Piano Clues

What does this have to do with playing the piano? Let me explain…

If you look up free sheet music or chord sheets on the internet, you often run into something called “guitar tabulature” or “tabs”.

This is a simplified type of sheet music that is easier to read for guitar players than traditional notation. It basically displays the fretboard of the guitar.

What if you want to play that song on the piano and you can’t find the sheet music? Then you might get lucky with the guitar tabs.

Translating tabs to notes on the piano is not very hard but you’ll have to learn a bit about how the guitar works.

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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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A “lead sheet” is a simplified form of sheet music that only contains a single staff with the melody, and chord symbols that give an indication of the harmony. It’s up to the players themselves to create the arrangement.

Lead sheets are very popular with many musicians, especially those who play Jazz and popular music.

A lead sheet gives you a quick idea of how a piece is supposed to sound, but it also gives you the freedom to play it however you feel like.

Often lead sheets are sold in thick books called “fake books” that can be pretty expensive. I have a couple of them and they are well worth the money — together they contain more than 2,000 songs — but they are not exhaustive (and there is quite a bit of overlap between them).

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There are a number of online sheet music stores, like Music Notes.com and Sheet Music Direct, that have a huge collection of sheet music for anything from classical to the latest hits.

These sites do not sell hardcopies, but sheet music in digital form. When you buy a digital copy, you pay for the right to print the sheet music (once). You will need to install a special plug-in for your browser to make this work.

The advantage of using these sites is that it’s relatively cheap to get a piece of music, and you can transpose it to another key before you print. So if the music is in the key of Ab, but you’d rather play it in C, you can transpose it up by 4 half-steps and then print it. Try doing that with a hardcopy!

If you’re a real cheapskate, then here’s a trick: You can usually view the first page of the piece for free in your web browser.

You can transpose this page to a more convenient key if necessary, print it out, and even listen to it online.

Often, the first page already contains the entire A-section (or the verse) of the song. This is a great way to get started on figuring out a piece, for free!

Musicians can be divided into two groups: those who read sheet music and those who play using the “chord method”.

If you’re a sheet music player, you may think that you don’t need to know about chords. However, I believe that understanding how chords are used in a composition will make it much easier for you to read and understand the piece.

Even for classical music! Just like today’s songwriters, composers of classical music used chords to create their harmonies. Chords are the foundation of all our music.

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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.

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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.

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