bass note to a “Dm”
chord, or she might mean “Dm7”, or even an inverted “Dm7”. MmA will handle these . . . almost perfectly.
When the “slash” part of the chord indicates a note which is not a note in the chord, MmA assumes that
the indicated note should be used in the bass line. Since each chord generated by MmA also has a “scale”
associated with it for use by bass and scale patterns this works. For example, a C Major chord will have
the scale “c, d, e, f, g, a, b”; a C Minor chord has the same scale, but with an e♭. If the slash note is
contained in the scale, the scale will be rotated so that the note becomes the “root” note.
A warning message will be printed if the note is not in both the chord and the scale.
Another notation you may see is something like “Dm/9”. Again, the meaning is not clear. It probably
means a “Dm9”, or “Dm9/E” . . . but since MmA isn’t sure this notation will generate an error.
Please note that for fairly obvious reasons you cannot have both slash notation and an inversion (see the
next section).
For more details on “slash chords” your favorite music theory book or teacher is highly recommended!
A.1.5 Chord Inversions
Instead of using a slash chord you can specify an inversion to use with a chord. The notation is simply an
“>” and a number between -5 and 5 immediately following the chord name.
The chord will be “rotated” as specified by the value after the “>”.
For example, the chord “C>2” will generate the notes G, C and E; “F>-1” gives C, F and A.
There is an important difference between this option and a slash chord: in inversions neither the root note
nor the associated scale are modified.
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