Whilst becoming familiar with chords might seem like a theoretical exercise, it is a useful addition to our toolkit and can help us practise piano more effectively.
It gives us another way to organise what we see, hear and play. It can strongly support sight reading and memorising, help us understand more of the broader harmony and become useful if we want to play by ear. Yet we classically trained pianists often spend relatively little time learning to recognise and play chords as chords – and perhaps even less understanding the relationships between them.
Learn four chords?
I’m sure you’ll have seen 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 will not take us very far in classical music. Aside from the most basic pieces, such as the Minuet in G, composers rarely limit themselves to such a restricted palette.
Even Bach’s famous C Major Prelude wanders off into some complex and exquisite harmonies and it is still considered relatively easy to play.
Where do we recognise chords?
Chord recognition happens in two related directions. First, we can recognise a group of notes on the page and give the chord a name, such as C major. Secondly, we can translate that name to the piano and know where to find the notes under our hands.
These are separate skills, so it can be useful to practise them separately. I generally find that a new skill is easier to develop when we are not trying to solve every part of the problem at once.
Most of my time at the piano is spent playing and practising classical music. However, for this topic I am going to suggest setting classical scores aside for five or ten minutes whilst we cover some basics in a clearer setting.
Finding chords on the piano
Let’s first look at finding chords on the piano. To do this, we need to be familiar with the basics: this is nothing more than for example knowing what a C Major scale is and how to play it. You might not instinctively know every chord in every key, but if know the scale, you actually can work out a major, minor and seventh chord from any given note.
For the exercises that follow, choose music you know really well. This might be songs from shows, standards, church hymns or Christmas carols – anything where you know the tune and can hum it in your head.
However, rather than begin with a full piano score, use a simple chord-and-lyrics sheet for a familiar song. The chord symbols sit above the words, which allows us to concentrate on finding and changing the chords at the keyboard.
You will find plenty of this type of material online. Search terms such as guitar tabs, guitar chord sheets and lead sheets can be useful, although the formats vary.
Using this simpler format temporarily removes some of the information that would appear in a full score so that the chord changes are easier to see.
Tip: if the sheet you find contains symbols such as dim, ♯9 or ♭5 that you do not yet recognise, play just the bass or root note for the purposes of this exercise and continue.
A simple way to practice in 3 stages
Stage 1 – root position
We are going to practise playing just the chords whilst mentally humming or singing along. To start, play them in root position, with either a single bass note, an octave or the whole chord in the left hand.
I’m sure you’ll know Amazing Grace, so try it from the chord sheet shown above. You should find it relatively straightforward.
Next, use different songs you know in a range of keys and practise in the same way. The aim is gradually to become more comfortable finding the chords without having to work out every note afresh.
Stage 2 – economy of movement
Another part of becoming familiar with chords is learning to use different arrangements of their notes. Rather than playing every chord in root position, we are going to use an “economy of movement” approach: moving from chord to chord whilst moving the hand as little as possible. In practice, this is often how chords connect most naturally under the hand.
We can reuse the same chord sheets for this exercise.
To make things more interesting, begin from different arrangements of the notes. The technical name for these different arrangements is inversions.
This may feel more challenging at first because it tests whether you know the notes in each chord rather than one familiar hand shape. With practice, the different inversions will become increasingly familiar. If you have needed to practise arpeggios in inversions, then you are likely already familiar with these shapes.
Simple chord sheets are not always available in every key, so I have transposed Amazing Grace into all twelve major keys for you. You can download the file here. I have organised it chromatically, which also makes it useful if you want to work out a transposition from one key to another.
Now for Stage 3 – add the melody
We will now add another layer by using what are called Lead Sheets.
A Lead Sheet generally contains the melody, the chord and sometimes the lyrics. It gives us enough information to play the tune whilst deciding how we want to arrange the chords.
Tip: Choose something relatively simple at first. The purpose is to add the melody to chord changes that are already manageable, not to test how many unfamiliar symbols you can decode at once.
We will repeat what we did earlier, but this time add the melody. There are three useful variations:
- 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 purpose is to keep the exercise manageable whilst the chord shapes become familiar;
- Choose music that you know well and keep it fairly simple at first;
- Use songs in as many different keys as you reasonably can.
The next step is to look for the same patterns inside written music. Converting dots into chords quickly and easily takes that process further.
The first few lessons in my course Understanding Harmony for Pianists begin with these building blocks before taking you deeper into the ways chords relate to one another and give music its direction.
