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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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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These are suggested fingerings for playing the major and natural minor scales. You can play the scales all the way up and down the keyboard using these fingerings.

Finger numbers (left and right hand):

Note that the pinky (finger 5) isn’t used in the tables below. You can use it for the final note of the scale if you wish.

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We have seen that it is possible to build chords on the tones of the major or minor scale (the diatonic chords).

Often, these chords are not referred to by their name, but by a number. And not a regular number like 1 or 6, but with Roman numerals.

In case you forgot all about them, here are the Roman numerals 1 to 7:

If we were to write the diatonic chords from the C major scale using Roman numerals, it would look like this:

Notice the following:

• Major chords (C and F) are written using capitals.
• Minor chords (Dm, Em and Am) are in lower-case.
• The dominant-7 chord (G7) is written as V7.
• The diminished chord (Bdim) is written as vii°

Occasionally, you may also see the following notation:

Why use these Roman numerals instead of the chord names? Because using the numbers allows us to talk about chords and chord progressions independently of the key.

For example, the chord progressions C F G7 C and F Bb C7 F can both be written as I IV V7 I.

The first is in the key of C and the second in the key of F, but otherwise they are identical:

One advantage of using numbers instead of chords is that it becomes easy to transcribe a piece from one key to another.

Example. Here is the beginning of Misty in the key of C:

        C          Gm            C7          F
Look at me, I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree

Suppose you want to play it in another key, say G. First, you replace the chord names with Roman numerals:

        I          Vm            I7          IV
Look at me, I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree

Then you look up the chords for the new key and fill them in:

        G          Dm            G7          C
Look at me, I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree

The principle works the same for the chords from a minor scale, although the symbols are slightly different (because the chords have different qualities).

For example, the key of A minor:

It is also possible to use Roman numerals to describe chords that are not diatonic. In other words, chords that are borrowed from other keys.

For example, the chord bIII is the 3rd chord (III), in major (uppercase letters), lowered by a half-step (b). In the key of C, this would be the Eb major chord.

You may also see a sharp symbol combined with a Roman numeral: #IV in the key of C is the F# major chord.

It is not uncommon to add a qualifier to the Roman numeral. Examples: IVmaj7, II7, #IVdim7. To find the real chord, substitute the Roman numeral for the n-th chord from the scale.

You may have heard of the Nashville Number System. This is the same principle, although it works with plain-old numbers instead of Roman numerals. So instead of II-V-I you’d see 2-5-1, but they both mean the same thing.

Solfege is yet another system, except that it doesn’t use numbers, but syllables:

And finally, each of the diatonic chords can also be given a name that more-or-less describes its function. Different chords have different functions in their key. I’ll keep the details for a future article, so I’ll simply give you the list here:

So now you know that when people talk about the “I-chord” or “tonic”, they mean the first chord from the key.

The “key” of a piece determines what tones can be used by the melody and which chords will harmonize the melody.

There are 12 major keys and 12 related minor keys.

The notes that can be used are given in the key signature. In written music, you can find the key signature on the left of each line.

The key signature consists of one or more sharps or flats, or none at all. For example, if you see the following bit of music:

This means the scale for this piece has two flat tones (black keys) and five regular tones (white keys). Specifically, B should be played as Bb and E should be played as Eb. This is either the key of Bb major or G minor.

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The key that a piece is written in does not just determine the possible melody tones, but also the chords that can be used.

The diatonic chords are the ones most likely to make an appearance. These are the chords that can be built on the tones of the key’s scale. They do not “borrow” tones from other scales.

Let’s assume we’re playing in the “key of C”. That means we’re using the tones from the C major scale.

The C major scale is: C D E F G A B C

We can build a three-note chord — also called a “triad” — on each of these tones.

This is the formula: We pick a root tone to start from, then skip one to find the second chord tone, then skip another to find the last chord tone.

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This is the major scale of C: C D E F G A B C

This is the natural minor scale of A: A B C D E F G A

Notice anything? That’s right, they both use the same tones!

When the tones in a piece come primarily from the C major scale, we say that the piece is “in the key of C major” or just “in the key of C”.

When the tones in a piece come form the A natural minor scale, we say that the piece is “in the key of A minor”.

Since both of these scales contain the same tones, the key signature of both the C major key and the A minor key are identical: white keys only, no sharps or flats.

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We have already looked at intervals and you now know that going from C up to G, for example, is called a “perfect fifth” interval.

But you can also go from C down to G. What is that interval called? Hint: it’s not a fifth.

As before, you can count the number of half-steps going down from C to G. Or you can take the elaborate method of counting the number of notes and adjusting for sharps and flats.

But there is another way: you can invert the interval from C-up-to-G to get the interval from C-down-to-G.

Here is the rule: inverted interval = 9 - interval

Fortunately, that is not too heavy on the mathematics. So C-down-to-G is: 9 - 5 = a 4th.

The 5th was perfect. Is our 4th also “perfect”?

A few more rules:

• Perfect intervals remain perfect.
• Major intervals become minor.
• Minor intervals become major.
• Augmented becomes diminished.
• Diminished becomes augmented.

So inverting a perfect fifth indeed results in a perfect fourth, and vice versa.

Another example: the interval C up to A. This is a major sixth. If we invert this interval, we get 9 - 6 = 3 and major becomes minor. So C-down-to-A is a minor third.

To find an interval in the opposite direction, you can also reverse the notes. Instead of doing C-down-to-G you can consider this G-up-to-C, which is identical. Likewise, C-down-to-A is equivalent to the interval A-to-up-C.

Fun, fun, fun.

We have already seen the major scale and how it is constructed. Now it is time to talk about another important scale: the minor scale. In fact, there is not just one minor scale, there are three.

The natural minor scale

The natural minor scale is the “original” minor scale and the foundation for the two other minor scales.

The interval formula for this scale is: W H W W H W W

As always, W means a whole-step and H is a half-step.

If we choose the note C as our starting point and apply this formula, we get the scale of C minor: C D Eb F G Ab Bb C

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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.)

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