Alternative Music Tips And Information

Learning Chording Techniques On The Piano

Do you know the incredible benefits that come to you by learning chording techniques on the piano?

There are many — way more than just 10. But due to space limitations, I’ll just list 10 out of hundreds:

1. By learning chording techniques, you are at least quadrupling your chances of creating exciting new sounds on the piano — sounds that most other piano players have no idea how to create. That’s because arranging using chord techniques is open-ended — there’s no end to the styles and applications you can eventually learn and apply.

2. Learning chording techniques in NO WAY interferes with your ability to sight-read music. Some ill-informed people think it does, but not so! Ask any great jazz musician from Dave Brubeck to Andre Previn to Oscar Peterson to Chuck Corea to…. They ALL read music prolifically, yet choose to apply chording techniques to song after song, creating many of the great classic tunes we all know, like “Take Five”, etc, etc.

Knowing chords and being able to apply techniques to those chords actually HELPS YOU TO SIGHT-READ FASTER, because instead of just seeing groups of random notes on the sheet music, you can see chord patterns forming and dissolving into yet another chord, another chord progression!

Guitar Chord Progressions

Guitar chord progressions are like baby brothers – you cannot escape from them and they take some explaining. Let us do some analysis on the term “guitar chord progressions”. In case you did not know, any time two or more notes are played, this is referred to as a “chord”. You probably know that certain guitar chords sound good together. These are called guitar chord “families”. Guitar chord “progressions” are certain sequences of chords that sound so good together that they are used as the musical basis of songs.

Chord progressions are derived from musical scales like C D E F G A B C. This is the C major scale which is used very often in music. It is just a sequence of notes with no sharps or flats which makes it easy to use to teach music students the principles of music. When we study chord progressions we think of these letters as chords instead of single notes. If we number the chords from one to seven we can work in a practical way with the chords in any key because the basic principles are the same.