How To Play Piano Chords
Hi everyone,
Have you ever noticed that knowing how to play piano chords is often a weakness of some players? Playing the correct chord at the right time can make all the difference in the world to a song. The voicing you chose can make or break the way the song sounds. No KIDDING? When do you use inversions? When do you play base chords? The answers to those questions will determine how good and/or professional you sound when you perform.
I recall years ago when I was in a college marching band and we used to warm up using Bach Chorales. At first I thought it a bit odd that a marching band would be learning how to play piano chords. But as time went on I learned that we played those because it taught us to listen. There is no better teacher of music theory harmonization than to listen to Bach’s Chorales. Listening to those BIG, FAT, GORGEOUS chords literally gave me goose bumps! I have those chorales on my IPOD right now. They help me fine tune my ear to HEAR and identify them.
Click Here To Learn how to play Power Piano Chords
What’s that got to do with playing piano? Well, as Ricky used to say to Lucy…..”you got some splainin’ to do” so here goes. As I mentioned in the first paragraph the voicing you select will make a huge difference in the sound.
If you’re an old hand at chords and want a little more detailed information on progressions and the theory behind them you might want to hop over to page 2 discussion on Piano Chord Progressions of this article for that discussion.
I recall when I was a young music major taking an arranging class needing to know how to play piano chords. I selected a Blood Sweat and Tears tune for my project. I loved their combination of jazz, blues and rock. What I didn’t know until I began my project was that they used some ‘serious’ chords. They were FAR beyond basic Major, minor and 7th chords. They got into 13 chords and other exotic ‘beasties’ that I knew existed but had no idea how or when to use them. I didn’t even know what they sounded like….but I sure loved that BS&T sound.
As I progressed with my assignment I found that the sheet music I was using was NOT the same chord structure that was on the tapes. When I put my first arrangement together it sounded really thin and a lot of that had to do with the fact that I didn’t know how to play piano chords. I had to do some SERIOUS work to figure out why my arrangement sound so weak and what the chord structure REALLY was. That was when I realized that there are chords and there are CHORDS. On the surface they may be similar but the voicing can make a huge difference. In order to play like the pros you had to know what those ‘secrets’ to BIG sound were.
Move forward to working with the piano. I’ve often bought books with all kinds of piano pieces in them. It is the rare one that will give you full and rich sounding chords and. They take the easy way out either because they just can’t hear what’s really there, they don’t know how to play piano chords, or in some cases maybe aren’t allowed to reprint the REAL deal due to copyright issues.
If you want to get around this you need to train your ear to know what those exotic chords are when you hear them. That takes practice and the best way I know to do that is by sitting down at the piano and playing different variations and inversions to ingrain the sound into my brain.
But where to start and how do I learn how to play piano chords?
That is a question that we frequently get. Well, we set out to find some courses that do that and to evaluate them for how well they do it. We have reviewed several courses which you can find links to on the left hand side of this page.
While there are links to those courses, some of which are beyond beginning level or basics, this page is focused on playing strong chord progressions by using power chords.
Without a doubt people not knowing how to play piano chords is the one area that we find the weakest among the players we come in contact with on a regular basis. Given that we took special care in evaluating several ‘chord courses.’
Our highest rating for this category was for the Power Piano Chords Course.
Power Piano Chords consists of 39 lessons covering:
- All major chords!
- All minor chords!
- All diminished chords!
- All augmented chords!
- All extension chords — 6th, 7th, 9th, 11th, 13th!
- Chord progressions!
If you would like to get more into the indepth theory of chord progressions take a look at page 2 Piano Chord Progressions of this article.
Click for the Power Piano Chords Course to learn how to play piano chords