In this blog, I’ll talk about chords from a non-conventional perspective, i.e., from my own observation. Don’t expect any hard-hitting music theory, because as you know from my ‘hearing dependence’, I have none to speak of.

By way of observation, a chord is any 2 or more notes held together, whether with your left or right hand.

Commonly though, a chord is made up of 3-4 notes (and very rarely, 5, which is unnecessarily stressful on the fingers!) depressed at the same time, E.g., when you’re playing the organ, or you play the left hand on the piano in a percussive/staccato way.

With playing the piano - now practically speaking - a chord is played 3 ways on the left-hand fingers:

(i) just holding the notes of the chord down, usually until the sound fades and you’ll either depress them again do something else, depending on the song.

(ii) as an arpeggio by moving your fingers to the flow of the song. You would typically stretch out the notes over 1-2 octaves, before an expected change to the next chord.

(iii) as short ‘hits’ or ‘strumming’ (like the guitar), as part of a bass + chord combo in an imaginary drum pattern.

Playing a melody by itself on the right hand sounds pretty flat and boring. A chord – with its accompanying last left finger bass - lends body, direction and mood to the melody.

There are hundreds of chords, but you don’t need to know every chord!

You really only need to be concerned about the more-commonly used ones. Piano cord charts (which show the names of chord and their notes) are easily available by searching Google.

When I read up chords at some sites, I have such difficulty figuring how folks can understand references to ‘ I-V progressions’, ‘5^th subtonics’, ‘supertonics’, and anything else going beyond a number (E.g., ‘seventh flat thirteenth’) etc.

Why any one would want to learn all of these terms totally confounds me. In the 1000+ songs I’ve learned, these terms have never ever jumped out or beckoned my need to understand them. My advice is to just ignore them when you’re learning to play by ear, unless you really want to pack more theory than you need to into your brains. But if you ever need to delve more into it, you could always go to source like this one.

You could aspire to learn all of the chords you want, but in actual playing of the piano, if you insert lot of precise and fancy chord names, chances are that you’re more likely to stumble on reading the tougher ones while playing. I mean, how quickly can your mind interpret something like Cm7b5 or Csus4 while playing…? (I guess maybe here, conventional music readers might have an advantage if they can decipher those wriggly notes on a pole quickly enough to play them without needing to know their alphabetical name).

With the more tough-sounding or exceptional chords I’ve encountered - rather than try to find an actual name for it, say in this tool - I prefer instead to write in red and circle the 3-4 notes in alphabets, and just write the bass (i.e., the root note to start with for my left finger) on top of these. If I really need to know the name, I just then refer to the chord chart.

To try and make things a little easier for the hearing student, I’ve asked myself the question, “In all the songs I’ve heard, which chords - in any given key - are most commonly used?

I’ve come up with a ‘neat dozen’ of chords that you just need to try and memorize, because they are the ones you’d also likely encounter and use the most. There’s no immediate need to go beyond learning these, and if you do stumble on something other than these typical ones, just either (i) use my ‘write and circle the notes’ shortcut described above; or (ii) go to this chord chart source, and match the notes to find out the chord’s name .These 12 chord positions are illustrated below just for the key of C:

Because there are 12 keys, there would of course be 144 chords to eventually learn. It’s not as bad as it sounds, because you don’t have to learn them all at once…but only when they’re encountered, or if you’re ready to try a new key. Also, you can quite easily figure out each of these chords on any key by referring to the section below titled, “How to figure out a chord manually”.

At worse, just buy or Google to find and print out a comprehensive entire piano chord chart and highlight these 12 sets.

How to figure out a chord manually

When hearing, if you happen to discover a chord that you’re unfamiliar with and really want to know its name…. As long as you know its root bass you would then just use a chord chart, look up that same root bass name and each of the available chords under it. Next, match the notes against each of these chords until you find the name of the chord that matches your notes.

Say, you know a chord in one key , Eg . C Minor 6^th, and want to find out what the corresponding chord position is on another key, say Ab… and you don’t have access to a chord chart to look at.

All you then need to first count how many semitones (ie each adjacent note) from the root of the first chord, ie. C, the next root (Ab) is from C…either left-wards or rightwards of the keyboard.

So, by knowing:

…you would  count each of the notes in this 4 semitones leftwards (it’s shorter counting leftwards than rightwards in this case, of gong from C to ab), and figure out:

That is, the C note on Cm6 = Ab on Abm6 (4 notes to the left).  Next, the Eb four tones to the left = B; G = Eb , and A = F.

Therefore, Abm6 is made up of Ab, B, Eb and F … after each note of Cm6 is being counted 4 semitones leftwards).

Try another chord example yourself, and checking against  a chord chart.

Therefore, as long as you know the position of one chord type (by this I mean a Major, Minor, Minor6 etc.) in one key, you can find the position of the same chord type for any other key.

How to memorize chords

I find that an easy way to memorize a chord is to look at the shape and/or pattern created by the 3 or 4 individual notes. Look at your fingers’ positions on the white keys relative to the black keys. Here are the more obvious examples:

- The 5 different chords of C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am are 3 white key notes, whereby from the C position, they appear to follow in a pattern (ie. one dot, one space), one set after the other:

- Next, the chords D, E, and A look like triangles:

- Chords Db, Eb and Ab look like upside-down triangles:

- Chords Bb and B look like…er,…. well, use your imagination (haha!):

- Chord F# is just 3 black keys a ‘hop up the step’ from the F chord:

- Diminish 7ths are ‘good-to-know, sometimes used, and not as hard as they look’ chords. There are 3 different sets of them (the 3 rows below), each with 4 (therefore, all 12 keys) different positions or patterns.

Have a good look at row one, and you will notice that each succeeding chrod is just a patterned inversion of the one before - first, with C, you press C and the other 3 notes; with Eb, you press Eb and the next 3 notes; and the same for F# and A dim7. Notice the patterns…

Similary, observe the symmetrical patterns in the next two rows of Dim7s.

These may be 4-note chords, but having a distinct pattern makes them easier to remember.

Therefore, to help memorize chords, hold the chord down and observe closely the position of its notes’ against the black and white keys, and then ask yourself if it reminds you of the shape or pattern of something.

Thank you.

One of the most important things that makes your playing interesting is how you move your left hand bass and chords. This is especially so when playing as a solo pianist, when you’re basically ‘on your own’ to try to bring out the following elements of a song :

- the melody (E.g., from the main vocal, instrument, orchestra)

- accompanying or counter- melodies

- the chords

- the bass

- the underlying beat of the song.

While music notation show tempo signatures like ¾, 4/4, etc., I suspect that not too many students learning piano the conventional way are actually taught how to play the piano in accompaniment to drum/rhythm beats such as Bossa Nova, Swing, Rock, Cha Cha, Shuffle , Disco, Slow Rock  (watch demo).  These are common beats in contemporary ‘percussive and piano-friendly’ music (I use ‘piano-friendly, because some music just sound awful when played on the piano, regardless of whether a music sheet has been published for it!)

Thinking back, I feel very fortunate now, for having a background in playing the electronic spinet organ, where from day one I had to play songs to the accompaniment of the different drum beats available on the organ’s ‘rhythm box’ (picture below), at the same time stepping on any of 13 pedals on the left bottom section of the organ to play the basses.

The reason I brought this up is because when teaching myself the piano, I realized that part of the left-hand movement involves replicating what I used to do on the organ with the bass pedals and my left hand, in synchronization with the drum beat that is constantly pounding away.  In the typical oldies 4-piece (3 guitarists and 1 drummer) band, your left-hand on the piano is like the bass guitarist, strumming guitarist and the drummer combined, while your right hand is like the lead guitarist playing the main melody.

While people hardly play the organ these days, rhythm beats are now to be found:

- built into some higher-model digital pianos (see above);

- in a modern-day digital Drum Machine (picture), a small power-operated unit that costs anywhere from $50 (used) upwards on eBay, and contains factory-preset rhythm beats, or you can otherwise program your own beats.

My own experience with the few drum machines I’ve bought is I’ve found them very complicated to use due to the need operate a cumbersome dial, difficulty of getting to desired beats and adjusting the tempo.  You just need to program stuff that’s hard to get to while performing at the same time.

This could perhaps also explain why the ‘old days’ (1970-80s) rhythm boxes (picture below) currently fetch quite attractive ‘vintage value’ prices on eBay - not so much because they are collector units, but because they are that much easier to operate at a press of a button.

To illustrate, I’ve been buying a few of these ‘vintage’  units (like the one below)  on eBay, and am having fun playing the piano with them.  Here are a few of my samples at YouTube played with a Yamaha CP33 piano and a Roland TR-66 Rhythm Box (under $80):

If You Leave Me Now

Wave

And I Love Her

My Girl

TEAC Rhythm Box

(By the way, if you ever spot a box like the Roland TR-68 above for <$100, GRAB IT, because it fetches at least US$250 on eBay!!)

- there are also  drum machine sounds that now downloadable as software on your computer, and even for the iTouch and iPhone, but I’m not too familiar with their operation.

- best of all, for the purpose of learning the piano by hearing drum beats are commonly offered in a relatively-inexpensive electronics keyboard like the Casio CTK series that I had mentioned in my learning-by-hearing tools. You can select from a last range of built-in drum patterns.

What’s great is the fact that when you hold your left hand in the automatic accompaniment mode (‘fingered chord’) and with a beat switched on, you can hear how the bass and chords are being played together to follow the beat. You can practice following what you hear on the piano.

To illustrate, let’s take a simple beat like March or Swing, which sounds like ‘tom-chac-tom-chac….(and so on continuously)’.

On the chord of C, your left hand would play the following pattern:

- (1^st Bass) C bass for the first ‘tom’!

- (Chord) E and G held together for the first ‘chac’!

- (2^nd Bass) G bass for the next ‘tom’!

- (chord) C and E held together for the next ‘tom!’ …. and so on

I know it may be hard for you to conceive what I’m talking about above. I’ll do a few videos on this subject later.

When a song calls for it, the more skilled you are in switching between playing your left hand like a beat while also moving in arpeggio, the more interesting your playing should sound.

The next step when you become well versed with the song, perhaps you might want to try playing it with a drum beat. You can use a drum machine or a Casio keyboard connected to an amplifier, or whatever method that we’ve discussed above. If you are stuck always try and refer back to the song to listen closely to the drummer, bass and chords. Remember though, that not all songs have a drum beat.

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