Hi everybody,
What a great thread - thanks "lrngkybrd" for starting the whole thing. How the keyboard recognizes chords is something that one normally wouldn't know - thank you Alec for all of the explanations.
I am an old organ player and I normally would play 3 or 4 finger chords with the left hand and hold one note of that chord for counter melody while beating the rest of the notes for rhythm (along with the pedals). I would use chord inversions that were convenient and would keep all chords centered around middle C in order to keep left hand movement to a minumum. This of course generated many sustained chords without even thinking about it.
This technique which is common and works well on the organ does not work entirely well on the keyboard. An example is playing a C6 where the notes would be G A C E. This is recognized as Amin7 and of course the sound, the bass line, and the technichord harmony is entirely wrong.
This old habit, which is automatic when I play, is sure hard to break. It requires a lot of "jumping around" to always play the chord in the root position.
I wonder if anyone else has this problem?
Walt