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OK, yesterday my new piano FINALLY arrived (yeah) so I will start taking lessons next week. Of course I haven't waited to start banging away at the keys anyway and have pulled out a couple of "easy" piano books I have. Here is my question...
There is a square box on top of the music line that has a [Am] in it (others have [Dm].... what does this mean??? I can figure out the ones that have [G] or whatever in them... it is the little "m" that is throwing me off.
Can anyone explain this one to me?
Thanks!

[Am] is A minor
[Dm] is D minor

m = minor

Locate G on the piano, see the black key to the left of it? G minor, which is also F sharp.

THANK YOU!!!!
OK, so A minor is the same thing as A flat?

no, a minor is a A minor chord, Ab is a whole other chord.

edit:

An A minor chord consists of: A C and E played in any inversion.

An Ab chord is Ab C and Eb played in any inversion.

OH Lord.... that piano teacher better get here soon! LOL!

Jen, congrats on your new piano, and on not waiting for the teacher!! That's more fun isn't it.

There are lots of elements to written music, so it can seem overwhelming at first, but just take those elements one by one, as they come up in the music on the page, and in no time it will all make sense.

Since you're reading/looking at music before you start your lessons, I'll try to address one (ok, two) elements that might help you till the lessons start. Specifically, elements regarding note names and chord names.

First, there are notes, and all notes have names, as in A, A flat (written on computer as Ab) A sharp (A#) etc.

Then there are chords, and chords could be thought of as rules for how notes are put together. A note is just that, one note, but a chord is a grouping of notes played together (simultaneously or not.)

There are a few different kinds of chords, but let's start out with the fact that the main way of naming chords is to talk about major chords and minor chords.

What can be confusing is that each note has a chord named after it. So for A, there's the note A, and then there are chords A major and A minor (minor is always written with a lower case m.) There are also A flat major, A flat minor, A sharp major and A sharp minor.

If you are looking at a line music, the staff, that has notes written out, and then above the staff there are letter of the alphabet such as G, Am etc, those letters are likely the chord names. At this point, you could just ignore those chord names and only worry about playing the notes.

If this is confusing, don't worry. Just blame me and my explanation rather than your own understanding! If this isn't confusing, well there are two elements you can now keep in mind when you are looking at music.

Enjoy, and by the way, welcome to the forums!

And you know, those little boxes with the chord names are so guitarists can play along! At least that's what I use them for.

In other cases, I have ad libbed the LH accompaniment based on those chords when the written out stuff was too complicated, that way I could just concentrate on getting the RH melody.

I was probably getting ahead of myself trying to play the chords, but I just got so excited when I noticed they were up there! LOL! Thanks for all the explainations... they'll probably really make sense to me in a few weeks... (years?)

It won't take long. You'll be amazed at all the cool stuff your in for.......HAVE FUN!!

DOH~

I was thinking about my first post today and I knew I messed something up!

at first, i didn't know what the little boxes on the top of sheet music meant, but then i found out they were for not only the piano chords, but they're guitar chords.

Congrats on getting your new piano!! Enjoy!