Addition of French (latin) chord and note names

• Jun 15, 2011 - 14:55
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
closed
Project

I live in France and here they don't use/teach A,B,C,D,E,F,G as the note names, but Do, Ré, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si. So a DoM or DoMaj chord is a CM or CMaj chord, etc.

I believe France shares this with some other languages/countries as well (Spain, Italy, etc.).

While there is certainly an awareness of the Anglo-Saxon chord system, the Do, Ré, Mi system is WIDELY used as well and I don't think it's going away.

It looks as if harmony.cpp has the A-G hardcoded note names and I don't know that, given the amount of things that depend on it the reference to a "C" or "C E G" form, etc. that this sort of base reference is what needs to be translated. Rather another "filter" if you will, needs to be in place to allow the text that one sees on the score to reflect this sort of language/country-specific chord naming convention. Obviously, this would need to work with transposition actions as well (as the anglo-saxon chord names do now).

As a short-term work around, I suppose that this could be a plugin that allows one to change the chord names for printing and then to change them back for transposition activities. I have not seen a plugin like this if it already exists.

Thanks!


Comments

We are currently investigating the addition of french chordnames. Do you have some examples of published music using this system? Would you prefer Do, ré, mi or DO RE MI ? What about the bass DO/SOL?

Well, I'm an American living in France and a guitar player, so while I really want to see this, I'm perhaps not the BEST person to ask (i.e. a real French keyboard player might be better). Nevertheless, I think I'd prefer a formatting like: Do Ré Mi Fa Sol La Si and for bass notes, like Ré/Fa# and Do/Mi.

As for "published" music, I have my own guitar lead sheets here in Word documents: http://www.leighweb.com/david/song-sheets#francais but I'm not sure that's what you're looking for. For more piano-oriented sheet music, I've attached one of the song sheets from this site: http://www.jem-editions.ch/index.php/partitions.html where you could buy others to see what they've done.

Hope that can help.

Attachment Size
jem0948.pdf 143.29 KB