by Gerry Baird

Created on: March 16, 2009   Last Updated: March 17, 2009

Spice Up Your Playing with Chord Style Piano

Have you ever gone to a nice restaurant or a mall and heard a pianist playing beautifully without any sheet music at all? She might have memorized every note of the piece you are hearing, or she might be playing by ear, but chances are she's using chord style piano to help her play the harmony parts. Chord style piano is used by many pop/rock artists and performers, and it is also a learning style that is well-suited to adult piano students who can more easily comprehend the intellectual framework it provides.

When I was growing up, we had a piano that didn't serve much purpose other than to hold lamps and picture frames. Every once in a while I would sit down and plunk out a melody, playing mostly by ear. I even learned a few basic chords and added harmonies to simple songs. That's about as far as I got before deciding as an adult to finally take piano lessons. I wanted to learn how to play the piano "right," so I ignored those little symbols above the notes on my sheet music - symbols like "Cmaj7, D, G7, Bb7#9" - and learned to play notes exactly as they were written on the treble and bass clefs. I made good progress over the course of a few years, but learning was sometimes slow and frustrating. Then I was introduced to chord style piano and discovered that a knowledge of chords gave me a "map" to the piano and let me pick and choose notes that would sound good in a given song. I combined this knowledge with the classical piano skills I had already learned, and soon was regularly receiving compliments on my playing. Chord style piano even helped me site read and play classical music better, because I had increased confidence and my hands were already familiar with many of the shapes and movements found in other piano styles.

Here's a very brief description of how chord style piano (sometimes called "popular piano") works. Think of a simple song like "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." This song consists of 3 chords: C, F, and G7. These letters are both names of chords and the names of the root note each chord is built on. The C chord contains three notes: C, E, and G. The F chord also contains 3 notes: F, A and C. The G7 chord contains 4 notes: G, B and D and F. These notes could be written on the bass clef using standard notation (with stems and rhythm values), but in chord style piano the bass clef is eliminated or ignored and the left hand part is simply notated with letters and other chord symbols. This type of notation

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