Occasionally, you may come across a weird-looking chord symbol such as G7b9 or C7b9#5. The b9 and #5 indicate “alterations” to the chord.
Alterations change the “color” of the chord but do not change its character and purpose.
As always, b means to lower a tone by a half-step and # means to raise the tone a half-step.
The chord G7b9 contains the tones of the G7 chord with an added 9th that is lowered a half-step.
You don’t need a “1000 Chords Dictionary” to be able to read and play chords. You can learn how to form chords on your own, because chords are built using simple formulas.
A chord is three or more notes played at the same time. It’s as simple as that. Of course, the trick is to know which three notes…
Obviously, not all combinations of notes sound good. Particular combinations each have their own name: there are “major” chords, “minor” chords, “dominant-7″ chords, “diminished chords”, and so on. See a demonstration of the different chord types
Of each chord type, there are 12 possible chords: one for each note. So there is a C major chord, a C# major chord (which is the same as the Db major chord), a D major chord, and so on. There is also a C minor chord, a C# minor chord… you get the drift.
Just in case you are completely new to the piano and making music in general, here is a quick introduction to the instrument and music theory.
Even though a piano has 88 keys, there are only 12 unique tones:
If there is a song you’d like to play on the piano but you don’t know how, then you can either:a) figure it out by ear; b) buy the sheet music; or c) try to find it online.
You’ll be happy to know that the internet has an incredible amount of simplified sheet music, either in the form of chord sheets or tabulature, a type of simplified notation that guitar players use.
Real sheet music of popular songs is seldom available for free. However, if we can find the chords (and the lyrics if you want to sing along) then we’re already half-way there.
A tetrachord is a combination of four specific tones. “Tetra” means four and “chord” in this case just means: “a collection of tones”.
It’s not a chord in the sense that you use it to harmonize a melody. Blame the old Greeks for the terminology. 
The interval formula for a tetrachord is: W W H
This means the first three tones are each a whole-step apart (W), but the distance to the last tone is only a half-step (H).
(Remember that a half-step is simply two notes next to each other, while a whole-step skips a key.)
I remember that when I started the piano I was playing pieces from my study books and I had no idea what they were supposed to sound like.
Reading the pitches of the notes wasn’t so hard, but I could never get the rhythm right, especially with 8th and 16th notes.
Of course, you try to count out loud: 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & …
But when you’re already struggling with reading the notes and finding the right keys (in both hands!), then it’s really hard to keep count as well.
So what I did was load up my notation program — I use an inexpensive tool called Score Writer 4 — and copy the hard parts from the score into the computer.
The major scale is the most commonly used scale in our music. You should learn all major scales by heart, but it’s also good to know how they actually work. In this article, we’ll learn to build the major scales from scratch.
An interval is nothing more than the distance between two tones. It is often convenient to speak about music in terms of intervals, so it’s important that you know the terminology.
We distinguish between two kinds of intervals:
A melodic interval is the distance between two tones played after each other:
A harmonic interval is the distance between two tones played at the same time:
The rules for both types of intervals are the same.
The problem we are trying to solve is: If you have two tones, then what is the interval between them called?
There are several ways to approach this:
