Have you come across a lead sheet or jamming on a chord progression and you realise that you can't, for the life of you, remember what those chords are anymore? Or,
...you know what it is but it just takes you forever to figure it out on the piano? Or,
...you find the chord but you're not sure it's correct and you don't know how to check if it is right, or not?
I call it ‘chord amnesia’, when we forget chords all. the. dang. time!
We might remember the basic chords but the more complex ones are difficult to remember so we get overwhelmed! And there's so many chords to learn it seems endless!
In this article we’re going to explore how you can use learning devices to improve your chord memory, but before we get there, think about this - what situations do you use chords in?
The sheer amount of activities that we use chords in proves the weight of this topic and how important learning them is for all pianists.
We use chords to play from a lead sheet or chord charts.
We use chords for songwriting.
If we’re jamming with a band or with other musicians and they have a song to teach us, we need to know chords in order to play along in time (without hesitation!).
Simply playing from sheet music - sometimes chords are written above the staff, so that you can elaborate on what’s on the page.
If you want to improvise, you'll need to know your chords to have a framework to improvise on.
Finally, chords are essential when we are playing by ear!
All of these things can go into one big basket which is ‘creative piano playing’.
Read this blog about unleashing your key creativity! (Click image).
Creative pursuits like improvising; songwriting; comping; playing off a lead sheet; elaborating on that lead sheet to make our own arrangements; playing with a band: all these things are in the creative camp of piano playing and we need a good knowledge of chords for.
For me, learning chords was always inherit with two struggles.
1) how do i remember what all the chord symbols are referring to when they all look similar, and
2) how do i remember what sequence of notes creates which chord?
These two struggles would paralyse me whenever I had to play creatively!
But I've been working on this for a few years and now, I remember my chords easily using my own memorising device.
Let's look at exactly how many chords there are so we can understand the volume of memorisation required (just what we’re trying to avoid!)
When you first learn chords you learn about major and minor chords...
Then maybe you start to learn about the diminished and the augmented chords...
Normally I teach the major seventh, the minor seventh, the dominant seventh next...
Then you can get into suspended chords, diminished and half diminished sevenths, augmented and extended chords.
All these common chord types–even though they're not so common for many standard pop songs–add up to 12 chord types.
But of course we want to be able to play those chords from anywhere on the keyboard, not just on C! We've got 12 keys on the keyboard. If we want to learn each of these chords from each of those 12 keys we're dealing with 144 chords!
And it doesn’t end there!
We have many other chord alternatives too: extensions, altered chords, added tone chords... we end up with about 30 chord types at a conservative count!
30 chord types multiplied by 12 keys, that's 360 different chords!
Rightfully, you might be thinking, “GAME OVER, I’ll just play flute instead”!
Hold up! We don’t need to take drastic measures! Instead of memorising 360 chords, we’re going to use a learning device, we will STORIFY!
What the heck does ‘STORIFY’ mean?
Instead of memorizing 360 individual chords, i.e 30 types of chords at 12 positions on the piano, we're going to Storify.
Take those chord categories and tell yourself a story, a narrative, so that your brain can make more connections and hold onto that information easily.
Imagine you’re in school and your teacher hands you a page with plain text - a full list of random facts. Unless you have a photographic memory it’s going to be extremely difficult to remember that list.
This is why we use learning devices to help us link seemingly unrelated information with stories and images so that it is more friendly and digestible to our brains.
“Emotion has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning and problem solving.”
‘Frontiers in Psychology’, 2017.
These neuroscientists were researching the effect of emotion on memory and learning and these other cognitive processes. Emotion, whether good or bad, had a positive effect on learning & retention. When we add emotion to the things that we learn, it makes it easier for our brains to hold on to!
For learning chords, we’ll create a picture and a sentence/story that will link together to tell me essential information about that chord: how to play it, and what it does.
This is to Storify! We're making a narrative, linking it to a picture in our head and we're attaching emotion to it because we have feelings about that picture.
Here's just one example: the major chord.
Imagine a picture of a soldier - pretend he’s a Major. He's holding delicate purple flowers in one hand that he enjoys smelling. He has a big love for the little things.
This story gives us an image and it gives us a sentence that relates to that image, and both of those things relate to the title of the major chord. How do we turn that into playing the major chord?
First, we need to learn a little about what makes up a chord.
All triads are made up of two intervals: the major and the minor chords both have two intervals of a third within them.
The first third is C-D-E and E-F-G is the other third (3rd means there are three letter note names within the interval).
But we have a difference between the types of thirds: there's major thirds and minor thirds.
The major third is a bigger gap of four half steps as you can see by these zigzags.The minor third is a smaller gap of three half steps.
So when we make a major chord we're adding a bigger third of four half steps with a smaller third of three half steps.
How do we remember that the bigger third comes before the smaller third?
Let’s go back to the rhyme “big love for little things”: “big love” = the big 3rd comes first, ‘for the little things’ = the little 3rd, comes second!
That's an example of how we can attach an image and a narrative to help us find and play different chords. You can use that formula beginning from anywhere on the keyboard!
The second step of learning chords is essential but sadly, often forgotten! We don't want to simply work out the formula for playing a chord and think, “I know that’s technically correct”. We want to hear that it's correct so that we can apply our knowledge of chords to play by ear!
Do the ear test:
Listen to it, think ‘what does that sound like to me?’, or ‘what feelings or ideas come to me while listening to that chord?’
Sometimes it takes concentration to hone in how we feel when we hear something. Most people say that a major chord is happy, or, we might say it sounds like love!
By using the word ‘love’ instead of happy we can bring it back to this idea of the major chord–big love for little things– and it sounds like ‘big love’ as well!
You can do this exercise at home but there's not just the major and minor chords, there's all those other chord types too...
To learn about these other types of chords as well, you’ll want to check out ‘WE LOVE CHORDS’!
Learn about different chord types.
Learn how to play those chord types anywhere on the keyboard using their unique formula, and
Learn about the jobs (‘function’) of these chords: what feelings do those chords give us and what part do they play in the story of the song?
The ‘WE LOVE CHORDS!’ is available within The Creative Pianist member’s area!
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