This is the second post discussing how to get better at recognising chords whilst playing piano. The first covered some ideas of how to get familiar with recognising them in terms of actual notes played at the piano. This post introduces some ideas of how to quickly recognise the dots on the page in front of us as being a chord rather than a collection of discrete notes.
Why do we want to do this?
We’re doing this as it will improve our sight reading. As we by convert say 5 discrete notes into a single chord, it gives our brain only one thing to process rather than 5. It will make memorising easier for exactly the same reason and, as a bonus, help grow our basic understanding of theory and harmony.
However, as for the exercises in the previous post, I’m going to recommend that we keep our Classical scores to one side just for the moment. We first want something that gives us a helping hand in terms of learning this skill.
First steps
One advantage of popular music, is that we can easily get lots of arrangements with the chords already written in for us. This means that you have both the written notes, and a chord symbol to help you validate and work out the chord from the dots. Again, we will use simple piano arrangements of music we like which is written in this manner. You’ll find that Google comes up trumps with a little perseverance. Try a simple search for ‘Piano Music with chords free’ on Google. Now select Images. There are a ton of them – and would you believe lots and lots on Pinterest.
If you don’t have the energy to go searching on Google, you might consider buying something like the Great Family Songbook: (dubbed as a Treasury of Favorite Show Tunes, Sing Alongs, Popular Songs, Jazz & Blues, Children’s Melodies, International Ballads, Folk … Jingles, and More for Piano and Guitar).
Keep it simple
Again, for now, we want to keep things relatively simple. Simply play through a few each day but pay specific attention to ensuring you can correlate the chord symbol given with the notes in the score. As this is an exercise, don’t feel that you need to keep to a strict tempo – take the time to look from the music to your hands and back again. Just bear in mind that the melody note can very often be a note that isn’t actually in the chord you’re playing. So, if in doubt, when you’re looking at the chord, ignore the top note if that helps you initially.
Don’t forget, find things in lots of different key signatures … don’t just stick with C Major.
Tip: you’ll almost certainly come across the odd chord that you might not recognise at the moment. These are things marked with ‘dim’, ‘maj 7’, sus4’ and many other exotic variations. In these instances, just don’t worry and keep going. We’ll come back to more complex chords in the next post.
Next step
To mix things up a little, also spend some time with music where the chords aren’t written. It’s time to work them out for yourself.
Again, keep things simple. Use music that has simple time signatures and is written without lots of embellishments or awkward rhythms. There are some classical pieces such as Chopin’s A Minor Waltz that would in fact fit the bill perfectly, however, these are probably few and far between.
For me, the easiest options are Hymn Music or Christmas Carols. You’ll find these in lots of different key signatures too, which is important. To me these are somewhat better than lots of popular music which isn’t written in simple rhythms. Needing also think about the rhythm is a complication more than we need just now. However, if you are unfamiliar with this type of music, fall back to simple arrangements of music that you know for practicing. If you still have some of your beginner books and methods, then these will almost certainly provide you with lots of material that you can use for this purpose
There are two things I recommend you do here …
Away from the piano
Try to work out the chord from the notes away from the piano. Look for chord changes within the bars/measures. Remember that the same applies as we said before, the melody note might not be part of the chord so, if in doubt, ignore that note. You can do this on the bus or train to work, or over coffee at lunch time. If there aren’t enough notes written in the music for you to identify the chord, mark it with a Question Mark and then later, at the piano, try it by adding in extra notes of the chords you think it is most likely to be until you find the one that makes sense.
At the piano
At the piano, as you play, say the chord either aloud or to yourself. Again, if you need to pause and think, then pause and think … we’re not trying to sight read at the moment. With practice, you’ll find that you start to recognise the chords very quickly.
After a couple of weeks of this, you’ll also find that as you play your classical pieces, you start to notice some sets of notes as chords without even really thinking about it. It won’t yet be all of them and so next week, we’ll look at how to start learning some of the more ‘exotic’ chords. I don’t want to say ‘complex’ because really they’re not.
Let me know how you get on with this – it really is learning by doing!
Take a look at the video to see a worked example using ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’.
