Playing from a chord chart
Most chord charts were written by guitarists. What on them is yours, what isn't, and how to build a whole song in five stages.
Everything you have learned up to now connects here. You open a song on the site, you see a row of chords sitting above the words, and you play it. That is the whole thing, and it is also the lesson that closes the course.
There is only one small problem worth naming up front: most chord charts in the world were written by guitarists. Some of what is printed on them has nothing to do with you at all, and some of it needs a small translation on the way in. This lesson is mostly about that difference.
A typical chord chart carries four kinds of information. Two of them are yours, and two of them are not.
The chord names above the words — entirely yours. This is the heart of the chart: what to play and when to play it. The position of the name above a particular word is telling you that the chord changes exactly there.
The key and the capo — half yours. The key is very relevant indeed. A capo is a clamp guitarists tighten onto the neck to move a song into a different key — you have no such object, and you simply play in whichever key suits you.
Fingering diagrams — not yours. Little grids with dots in them are a guitar neck. Ignore them.
Fret numbers in the tab — not yours. Those rows of numbers along the bottom of the chart are describing strings.
What is worth reading, and what most people skip straight past: the rhythm. If the chart names a time signature, a tempo, or a strumming pattern, every one of those is as true for you as it is for the guitarist. A strumming pattern on guitar and an accompaniment pattern at the piano are the same musical decision taken on two different instruments.
Here is the method, and the first few times it is worth working through it in order rather than trying everything at once.
Read the line before you touch the instrument. Which chords appear in it? How many times does each one come round? Is there anything in there you don't recognize?
Play the left hand only. A single root note per chord, placed where the chord changes. A whole line of it. It sounds thin, and that is exactly what the first step is supposed to sound like.
Add the right hand in block chords. Still no pattern and no clever rhythm. One chord for each change.
Now choose an accompaniment pattern out of the four in the left-hand lesson, and apply it across the whole line.
And only at the very end — sing or hum over it. If you try to sing and play from the beginning, both of them will come out mediocre.
Play Along — open the song, slow it down, and play over it
This tool earns its keep here in particular: you can slow the original recording down without changing its pitch at all, and play along with it until the changes settle into your hand.
On a chord chart you will sometimes run into C/G or Am/C. The slash is saying one single thing: what the bottom note is.
Before the slash, the chord; after it, the note your left hand plays underneath it.
And here is the meaningful difference from the guitar: guitarists ignore this almost every single time. For them an inversion means a whole new hand shape, so they play the ordinary chord and carry on. For you it costs nothing at all — you just put the note after the slash into your left hand.
Which means a slash chord actually comes out at the piano the way whoever wrote it intended, and doesn't on guitar. The full mechanism gets taken apart in the inversions lesson.
The chart is not going to limit itself to six chords. Here is how to survive the rest of them without stopping.
A seventh chord, like G7. Add one note to the triad. And if that is more than you want to deal with right now — play a plain G. It will sound slightly less rich, and it will sound right.
A suspended chord, like Dsus4. The middle note has been swapped out for its neighbor. Same answer here: play the plain one, it will work.
A chord with big numbers on it, like Cmaj9. That is an extension. Play C.
The rule that rescues songs: when in doubt, play the basic triad hiding inside the name. C-something is C; Am-something is A minor. Getting through a whole song on simplified chords beats grinding to a halt in the third bar by an enormous margin.
And when you do want to see exactly how an unfamiliar chord sits on the keys, there is a tool for that:
The Chord Dictionary — every chord on the keys, including the ones we never covered
On a chord chart, where the name sits above the word is what tells you when to change. It is less precise than it looks, so three rules are worth having; between them they cover very nearly everything.
Most chords change at the start of a bar. If you are in doubt, that is the guess to make.
A chord that appears twice in a row is holding for two bars. It doesn't mean anything special is happening there — there simply wasn't anything to write in the middle.
And two chords over the same line of lyrics split it between them. Usually half a bar each. If the line comes out sounding cramped, try giving the first one more room.
And the rule that beats all three of those: listen to the song. Your ear knows when the harmony turns over far better than any chart does, and the moment you are playing over the recording, the places where you changed early or late grate on you immediately. That is why the tool above is worth more than any amount of explanation.
Sometimes the song is written in a key with four sharps in it, or is simply pitched too high to sing. A guitarist has a capo; you have something better.
If you have learned to think in degrees from the pop progressions lesson, transposing is a minute's work: identify the degrees in the original key, and write out those same degrees in the new one. I-V-vi-IV stays I-V-vi-IV wherever you put it.
And if you haven't yet — the quick rule is to shift every chord the same number of keys in the same direction. A song in D that is fighting you moves into C if you take every chord down two keys.
The real advantage is that at the piano nothing stands in the way of your doing it. There are no shapes to relearn, and there is no gadget you have to go out and buy.
One song a week. No more than that.
Choose a song you love and know well — both of those conditions matter. A familiar song means your ear will know the instant something is wrong, and that is feedback no teacher on earth delivers that fast.
On day one, play the left hand only. On day two, add block chords. On day three, choose a pattern. On day four, add the pedal from the pedal lesson. And on day five — sing over it.
By the end of the week you have a whole song. Fifty-two songs a year is a real repertoire, and it is a great deal more than most people get to in two years of exercises.
| What happens | The likely cause | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| You keep trying to read the fret numbers | Part of the chart isn't yours | Ignore them, and the diagrams with them |
| You stall on a chord you don't recognize | Trying to play the whole thing | Play the basic triad inside the name |
| The chord change lands late | You didn't spot in advance where it sits above the word | Read the line before touching the instrument |
| You can't sing and play at the same time | You tried both of them from the start | The playing has to be automatic first |
| The song is too high for you to sing | You assume the key is fixed | Move every chord; you don't need a capo |
| You play the song and it doesn't sound like it | No accompaniment pattern and no pedal | Add them; they are half of the sound |
| A new song every week and none of them finished | Five songs in parallel, not one of them done | One song a week, five stages |
| You play only what is printed on the chart | The chart is a skeleton, not a recording | Listen to the original; it holds the rest |
And this is worth saying out loud: a chord chart is not sheet music. It isn't trying to hand you the song in full, only its harmonic skeleton, and it takes for granted that you will fill in the rest. That is exactly why two people playing off the same chart sound nothing alike — and why what you picked up in the three courses before this one is what turns this chart into music.
And that is the end of the track. You have an instrument, a hand that knows how to sit on it, chords and inversions, a left hand that accompanies, a chart you know how to read, a scale that runs, a foot that knows when to let go, and two hands that work together. From here it stops being study — it is simply playing, and choosing the next song.