If you are following these lessons in order, you are now working on adding 7ths to your chords. I want you to keep working on that, but need to give you some other information that will help you. Many pianists want to know what chords I use, but they do not understand that the actual […]
If you are reading this lesson before reading my first lesson on playing lead sheets, please take the time to read it here before continuing. To review the last lesson, I explained why I think there is value in knowing how to read lead sheets, and gave you four steps to get started. Here they […]
Today, I am going to teach you how to play from a lead sheet. If you do not know what I am talking about, a lead sheet is music notation that includes the melody line, the lyrics, and chord symbols. At the present time, you do not see many lead sheets in church music. They […]
In the last lesson, we crossed the fine line between they study of theory and playing by ear into improvisation, and we are going to start that improvisation in earnest in this lesson. Before we do, I want to reemphasize something. First, I want to make sure that you do not find yourself falling into […]
This is a special lesson because it is in my opinion the lesson where you start improvising. There is a fine line between playing by ear and improvisation and we are going to cross that line today. Let me tell you a bit of my history before we start. I understand that most pianists don’t believe […]
Is it more important to be able to read music or play by ear? I really don’t know the answer, but I know they are both important. I am teaching my son who is eight to play the piano and though we focus mostly on reading music, I am already teaching him to play by […]
If you have followed me up until this point, you have a good idea on how to identify and name most chords in church music. There may be exceptions but that is fine for now. I hope you have been doing the exercise of going through the hymnal and learning to quickly identify the chords […]
How many different chords do you have to know? Probably not as many as you think. Below are examples of the chords I will regularly talk about. By the way, you will not see simple triads here because they are rarely used. You are going to learn that we are almost always going to add […]
Let’s take a song and walk through all of the chords in it. I chose “Just As I Am” for this exercise because it is a very typical hymn from a harmony perspective. It contains I, IV, and V major chords and has a few 7th chords, a 9th, and a few inversions. Here is […]
Remember that slash chords are chords written like this: Amin7/D. When you see one, it means to play the first letter as a chord with the second letter as the bottom note in the bass. Slash chords are often used to simplify things for the instrumentalist and they do make things simpler. If you do […]
Most classically trained musicians tend to think in terms of triads. They look for the three main notes of a chord (1, 3, and 5). However, the more advanced your chords get, the more likely it is that either the 3 or 5 (or both) will be missing from your chords. Here is an example: […]