As we discussed in this post, being able to quickly recognise chords will dramatically improve your sight reading and make memorising much simpler – and that’s just for starters. It also improves your general appreciation of theory and harmony … almost by osmosis … and even helps enormously if you want to play by ear. However, the art of mastering chords on piano is often not taught to classical pianists.
Learn four chords?
Unfortunately, many classically trained pianists don’t really learn much about chords beyond the standard arpeggios required for exams. This is the first in a series of 3 Lessons on how master this skill.
I’m sure you’ll have seen a few videos on YouTube inviting you to ‘learn four chords and play thousands of tunes’. This is true to a certain extent. However, a four chord repertoire won’t help you much as a classical musician. Aside the most basic of pieces such as the Minuet in G, composers rarely limit themselves to such a restricted palate.
Even Bach’s famous C Major Prelude wanders off into some complex and exquisite harmonies and it’s still considered relatively easy to play.
Where do we recognise chords?
Chord recognition happens in two places. First, in recognising the chord from the dots in front of your eyes and being able to give it a name (for example ‘C Major’). Secondly, in being able to quickly translate that to the piano keys and knowing exactly where to find it.
To speed up the learning process, these are actually two skills that you can learn and practice separately. I always find when learning any new skill that the less your brain needs to focus on at any one time, the better.
I’d say 95% of my time at the piano is spent on playing and practicing Classical music. However, for this topic, I’m going to advise you to set aside your classical scores – only for 5 or 10 minutes per day – whilst we cover some basics.
Finding chords on the piano
Let’s first look at the skill of mastering chords by being able to find them on the piano. Now here, I’m assuming that you are already familiar with basic chords. If I ask you to play C major, you know what it is and can play it. You might not instinctively know every chord in every key, but you should know how to work out a Major, a Minor and a 7th chord from any note.
To help with the exercises that follow, pick music that you know really well. This can be anything. Songs from the Shows, American Songbook, Church Hymns, Christmas Carols – basically things where you know the tune and can hum it in your head.
Now, rather than start with actual sheet music, we’re going to use what are called ‘Guitar Tabs’. You’ll find these all over the internet – free to download. I found https://www.ultimate-guitar.com for example that has a massive range with different types of arrangements (from simple to more complex). Otherwise, just google individual song names and ‘easy guitar tabs’ and you’ll find all you need.
Basically, these have the lyrics written out and a Chord symbol written above the words.
Tip: For now, if you start seeing things like ‘dim’, ‘#9’, ‘flat-5’ etc. in the chords, put this version to one side for future reference (it will come in handy).
A simple way to practice in 3 stages
Stage 1 – root position
What we’re going to do is practice playing just the Chords whilst mentally humming or singing along. To start, just play them in root position with either a single bass note in the left hand, an octave or whole the chord.
I’m sure you’ll know Amazing Grace so just try it out from the Guitar Tab shown above. You’ll see it’s relatively straightforward.
Next, get hold of different songs in plenty of different keys and practice like this for a while until you can find the chords almost without thinking.
Stage 2 – economy of movement
Another aspect of mastering chords on piano is using different combinations of notes. For these exercises, rather than using Root Position for every chord, we’re going to use an ‘economy of movement’ approach. By this, I mean that we will move from chord to chord whilst moving our hand as little as possible. In reality, this is generally what we do most often when playing.
We can re-cycle the same Guitar Tabs we used earlier for this.
To make things more interesting, you might initially want to practice from different starting positions. The technical name for these is inversions.
You might find this a little more challenging as now you’re really testing whether you remember all of the notes in each chord. However, it won’t take long before you can do this almost without thinking.
As you will probably struggle to find guitar tabs in all 12 keys – especially in simple versions – I’ve transposed Amazing Grace into all 12 major keys for you in a Guitar Tab format. You can download the file here. I’ve organised it chromatically so that if you wish you can use it to work out transcriptions from any key into any other.
Now for Stage 3 – add the melody
We’ll move onto something just slightly more difficult and that’s using what are called ‘Lead Sheets’. A Lead Sheet generally contains the melody, the chord and sometimes the lyrics. Again, these are widely available on the internet and you can buy entire books of them too.
Tip: Don’t attempt any Jazz Lead Sheets just now as they tend to use more complex chords which at this point you might struggle with … we’ll come back to these in Lesson 3.
What we’re now going to try is repeating what we did earlier, however, we’ll add the melody – making our brain work just that tiny bit harder. Here, we can use 3 variants.
- Right Hand plays melody only and left hand plays root position chords
- Right Hand plays melody only and left hand plays ‘economy of movement’ chords
- Left Hand plays bass note only (either a single note or an octave as you prefer) and the right hand plays the melody and adds the notes from the chord underneath)
I’ve demonstrated all of these things in this video for you:
Remember:
- The object of the exercise is not to overload your brain whilst you learn
- Choose music that you know really well and that is quite simple at first
- Look for songs in as many different keys as you can
Lesson 2 looks at recognising chords from actual music and then Lesson 3 starts to add those more colourful and exotic chords.
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Good luck with this first foray into chords and please let me know how you get on.
