Reading Chord Charts - Piano Lessons

Pianolessons.com the #1 Name in Piano Lessons Online Reading Chord Charts – Nate Bosch Hi, my name is Nate Bosch and today’s lesson I want to talk to you about how to read a chord chart or how to read a lead sheet it’s also known as. I going to make a couple of assumptions first, I may assume that you know what a chord is and you can build basic triads, sevenths you understand intervals. What I want to talk about today is how to read them, how each of those chords is notated on a sheet. Now in regular sheet music these chords right here would be build with notes on a staff. Now a chord charter lead sheet just has the written on top so this chord right here would be notated on the sheet of music as a C. Now we’re going to play C major chord or the nice Jazzy chord it’s going to be written in two ways and it’s going to be defining that interval right there, the seventh. So that would be considered a C major seventh chord, all we now that it’s considered a C major seventh chord. How is it written? Two ways, regular, popular music, country, blues, pop, rock they are written probably— but you won’t find that chord too often in some of those types of music, but the CMaj7. In Jazz it’ll often be written C with a triangle behind it, same chords just written a little bit differently. Now if you see a little m beside the chord that identifies it as minor chord, when you see say Dm with a little m, that’s a D minor chord. Now when we see D little m and a 7, well that 7 is talking about the interval off of the root, so know that’s a D minor seventh chord that’s how it’s written Dm7. Now dominant seventh chords which are based on the fifth degree of the scale, so in the key of C that would be a G. Now G minor seventh talks about the major seventh interval, a G minor seventh only lower the third. So how you notate a G dominant seventh chord or simply G7? That will always indicate a dominant chord. So there’s some basics we have now, if we go to suspended chord or suspended chord it’ll be written C suspended. Now what is that suspended look like, there you have a C suspended chord or that’s a C suspended fourth because the fourth note suspends to the third. Now, you might see a Csus2-4 not a very common chord but 2-4 talks about intervals again. So when you’re looking at these chords on a chord chart it’s important that you remember just a couple of rules and you have to understand intervals so if I just a couple of chords that you like, I would—let’s go with, when we have an F minor chord to an F minor seventh would be written Fm7. Now when I throw a G here and there we have C7 chord with a ninth on it. How would we write that? Well you’ll see that written as a C9, now the Cadd9—I’m just throwing a bunch of terms at you here and we can stop at any and kinda review what Cadd9, would be a C with just making sure that, that ninth is on the top. Now C major ninth would include that seventh which defines the sound of the chord. I want to talk about two more. We talked about the major chord major seventh, dominant seventh, minor seventh the minor chord and now there’s the augmented chord, well how this augmented chord written? Well as you see augmented chord is written C+, there’s where your C+7 would be. For diminished chord it’s written with dim behind it or it’ll have a circle, just a little like a degree, circle would be a diminished chord. So I hope I didn’t run through them too quickly but that gives you a quick overview on how to read a chord chart and how chords that you understand that can build and look at it on the keyboard that are written on the page.