Agronesia

When I tried decoding the 10th measure of Beethoven’s Fur Elise (sheet) by keyboard, I realized that it sounds just like a cover song by the disbanded Japanese idol duo W, Jounetsu no Hana!

Well, I do remember reading Jounetsu no Hana’s lyrics at the Hello! Project lyrics collection archive site projecthello.com, and it was written there that the composer is Ludwig Van Beethoven. However I couldn’t figure out what song it was at that time.

Now it’s glaringly obvious. The melodies are just Fur Elise, which is in 3/8 time, adapted to 4/4 to conform with the norm of pop songs. This time adaptation makes them not 100% same tune by tune, which is why I didn’t realize it the first time. To make the chain look more tangled, the song W is covering is a 1959 song by The Peanuts (a very old Japanese duo), which is actually a cover for an American song Passion Flower.

To compare the songs, listen to Fur Elise and then Jounetsu no Hana.

Oh, and don’t complain that I wrote Fur Elise instead of the fancier Für Elise. Jounetsu no Hana is also actually 情熱の花 :)!

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.