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Comment by Sesse__ | Hacker News Reader

All of this makes a lot of sense. But to add; a semi-professional piano player I know once gave me a heuristic that can help sometimes, namely “the lowest fifth contributes the most to what the chord feels like”. But you can still get into discussions about whether something is, say, a Dm/F or F6 (and I see a lot of tabs where I disagree which the author's choice).

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(semi-professional piano player here) That's interesting. I've never heard that...not even sure what "lowest fifth" would mean. I would think that the root and the third contribute the most, right? The fifth is sometimes even omitted. I'm very curious how this might work. Do you have any examples?

I guess it means in the sound scape as a whole, potentially including multiple instruments. But to keep it to a single piano, e.g. if you play B3 D4 G4, then it won't sound like a B chord (neither minor nor major) because there's no fifth. Instead, you'll hear D5 as an overtone of D4, and G4-D5 will be the lowest fifth that you hear, so it is readily interpreted as G/B. If the third were the most important, then this would have been a Bm, which is pretty clearly isn't unless you add an F# (or there is some other instrument in the mix that provides one).

At least that's how I interpreted him :-)

Allowing that I'm simply not sophisticated enough to understand this, I think he's overthinking things. :-)

I mean, B3 D4 G4 in isolation probably does sound like G/B to western ears, and maybe the overtone explanation is acoustically relevant, but it seems like there are not too many other things that those notes could be, and the spelling clearly spells a Gmaj triad.

(Semi pro jazz guitarist here). The heuristic I was taught: the accompanist owns the 3rd and the 7th, which allows the SOLOIST to choose #4, 5th or the #5 as the muse dictates in the moment. The 5th is an semi-avoid note, until I hear the soloist commit to a choice of 5th.

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