Going back to my Bm7b5 example, though: there's this issue that as soon as you start removing voices, especially if you mess with the base triad, pulling a name out of a voicing is a deeply non-trivial endeavour. I can read sheet music fine (I was trained classical, then started playing jazzy things also), but it reduces cognitive overhead for me to have well thought-out symbols on the sheet in front of me, even if I have the notes under them, I don't want it to be about the motion of my hands only, right? I like to see what the harmony is doing, and there is use for that part during improvisation.
Besides, not all sheet music has the same purpose: on a lead sheet for a song I want one notation, on a study piece for advancing my technique I want a different notation, for that matter I might see it useful to have several names (dim chord symbol, and reminder it's a 7b9 also, as a simple example or Dsus4 9/A and reminder it's an Am6 inversion). I'm more saying that lilypond needs to carry along intent, rather than discussing the specific chord naming convention (that _does_ exist as a separate issue, but the chord namer function can already be overridden to address this, and in fact IIRC in the past lilypond did ship with several implementation and then settled on Ignatzek's scheme somehow). I had a post a while back where I was doing something related with melodies, to study improvisation patterns: I would like to type `c d e g e` and see on my sheet `1 2 3 5 3` _if_ the chord above it is `C` and `4 5 6 1 6` if the chord above it is `G` (random example, don't look too closely). This is exceptionally difficult to achieve: while you can meander and find the chord, reaching for its root is real messy, and it'll be the root of the rendered chord, not the harmonic function's root. Same story for so-called roman-numeral notation (which is a similar excercise to the above) On Mon, Aug 31, 2026 at 5:10 PM Tim's Bitstream <[email protected]> wrote: > Jazz notation conventions for chord names in typical use differ in some > ways from the Ignaztiek style. On top of that, jazz guitar chord > organization tends to be unique to that instrument, caused by the > limitations of the tuning and the reach of the human hand and resulting in > using drop chords extensively and often eliminating notes out of the > voicing. > -- Luca Fascione
