Better Jazz Chord Symbols

[Robert Schmaus]

Dear Everyone,

based on the Lilypond file "pop-chords.ly", I've created a counterpart 
for typsetting of jazz sheet music. It is accordingly called 
"jazz-chords.ily" and all you need to do is include it in your ly source 
file to get more jazz-like chordnames.

Some remarks about it:

1. Obviously, it is not complete. Whenever you play jazz music, you will 
come across yet *another* chord that you haven't seen before. The chords 
included are the most common ones plus several that I've come across 
since I use Lilypond. Anyway, there are loads of 11 and 13 chords that 
are not yet defined.

2. Also, there are lots of personal preferences in how to write jazz 
chords. Starting with basics as "mi", "m", "min" or "-" for the minor 
mode - all of them are out there and all of them are correct. Same goes 
for the major symbol or "minor7b5" chords, where to put tensions in 
brackets, and so on.
I've made jazz-chords according to my own preferences - change it to 
match your own, if yours are different.

3. If you define symbols for chords which are not yet included, please 
send them back to me, so I can expand jazz-chords.ily and release a new 
version of it in time. (Or should it go into the snippets repository 
anyway?)

The "normal" chords (without stacked tensions in a bracket) are easy to 
make.
As of now, I haven't managed to create a markup command that produces 
those chords with two stacked tensions in a bracket. If you'd like to 
create a chord with stacked tensions, use one of the existing ones as 
template. Of course, changes of preferences must be made in all of these 
individually, at least until I have time figure out the command-problem.

Attached to this mal, you'll find the files

"jazz-chords.ily" containing the jazz chords definitions
"jazz-test.ly" - check, how each chord is called
"jazz-text.pdf" - how the output should look like

Hope this is useful to some of you ...

Best,
Robert

jazz-chords.ily
Description: Text document

jazz-test.ly
Description: Text document

jazz-test.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document