It is never, ever, ever, ever, ever a good thing for anything at all, under any circumstances, to be even one single Planck unit more complicated than absolutely necessary. Needless complexity decreases the number of people who can understand something and contribute to or use it effectively, and adds extra hoops to jump through for people who are capable of understanding it.
Take music theory, for example. The other day, I was trying to write down the chords for a song I’d accidentally banged out on the piano, and I’d hit a roadblock with one in particular.
Musical notes, as you may be aware, are represented by the letters A through G, with sharps (♯) or flats (♭) representing the notes in between the letters (except for E and F, B and C, which don’t have anything in between them). They’re arranged in a variety of scales, which are structured based on whether you jump one note (“half step”) or two (“whole step”) at a particular time, but realistically, at least with the well-known Major and Minor scales, most people just figure them out by their distinctive sounds.
So, it’s pretty easy to figure out several chords. An E Major (or just “E”) chord consists of the first, third, and fifth notes in the E Major scale, which are E, G♯, and B; E Minor is E, G, and B. Then you can throw in other notes from the scale to make things like E2 with the 2nd note, (E, F♯, G♯, B) or E7 with the 7th note (E, G♯, B, D (in 7th chords, the minor 7th is usually used because it sounds better; if you used D♯ you’d call it E Major major 7th)), or play with “suspended” chords which replace the third note with others — for example, Esus2 (E, F♯, B).
It starts to get a bit complicated as the chords get less common. For example, if you wanted to merge E2 and E7 to create an E, F♯, G♯, B, D chord, the chord is called E9. Is that because 2 + 7 = 9? No, that’s a complete coincidence. The actual reason is that this kind of chord is normally expressed E, G♯, B, D, F♯ — the F♯ is higher now, so that makes it the 9th note instead of the 2nd. However, *9 chords always include the 7th note, a concept which may not be immediately intuitive. In order to include just the 9th note with no 7th (E, G♯, B, F♯), you call the chord Eadd9. Which is totally not the same thing as E2 this time for some reason. But that’s not too difficult to figure out, at least. It may not be 100% obvious, but it sorta works.
So, anyway, about that roadblock I hit: what if you wanted to make a chord that consisted of A, C, D, and E? Well, A, C, E is an A minor chord. So if you add D, which is the 4th note in the A minor scale, it follows that the chord would be called “A minor 4″, right?
Well, no, because there’s no such thing as a 4 chord. There’s a sus4 (suspended 4) chord. But no just plain 4 chord. You can’t even say “add4″. Well, you could, but it would be wrong. A 4 chord, according to music theory, does not exist at all.
So, what’s the name of a chord consisting of A, C, D, and E? Well, that’s simple. It’s called “E7sus4♯5″, of course.
You see, E7 is E, G♯, B, D. Add a suspended 4 to that, and you replace the G♯ with an A. And since there’s no such thing as B♯, if you sharpened the B you’d jump right to C. So now you’ve got E, A, C, and D, and all you have to do is play the E on top to get the chord you’re looking for.
I mean, like, duh.
Now, that makes sense and all, except for the fact that it makes no fucking sense whatsoever. It would save so much trouble and produce a much more comprehensible-looking chord to just write “Am4″ (“m” is shorthand for Minor), but that’s not allowed, because the chord doesn’t exist.
My brother, Alex Green, explained to me exactly why this is the case:
It’s all about function. Am4 means nothing in the key of A Major.
Actually, yes, it’s true that in my particular case, the song I was writing was in the key of E Minor, so Am4 wouldn’t mean anything in the key of A Major unless I happened to be writing a song that was in the key of A Major with a random A, C, D, E chord thrown in somewhere. However, this E Minor-based song also uses chords such as “D Major”, which is, interestingly enough, not referred to as “E7add2sus4 without the E” in this particular context.
Providing to the vast majority of songwriters a logical explanation for exactly why chords such as “Am4″ do not exist would be about as useful as explaining to your 90-year-old grandmother the countless advantages of being able to make kernel modifications to your installation of Ubuntu versus the proprietary, locked-down nature of Windows, when all she wants to do is get to her email. Songwriters want to write things that sound good, and as soon as the theoretical stuff stops being in service of that goal and begins to make it needlessly harder, it only causes problems.
Stuff Is Too Complicated; Case In Point: Music Theory
It is never, ever, ever, ever, ever a good thing for anything at all, under any circumstances, to be even one single Planck unit more complicated than absolutely necessary. Needless complexity decreases the number of people who can understand something and contribute to or use it effectively, and adds extra hoops to jump through for people who are capable of understanding it.
Take music theory, for example. The other day, I was trying to write down the chords for a song I’d accidentally banged out on the piano, and I’d hit a roadblock with one in particular.
Musical notes, as you may be aware, are represented by the letters A through G, with sharps (♯) or flats (♭) representing the notes in between the letters (except for E and F, B and C, which don’t have anything in between them). They’re arranged in a variety of scales, which are structured based on whether you jump one note (“half step”) or two (“whole step”) at a particular time, but realistically, at least with the well-known Major and Minor scales, most people just figure them out by their distinctive sounds.
So, it’s pretty easy to figure out several chords. An E Major (or just “E”) chord consists of the first, third, and fifth notes in the E Major scale, which are E, G♯, and B; E Minor is E, G, and B. Then you can throw in other notes from the scale to make things like E2 with the 2nd note, (E, F♯, G♯, B) or E7 with the 7th note (E, G♯, B, D (in 7th chords, the minor 7th is usually used because it sounds better; if you used D♯ you’d call it E Major major 7th)), or play with “suspended” chords which replace the third note with others — for example, Esus2 (E, F♯, B).
It starts to get a bit complicated as the chords get less common. For example, if you wanted to merge E2 and E7 to create an E, F♯, G♯, B, D chord, the chord is called E9. Is that because 2 + 7 = 9? No, that’s a complete coincidence. The actual reason is that this kind of chord is normally expressed E, G♯, B, D, F♯ — the F♯ is higher now, so that makes it the 9th note instead of the 2nd. However, *9 chords always include the 7th note, a concept which may not be immediately intuitive. In order to include just the 9th note with no 7th (E, G♯, B, F♯), you call the chord Eadd9. Which is totally not the same thing as E2 this time for some reason. But that’s not too difficult to figure out, at least. It may not be 100% obvious, but it sorta works.
So, anyway, about that roadblock I hit: what if you wanted to make a chord that consisted of A, C, D, and E? Well, A, C, E is an A minor chord. So if you add D, which is the 4th note in the A minor scale, it follows that the chord would be called “A minor 4″, right?
Well, no, because there’s no such thing as a 4 chord. There’s a sus4 (suspended 4) chord. But no just plain 4 chord. You can’t even say “add4″. Well, you could, but it would be wrong. A 4 chord, according to music theory, does not exist at all.
So, what’s the name of a chord consisting of A, C, D, and E? Well, that’s simple. It’s called “E7sus4♯5″, of course.
You see, E7 is E, G♯, B, D. Add a suspended 4 to that, and you replace the G♯ with an A. And since there’s no such thing as B♯, if you sharpened the B you’d jump right to C. So now you’ve got E, A, C, and D, and all you have to do is play the E on top to get the chord you’re looking for.
I mean, like, duh.
Now, that makes sense and all, except for the fact that it makes no fucking sense whatsoever. It would save so much trouble and produce a much more comprehensible-looking chord to just write “Am4″ (“m” is shorthand for Minor), but that’s not allowed, because the chord doesn’t exist.
My brother, Alex Green, explained to me exactly why this is the case:
Actually, yes, it’s true that in my particular case, the song I was writing was in the key of E Minor, so Am4 wouldn’t mean anything in the key of A Major unless I happened to be writing a song that was in the key of A Major with a random A, C, D, E chord thrown in somewhere. However, this E Minor-based song also uses chords such as “D Major”, which is, interestingly enough, not referred to as “E7add2sus4 without the E” in this particular context.
Providing to the vast majority of songwriters a logical explanation for exactly why chords such as “Am4″ do not exist would be about as useful as explaining to your 90-year-old grandmother the countless advantages of being able to make kernel modifications to your installation of Ubuntu versus the proprietary, locked-down nature of Windows, when all she wants to do is get to her email. Songwriters want to write things that sound good, and as soon as the theoretical stuff stops being in service of that goal and begins to make it needlessly harder, it only causes problems.