Popular chord dictionary for piano how to#

When you make a chord, the distance, measured in half-steps, between the tones of a chord determines what kind of chord it is.Ĭhords in modern-day Western music are mostly either major chords or minor chords. As you go up the keyboard, twelve half-steps will bring you right back to where you started in the sequence of tones. Each white or black key is included in the scale, and is a half-step away from the keys next to it. The piano keyboard has only twelve different tones, which make up the chromatic scale, and they repeat as you go up the keyboard. So which notes make which chord? With eighty-eight keys on the piano, that makes an impossible number of combinations for creating chords, right? Actually it’s simpler than that. Most simply put, if you play more than one note at a time you’ve got a chord.

Popular chord dictionary for piano how to#

In this article, I’ll show you how to make basic and advanced piano chords, how to read chord symbols, and how to use chords to make your piano playing more amazing than ever. But for folk, jazz, pop, and rock musicians, chords are the foundation of how they think about, play, and perform music. Although guitar players use chord symbols all the time, for many beginning piano students chords are a mysterious art. Have you ever seen those letters up above the staff in your sheet music and wondered what they are? Those letters are chord symbols. This is a great place for beginners to start! Learn how to play piano chords with the help of our piano chord charts.