Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Efficient (and maybe fun?) ways to learn chords

Hello,

I have been taking blues lessons for about 6 months now. I have sort of hit a wall and both my teacher and I think I need to learn my chords better. Specifically, I need to be able to "see" the chords of all of the keys. For example, no matter where I am on the keyboard, I can "see" where the closest C7, C6, or C9 voicing is. I am less skilled but am still OK with F and G. However, I need to be able to do this with all of the keys.

My teacher in the past had me doing inversion exercises up and down the keyboard. This was pretty boring and easy to lose motivation because I felt that I was not being very efficient.

Is there a more efficient method (and maybe a more fun method) to being able to extremely proficient with chords?

Start doing some work on pop songs!

I did (and do) that next to my 'classic' playing and it improved my understanding of chords dramatically. On top of that, playing chords in all kind of inversions became a lot easier. Kind of without thinking.

Added advantage...it's fun, and you make quite nice sounding music without too much effort!

I am now talking about the pop song stuff where you play bass lines with the left hand, and (inverted) chords with the right hand (with the top note being the melody line). I'm from europe, so I still struggle sometimes with the US music terminology. This might be similar to what you guys call playing from fake books (but I am not sure)

Ingrid

I thought of learning chords by slogging through lead-sheets but didn't think it would be very efficient. From what I have seen of pop songs, they tend to use lots of chords that are not typical in blues. I want to learn all of my chords eventually, but my goal is to first get fairly proficient at improvising blues.

Maybe I should try it though if I can't find any exercises that I can stick with.