The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #129759 Message #2915707
Posted By: Don Firth
27-May-10 - 09:57 PM
Thread Name: Passing notes in chord construction
Subject: RE: Passing notes in chord construction
I would stick with the basic chords and not try to make the chord symbols reflect melody or passing tones. This could get off-puttingly complex. Let the written music and the tablature handle all that.
In Carl Sandburg's American Songbag, and especially in a sort of paperback supplement that came out some years later, The New American Songbook, above the melody lines of many of the songs, Sandburg (or somebody) put chord symbols for the (presumably) actual chords that Sandburg played. And they are a pluperfect nightmare to try to figure out.
Side note: among other things, Sandburg used to work a lot on playing classic guitar and whenever he was in New York, he spent time with members of the New York Society of the Classic Guitar—and he knew Segovia personally. (An excellent book about Carl Sandburg entitled Old Troubadour: Carl Sandburg with his Guitar Friends, by Gregory D'Alessio, New Yorker cartoonist and editor of "The Guitar Review." Highly recommended.).
I'm well enough versed in music theory so that, more often than not, I prefer to ignore whatever chords are in songbooks and work out my own arrangements. But I was trying to learn songs from Sandburg's books before I learned all this, and most of the time I couldn't make heads nor tails of what he was doing. I pulled out my copy of The New American Songbag just a few weeks ago and although I can now figure out what he's doing, I find his chord symbols overly complex and basically unusable.