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.