Agronesia

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.

I ripped this quite a long time ago from a Japanese song chord site. Not as easy as saving the pages, since the pages has a nasty Javascript that makes the page displays nothing when viewed from the disk. I had to make a program that extracts the contents out of it.

So there, you can have your guitar chord/piano chord/whatever of the H!P songs. Included artists are Momusu, Berryz Koubou, Matsuura Aya, Abe Natsumi, Fujimoto Miki, Goto Maki, Iida Kaori, Melon Kinenbi, Mini Moni, Nakazawa Yuko, Pucchi Moni, Tanpopo, v-u-den, and W. Download here.