Slash Chords

Lately I’ve been working with inverted chords in progressions, and turned to Scaler for help. The Chord Editor feature offers me all kinds of alternate chords, but when I want C/E, or C/G, I have to go to a great deal of laborious trouble and the existing interface fights me all the way.

When Scaler offers all those alternate chord suggestions, these slash chords should be there, too. It should be just that easy. Or give us a box we can just type in the letters.

I know the existing interface does have chord editing with inversions. I’m here to tell you, as someone who has used that system in practice, that I would rather just pick C/G from an options menu and be done.

Hope you can help.

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So may I ask, why not just go chord editor and add the third or fifth a bass below with one click? That way you control click a chord, click the bass note to add and your done. Of course you could also just use inversions in edit mode but that offers less control.
Often if I’m writing say a typical Coldplay guitar based chord progression I’ll just use the normal chords and stIck the bass note in afterward. So for scaler to be more helpful in this instance it could display the inversion as a slash (potentially as an option) or give me an option to stick a bass note so for example C / C, Em / C, F / C, G / C
Thoughts?

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I agree. For me it would be helpful to see what note is in the bass when looking at the chord symbols. This is most commonly annotated with the/chord notation.

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yes this would be helpfull,

treating the bass note apart from the chord is one thing that i miss from cubase chord pads / chord track in Scaler

it really makes things easier

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Hi davide—thank you for getting back to me about slash chords here.

I never knew about this control-clicking thing. Never heard of it before, but I’ll give it a go.

Meanwhile, since it seems people are interested in slash chords, could you maybe consider making this control-clicking option more visible? Maybe a tool-tip, or pop-up bit of text? Because I’m a relative n00b here, relying on Scaler here to help me understand things. One of the things I’m interested in is music with slash chords, including jazz, for example.

Anyway, I’ll head off and go control-clicking, see what happens. Again, thank you! :slight_smile:

Hi again—since my last post on this slash chords issue I have tried out the control-clicking suggestion. I’ve given it a red-hot go, and found some other functionality that I hadn’t known about, but I am nowhere near the simple slash chord (F/G) and altered chord notation that would make this kind of music making so much easier. Please help us.

Thanks!

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You wish is our command. We are testing slash chords as we speak and it’s working really great. Ed and the dev team have found some inconsistencies in how some other chords are reported now that inversions are handled differently so we have a preference to turn off bass inversion detection. Looks and works fantastic. Due in 2.1 along with some great content and new features we are very excited about. See attached for sneak preview.

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Hi. Thanks for all the great additions that you keep chugging out, including slash chords that were added back in 2.1 I was happy to see these as it was something I had requested.

One small issue I have noticed, is that chords that are entered as slash chords are getting converted into other inversions if voice grouping is turned on. While we would want the upper notes to change to improve voice leading from one chord to another, the bass note should not change.
For example an F/A chord that is changed to F-A-C, with F now in the bass, is no longer an F/A chord.

Is there anyway to have voice grouping turned on but to have it avoid changing the bass note? I don’t think there is, so I would request this be fixed.

thanks!

That is the expected behaviour, the question is, if we changed it where do you draw the line into leaving bass notes where they are? And if you did do that then you limit the effectiveness of the proximity of the voice grouping. I’ll have a chat internally.

Thanks. i’d say you draw the line with slash chords. the purpose of the slash is to designate which note is in the bass. Since it is specified that more should always remain in the bass even when voice grouping is on.