Piano Clues

Improvising is the art of making up music on the spot, without relying on sheet music or a memorized tune. It may sound hard but actually it is pretty easy.

The hardest part of improvising is allowing yourself to mess up. You must give yourself the freedom to play anything, no matter how awful.

Let’s face it: your first improvisations won’t be any good. But they’ll never become any better if you don’t allow yourself to be bad at it.

If you already know how to play by ear, you have a headstart because playing by ear and improvising are in essense the same thing. Improvisation is just a little scarier because you don’t have the safety net of an existing tune.

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Ready for more fun with the Circle of Fifths? Here we go!

Minor keys

There is also a circle for minor keys:

I put the names of the minor keys on the inside of the circle. This is because each major key has a relative minor key.

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If you play from leadsheets or you downloaded a chord chart from the internet, you may occasionally find chord symbols that you don’t know yet how to play.

Here’s the trick: the only thing that really matters about a chord is whether it is major or minor. You can safely ignore anything else about the chord.

For example, you may encounter the chord symbols Am9 and D13.

The first one is an “A minor” chord with an added 7th and an added 9th.

The second one is a “D dominant-7″ chord with an added 13th but it could also have a 9th and 11th, depending on how you voice it.

If that didn’t make any sense to you and you have no clue how to form these chords, then keep what you know and throw away the rest.

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If you know the “key” of a song, you’ll know which notes the melody uses, and which chords to play. Finding the key of a song is the first step of transcribing.

Playing from sheet music, you can find the key by looking at the key signature. But if you’re playing by ear, you’ll have to do some experimentation.

First, I play along with the song and try to find the scale that matches the melody.

There is a wonderful program called Transcribe! that can help you with this. It can loop endlessly through sections of the song and even slow the music down while keeping it at the same pitch. Very handy!

Most songs are in a major key and there are 12 possible major scales. If you know these scales by heart it shouldn’t be too much of a problem to find the right one.

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Speaking of chord progressions, there is a very cool web site called chordmaps.com where you can learn all about them.

For example, here is a chord progression map for the key of C.

In the key of C, the C chord is the home chord, the most important chord. This is where chord progressions begin and end.

Here is how to read the chord progression map: from the C chord you can go to any of the other chords, and then you have to follow the map back to the C chord.

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A “chord progression” simply means: a series of chords. Most tunes are harmonized with three or more chords, and the order of those chords is called the chord progression.

A verse or chorus of a song often starts out on the home chord (the I chord in the key), then moves through a series of other chords and finally ends up on the home chord again.

Many songs (as well as classical pieces) use the same sequences of chords, and in this article we’ll look at some of the most common ones.

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This article is for people who wish to learn how to accompany a singer, or their own singing.

When you play accompaniment, you just play the bass and the chords but not the melody of the song.

Of course, different styles have different requirements — in Jazz, you wouldn’t even play the bass, for example. The patterns I present here are suitable for pop and rock music.

The prerequisite is that you know how to do voice-leading. We’ll use voice-leading to go as smoothly as possible from one chord to the next (no big jumps).

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Suppose in a particular tune C chord is followed by F chord. Then you could play it like this:

However, that’s quite a big jump. As a result, the music sounds disconnected. Another way to play this chord progression:

Now only two tones change — the C remains in the same place — and they jump only a very small distance (a half-step and a whole-step, respectively).

The result is a much smoother sound. This principle is called voice-leading.

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The “power chord” is a simplified chord, used mostly by rock guitarists but it also has a place on the piano.

Remember that a major chord consists of the first, third and fifth degrees of the major scale. A minor chord is like a major chord but with the 3rd lowered a half-step.

A power chord, however, just has the 1 and 5 and omits the 3rd. Because we leave out the 3rd in a power chord, it is neither major nor minor.

You can play a power chord whenever a major or minor chord is required. In fact, because the 1 and 5 are present in every chord except for diminished and augmented chords, you can substitute power chords almost everywhere.

The reason rock guitar players love power chords is that you only have to learn a single handshape in order to play all possible power chords. Also, when you apply a lot of distortion to the sound, power chords sound better than full chords.

Power chords are not very common in piano music. But they are useful if you want to play chords way down low on the keyboard.

With those low tones, adding the 3rd makes the sound too muddy, so playing just 1-5 will sound better than 1-3-5.

The notation for a power chord, for example the C power chord, is C5. Less common is something like C(omit3).

Chords are made by playing three or more tones at once. Often we will play chords in root position, which means that the lowest tone is the root tone of the chord.

For example, C major in root position is played as: C - E - G (from low to high)

Often it is useful to put the chord tones in a different order. We’ll go into the reasons why later, but for now I’ll show you how to play such inversions.

If there are three tones in the chord, as in the C major chord above, we can play it in three different positions:

1. Root position (or fundamental position)
2. First inversion
3. Second inversion

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