Japanese piano chord collection site
I was looking for information about the chord F#m7-5. I know the basics of intervals already, so I just need someone to tell me what this chord type is (e.g. major triad, dominant seventh) and the components of this seemingly-bizarrely chord (e.g. root, major third, and perfect fifth for a major chord).
A cursory browsing around Wikipedia’s music theory articles didn’t bear any fruit. I actually expected it to be in the chord articles which has a handy list of chord symbols/notations with their components.
And then I found this Complete Chords site which has chords for guitars and piano. But to see it we must download a hefty 20+ MB pdf file! The file probably has chord diagrams for C, C#, D, D#, etc. I don’t need that bloat! If I know what Cm7-5 is, I can get the others (just shift all the notes to the left or right by the same amount, though in guitar finding a convenient configuration by oneself might be quite challenging).
And finally, accidentally, by Googling with “only Japanese pages” currently set, I found a convenient Japanese site which provides just the info I need! Go visit the site (shoshinsha, which means beginner). It shows the piano keys which needs to be pressed for a certain chord, some with its inverted chords. Just regard the kanji and stuffs as a beautiful graffiti. With the chord sidebar on the left and the image, you can easily get the chord you need.
So, when you find yourself asking “how do I play this chord?”, you know there’s a handy reference around. I’ve downloaded all the chords with C as its root, which will be a convenient chord cheat sheet.
Btw, it turned out that F#m7-5 is just F#m7 with the perfect fifth component replaced by a diminished fifth. Now I know that the -5 part means “diminished fifth”. So in other words it is an F#dim chord (diminished chord) with the added minor seventh component.
March 13th, 2010 at 7:28 am
Reading some of your post, seems quite interesting will be back to check it out some more later. Also I wanted to know if you would be interested in exchanging blogroll linkswith my piano sheets site
August 16th, 2011 at 11:19 pm
Hi!
You might want to write F#m7b5 instead… much more common and grammatically correct. It’s a semi-dim chord built with thirds on the seventh grade of the major scale. It has a clear function of a dominant chord (you could consider it like a D9 without the root)