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Guys,


I am working on chords using softwares like Ireal Pro. In short amount of time i started to visually memorize chords(if this expression makes any sense).

What i mean is for example when i play C7 , i know it consists of C E G Bb and i am very conscious while i am playing C7 . I know C is the root , E is the 3rd and Bb is the dominant 7th.

But with these kind of softwares i am not conscious anymore. I just play the chord very fast but as i am playing i am not really very sure which one is the 3rd or which one is the 7th of that chord. I just play it.

At first i was stopping at every chord and telling myself "This is the 3rd and this is the 7th" and trying to keep myself aware of it but in time it gets tiring. Just playing it without questioning is much easier.

Is that a bad thing?

I don't know. Is this think in some way stopping you to do what you want to do at the piano or keyboard?

It would be a good idea to continue being aware of the root, 3rd, 7th, etc ....

You may not consciously think of those positions every time you play it in a particular piece of music because it gets "memorized" but I would not suggest dropping that concept entirely.

In fact, I would suggest you try to form the chord the way you would do it and then see what iRealpro does.

There are multiple ways of "voicing" a chord and just because iRealPro shows it one way, does not mean that is the way it should be done.

If you do your own voicing, then the tune becomes more ... "yours".

Good Luck

Keep at it, you'll know which ones are the 3rd and 7th with out thinking about it soon enough.

As long as you're practising a wide variety of songs and positions on the piano and a good mix of dom7, maj7, and min7 you won't get into any ruts.

Try playing whole songs with only the root in left hand and only 3rd and 7th in right hand, or only Root +3rd or 7th and the missing 3rd/7th in right hand.

Btw dmd iRealPro is only chord charts, it has no sheet music.

not in the least bad, it's the right thing to do, it's what you should be aiming for. Only when working chords out, prior to getting to the automatic muscle memory stage might you need to acknowledge the names of component notes.

Ultimately, when you're making music fluently, the notation becomes an unnecessary intermediary. The connection is between your musical imagination and the physical execution required to realise it.

A sign of good progress. As you become faster at moving between chords, so does your mental processing need to pick up the pace. Individual chord elements being thought about is good, when learning a piece and it's chords perhaps, but will be too much to process at tempo. Once everything is secure including all the correct chord notes to play, absolutely replace all this detailed analysis with how it looks, the shape it makes and where you need to be on the register at this point in time vs. thinking about individual notes. Soon, you will not even be thinking about the chords. Just, where do I go next.

I'm doing the same thing. My teacher didn't want me getting stuck in the root positions. So he has me visualize the chords as patterns across the keyboard and improvise over the pattern. Once I got the hang of it, I was hooked!

I find I visialise chords in classical xtuff which is largely comprised of simple chords. . .Anything to get the thing into me head. . . .

I think learning things visually on the keyboard is very helpful. I've been playing jazz for quite a few years and there are voicing I can use on "auto pilot" where I don't know what is the 3rd or 7th. Of course, if you asked, I could tell you, but when I'm playing, I'm thinking of the shape of the chord more than hitting certain notes.

Indeed, I've been working lately on various scales such as diminished and altered and its hopeless if you're thinking "root, flat nine, sharp nine, etc." I am learning them as visual patterns of white and black keys. Works great!

I do it visually, no harm that I can tell....

I even made a kind of paper slide rule thing that takes lead sheet symbols and shows which keys to press.

I feel like not being aware of the components of your chord might lead you to have difficulties generating new progressions spontaneously. But apparently putting your awareness in front of your visual memory is not very doable. You start memorizing things and not much you can do about it.

This was a good discussion. Thanks guys.

There is another aspect to this which nobody has mentioned,but it is rather hard to explain. I have found it of immense benefit, particularly in improvisation, to visually memorise a combination, i.e. chord or scale, a scale simply being a chord with more notes, over the whole keyboard as one visual entity. That is to say, memorise visually the entire collection of notes belonging to the subset, not just chords or scales in a finite number of positions. Then during improvisation, the visual association of all notes, by way of example, in say an F# scale, will appear instantly in the mind's eye, and you know that whatever you play will be in F#, no matter what complexity of voicing occurs. Fortunately, the piano is constructed with asymmetry of black and white keys to make this very easy as most most subsets have distinct haptic and visual characteristics.

So I think cultivation of the visual aspect is wholly good.

I think it's extremely important to be aware of your notes, especially as you go through your inversions. It helps you know where other notes are as you add complexity (9 is a whole step above your root, b9 is a half step, etc.). In this case, you're not really memorizing each chord, you're understanding it. Memorizing would be choosing one voicing of C7 and playing that EVERY time it came up.

I think you're on the right track.

If you can memorize one voicing you can memorize two or more. I just tried this for myself and rattled off about twenty different two-handed voicings of C7 without at any point thinking "C,E,G,Bb".

For my own part, it would be inappropriate to describe this as visual because I do it without necessarily looking at the keyboard (depending on spread) or without seeing it in my mind's eye. It is spatial, for sure, contextual - moving sometimes feeling from one correctly located chord to the next. Above all it becomes *automatic* in what ever way it suits you to describe the process. I accept that some may call it 'visual'.

I don't accept any sense of 'understanding' chords or need to do so. The chord name and its constituent notes are labels, no more no less. One must learn them, of course, and at the beginner stage that will involve working them out from a knowledge of notation and reference to charts or structure. But it might also be by virtue of 'shape', by positional clues provided by the black-white note layout of the piano. Think also of ear-players who learn to do this sometimes very elaborately without formal education or knowledge even of note names.

Then, what starts out as a very slow laboured process eventually becomes automatic and fast where the labels are entirely dispensed with. A sequence of 4 different chords can be played heck of a lot faster than can a recitation of those chords' constituent notes. But even if chords are played at a rate which would allow acknowledging the names of the notes, there's nothing gained by doing so.

That's right ; but there is another factor that is even more important: the preliminary hearing, which forcing hands to make the appropriate configuration for the chord.