Hello,
I’m confused by something: if I create a tune in Em, and add a D chord in the tune, then switch to numeral mode, my D chord is shown as “bVII”. If I enter D# for the chord it shows as “VII”.
I’m pretty sure the 7 chord of Em is a D (right? right?) but maybe I’m missing something somewhere ? A convention I’m not aware of maybe ?
Thanks 
Alice
Hi Alice,
You bring up an interesting point. I was about to talk about how what people refer to as the “7 chord” is usually actually the flat-7, i.e. D in the key of E… which is true for major keys. But you’re talking about a minor key, and there things get tricky.
In minor keys, we can use numbers in different ways. We can use the same intervals, with 1m as the root chord, in which case I think the proper thing would be to maintain the steps between intervals, i.e. in Em you’d call G the 3b chord and D the 7b chord. But the other way to do it (and perhaps a more “proper” way for Roman numerals, I’m not sure) is to set the root to 6m or vi, which ends up making the common chords in minor keys line up nicely with the spacing of the intervals (if Em is vi then G is I and D is V). Personally, I prefer using numbers with a 1-based system for minor keys, but if I were to use Roman numerals I would probably prefer a 6m/vi-based system. Strum Machine doesn’t yet support this, but I will likely add support for it in the future.
Aaaaaah, I understand (with a little help from AI 
)
You derive all the chords from the major scale, even in a minor key ! Hence G is 3b and D is 7b.
AI tells me this is indeed the modern way to note chords in minor keys.
While I don’t play classical, my theory comes from text books - and text books tend to focus on classical theory.
In classical theory, you note minor key chords based on the (in this instance natural) minor scale. If you take the 7th degree of a natural minor scale, you get the D chord.
AI tells me people use the modern approach specifically to avoid ambiguity - if people say 3b then you know you’re speaking about the 3rd chord of the minor key.
For me the least ambiguous is indeed to use the minor key root as vi - in that case it’s unambiguous that the referential is the major chords of the relative major. It’s what the Jianpu notation does.
But don’t change the app on my account - just some help text on the app or simply on the website would have clarified things for me ! Maybe just this forum thread will be sufficient for people to find in the future.
Thanks for your help 
Alice
Any comment to help me understand better melodic minor and harmonic minor chords? Does Strum do these?
i suggest you don’t switch to number mode as this can be confusing. enter the chord as D, which is what you want.