Bass note and Inversions

Hey Scaler Team,
There is something I wanted to ask for a while.
I was wondering, why are the Inversions or the Chords over Bass note not been displayed ??
Why can’t we see for instance a C major over E bass: “C/E”, instead of “Cmaj” for any inversion ? Or an F major 7 over A: “Fmaj7/A”, instead of Fmaj7" for any inversion ?? Thanks. Julian

Hi @Julian

We love this idea but there are multiple reason why this isn’t displayed on the chord name yet.

The first one is the lack of real estate, it’s quite hard to fit more info about the chord on the current interface. Also the information is already accessible in Scaler, when highlighting the chord you can see the bass note on the keyboard (this is not ideal, but usually good enough for most users).

Displaying chord names with the bass note could be confusing to users who are not used to this notation. The “/” followed by the bass note is not universal and other notation could also be used.

There is also some overlap with the current handling of inversions in Scaler. Displaying the bass note is sometimes similar to displaying the inversion number, but it can also mean different things for chords with many notes or complex voicings.

This is something we are working on, trying to come up with a good solution for everyone. This might take the form of an optional display in a future version.

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Yes I understand what you mean with the confusion that might occur. From my point of view I feel that it is sometimes also confusing to not have the bass note displayed, especially with 7th chords when adding variations by changing bass notes to spice the chord progression when they repeat.

Also I noticed that most of Chords plugin shows Chords over bass note ( / ) like for instance “midiChordAnalyser” to name one of the simpliest.

May be an option to show or not Inversions as you suggested could be an idea :wink:
Best

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If I may just add one more thing:
Would be great to see the 7th chords without 5th too.
We already can see Triads without 5th e.g.: F, A = Fmaj no5, so why a Fmaj7 with no5 (F, A, E) is showed “Fmaj7” instead of “Fmaj7 no5” ?? Thanks