Download [UPD] Piano Chords Dictionary
Jacque Finister
A chord is a group of notes that can be played together and function as the harmony in music. There are lots of different chords that can be organized in different groups and categories. One thing that differ among chords is how many notes that are included. There are triads (three notes), four-note (sometimes called tetrachords) and five-note chords. In addition, chords with six or seven notes also exist. See in-depth summary of chord types.
A good way to learn chords on the piano is to be familiar with how they are constructed. The Cmaj7 chord adds one note to C, the seventh in the C major scale. The Cm7 adds one note to Cm, the seventh in the C minor scale. Looking at the extended chord (e.g. C7, C9, C11), they are adding notes using intervals from the root of the chords with seventh, ninth and eleventh degrees.
The numbers are used to simplify and represent the five fingers from thumb (1) to little finger (5), regardless if the left or right hand is concerned. On this site you can find fingerings for the chords, these are suggestions that strives to follow the standard way, but must not be optimal in all situations or for all hands.
Exercises could be done for developing independence among the fingers. Normally, the ring fingers are the weakest and need the most strength training. See fingerings illustrated with pictures.
On the image below you can see one example of how a piano chord is presented on this site including a diagram:
A red color means that the key is part of the chord that is in focus. To play the actual chord on a piano, press down all keys marked in red (if needed, see a diagram compared to a realistic picture). Since the pattern of keys repeat itself on the keyboard, you can place your hand in many positions. You will notice, however, that there is more bass on the left part of the keyboard and more treble as you go to the right. Therefore, you should strive for placing your hand somewhere in the middle.
When looking at piano chord symbols, we often see # (pronounced sharp) or b (pronounced flat), for example C# or Db.
Then the chord is written with a sole letter, as in C, it is a major chord. A chord written as Cm means C minor.
Sus, Dim and Aug are abbreviations for suspended, diminished and augmented.
For inverted chords a slash is used between the original chord name and the alternative bass note (i.e. C/E).
A parenthesis can sometimes be seen in the chord name, for example C(#5), meaning that the chord has an alteration or extension.
Less common is the use of no in a chord. In these cases a note is omitted and Cno3 means that the triad is played without the third.
Exercises
A collection of exercises with musical notation that can be open as pdf-files.
Go to exercises page
I know that already exist tons of chords libraries online. Still, I always thought that many of them lack important information, such as the names fo the single notes and, more importantly, the intervals in the chords (this is crucial to really learn chords construction). So, for my site, I've built a new chord library with diagrams packed with all these kinds of information. Check it out:
Is there any "dictionary" for chord voicings?
Like, I wanna play an Amaj#11 with the #11 on top, how would I go about doing so? I could voice it by following my intution but I might miss a few standard voicings that might be better. Or perhaps, I want an alternative way..
The Piano Chord Dictionary is an essential tool for any musician. Simply choose a root note, select the chord you want to learn, and the Piano Chord Dictionary will play the chord and display it on the on-screen piano keyboard.
A chord, in music, is any harmonic set of pitches consisting of multiple notes[a] (also called "tones") that are sounded simultaneously, or nearly so. For many practical and theoretical purposes, arpeggios and other types of broken chords (in which the chord tones are not sounded simultaneously) may also be considered as chords in the right musical context.
In tonal Western classical music (music with a tonic key or "home key"), the most frequently encountered chords are triads, so called because they consist of three distinct notes: the root note, and intervals of a third and a fifth above the root note. Chords with more than three notes include added tone chords, extended chords and tone clusters, which are used in contemporary classical music, jazz and almost any other genre.
Common ways of notating or representing chords[3] in Western music (other than conventional staff notation) include Roman numerals, the Nashville Number System, figured bass, chord letters (sometimes used in modern musicology), and chord charts.
The English word chord derives from Middle English cord, a back-formation of accord[4] in the original sense of agreement and later, harmonious sound.[5] A sequence of chords is known as a chord progression or harmonic progression. These are frequently used in Western music.[6] A chord progression "aims for a definite goal" of establishing (or contradicting) a tonality founded on a key, root or tonic chord.[2] The study of harmony involves chords and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them.[7]
Ottó Károlyi[9] writes that, "Two or more notes sounded simultaneously are known as a chord," though, since instances of any given note in different octaves may be taken as the same note, it is more precise for the purposes of analysis to speak of distinct pitch classes. Furthermore, as three notes are needed to define any common chord, three is often taken as the minimum number of notes that form a definite chord.[10] Hence, Andrew Surmani, for example, states, "When three or more notes are sounded together, the combination is called a chord."[11] George T. Jones agrees: "Two tones sounding together are usually termed an interval, while three or more tones are called a chord."[12] According to Monath, "a chord is a combination of three or more tones sounded simultaneously", and the distances between the tones are called intervals.[13] However, sonorities of two pitches, or even single-note melodies, are commonly heard as implying chords.[14] A simple example of two notes being interpreted as a chord is when the root and third are played but the fifth is omitted. In the key of C major, if the music stops on the two notes G and B, most listeners hear this as a G major chord.
Since a chord may be understood as such even when all its notes are not simultaneously audible, there has been some academic discussion regarding the point at which a group of notes may be called a chord. Jean-Jacques Nattiez explains that, "We can encounter 'pure chords' in a musical work", such as in the "Promenade" of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition but, "often, we must go from a textual given to a more abstract representation of the chords being used", as in Claude Debussy's Première arabesque.[8]
The Baroque period, the 17th and 18th centuries, began to feature the major and minor scale based tonal system and harmony, including chord progressions and circle progressions.[3] It was in the Baroque period that the accompaniment of melodies with chords was developed, as in figured bass,[17] and the familiar cadences (perfect authentic, etc.).[18] In the Renaissance, certain dissonant sonorities that suggest the dominant seventh occurred with frequency.[19] In the Baroque period, the dominant seventh proper was introduced and was in constant use in the Classical and Romantic periods.[19] The leading-tone seventh appeared in the Baroque period and remains in use.[20] Composers began to use nondominant seventh chords in the Baroque period. They became frequent in the Classical period, gave way to altered dominants in the Romantic period, and underwent a resurgence in the Post-Romantic and Impressionistic period.[21]
While scale degrees are typically represented in musical analysis or musicology articles with Arabic numerals (e.g., 1, 2, 3, ..., sometimes with a circumflex above the numeral: , , , ...), the triads (three-note chords) that have these degrees as their roots are often identified by Roman numerals (e.g., I, IV, V, which in the key of C major would be the triads C major, F major, G major).
In the 2010s, some classical musicians who specialize in music from the Baroque era can still perform chords using figured bass notation; in many cases, however, the chord-playing performers read a fully notated accompaniment that has been prepared for the piece by the music publisher. Such a part, with fully written-out chords, is called a "realization" of the figured bass part.
Chord letters are used by musicologists, music theorists and advanced university music students to analyze songs and pieces. Chord letters use upper-case and lower-case letters to indicate the roots of chords, followed by symbols that specify the chord quality.[28]
In most genres of popular music, including jazz, pop, and rock, a chord name and the corresponding symbol are typically composed of one or more parts. In these genres, chord-playing musicians in the rhythm section (e.g., electric guitar, acoustic guitar, piano, Hammond organ, etc.) typically improvise the specific "voicing" of each chord from a song's chord progression by interpreting the written chord symbols appearing in the lead sheet or fake book. Normally, these chord symbols include:
The basic function of chord symbols is to eliminate the need to write out sheet music. The modern jazz player has extensive knowledge of the chordal functions and can mostly play music by reading the chord symbols only. Advanced chords are common especially in modern jazz. Altered 9ths, 11ths and 5ths are not common in pop music. In jazz, a chord chart is used by comping musicians (jazz guitar, jazz piano, Hammond organ) to improvise a chordal accompaniment and to play improvised solos. Jazz bass players improvise a bassline from a chord chart. Chord charts are used by horn players and other solo instruments to guide their solo improvisations.
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