How To Read Piano Chords

Hello. My name is Matthew Forbes from The Music Workshop Company. I'm going to take you through how to tune some instruments, how to play them basically and also how to read the notated music for them.

Here is how to read chords on a piano from something like a pop or a jazz lead sheet. You're given on the music, simply the melody and the chords names, the chord abbreviations above them and let me just explain what those abbreviations generally mean. I've got the opening of the eleven McCartney song, 'Yesterday' where again, written is only the melody and so on.

The chords above are what I do with the harmonies which I will spread between my two hands but generally they are what's going on in the left hand. With the letter itself, as you can see the first one is 'C', that means there is a 'C' in the base and it's a 'C' major chord and a major chord is made up of the third and the fifth of that major scale, 'C' major. So those notes along with the tune would be that first chord.

The second one here is 'E'. Now 'E' major has a 'G' sharp, that 'E' major chord there. So we've come from 'C' and then to 'A' minor, the mince standing from minor.

Sometimes it's only a small 'M,' so anything with a small 'M' is minor. 'A' minor against the 'A' at the bottom but the third this time is the minor third to the fifth to make the minor chord. So we've gone from 'C' major to 'E' major to 'A' minor.

Next, we have a dash after the first chord with another letter after it. That means that the basic chord is the one at the beginning so that is 'A' minor but the second letter is where the, specifically the baseline goes and here is 'G'. So that's an 'A' minor chord over a 'G' base.

Now notice here, I'm putting the chord in the right and the base in the left. So there's always a balance between the two hands which works best in the sound and the voicing. Over with the melody on top of that, we have the 'A' minor over 'G' to 'F' to 'G'.

Here we have again a chord, the 'F' chord over the 'C' base. So we have the 'C' base with the 'F' pertaining to the 'C' chord. And again 'G' over 'B' is the 'G' major chord with the 'B' in the base and so on.

If I just play the chords with the two hands from the beginning, it's 'C' to 'E', 'A' minor and 'G', if over 'C' to 'C', 'D7'. Aha 'D7', if you see just the '7' after the letter, that means that it's still essentially the major chord. So 'D' major is the major chord of the 'M' sharp but the seventh is actually the minor seventh note, 'D' is the note, 'C' natural, so you end up with that chord.

That's known as the 7th chord, the plain 7th chord. We'll get on to slightly more complicated versions in a moment but that's '7' and then that goes to 'F' chord over 'G'. So it's 'G' in the base and an 'F' chord there to a 'C' chord at the end.

So along with the melody, those chords spread over the two hands, come out as. And that's how to build the harmonies from the information that you're given here. So putting it altogether with the chords spread over the two hands and the melody on the top, this is how the chords and the tune go together. Now, we've covered the major chords which are the letter names on its own.

The minor chords which have the minor third and the fifth, and we've also covered the regular seventh chord which is the major chord with the minor seventh away from the base. There are other chord symbols that come up. The major 7th is again the major chord written often 'MAJ 7' in shorthand that is with the major 7th.

So we're in 'D', we have a 'D' major chord. The major 7th above 'D' is the 'C' sharp and that's the major 7th chord. When you see a chord in the minor 7, we have an 'A' minor chord here.

If you learn 'A' minor and '7', it will still be the minor chord, and adding the minor 7th as well. So, from 'A' to 'G' natural is the minor '7th' so we end up with a chord of the minor '7th'. We have the diminished '7th' w