Playing Piano Chords: Accompany Songs without Reading Music

By Tijs Krammer

With this book you can learn to ac­com­pa­ny songs on the piano in a smooth way. You don’t need to be able to read music for this book. In­stead, you learn the chords with im­ag­es that are eas­y to un­der­stand. With the pic­tures you quick­ly mas­ter the chords. You can ac­com­pa­ny a first song af­ter half an hour.

Each les­son will take about 15-30 min­utes (de­pen­ding on your skills of course). There are six blocks and there are nine les­sons in each block. So in to­tal there are more than fif­ty les­sons. In each block you will learn new chords and new songs to play.

This book fea­tures count­less songs from ar­tists such as Ed Shee­ran, The Beat­les, Ali­cia Keys, Queen and The Black Eyed Peas. The songs are from dif­fer­ent styles and pe­ri­ods. These songs have all been hits, so you’re prob­a­bly fa­mil­i­ar with most of them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tijs Krammer
• Release date: Mar 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9789083323190

Tijs Krammer

A singer, conductor and arranger, Tijs Krammer is best known for his singing association with the internationally famed vocal group Montezuma's Revenge. Having studied singing at the Utrecht Conservatory in The Netherlands, Tijs pursued his musical education with Jos van Veldhoven at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, studying choral conducting, supplemented by a private course of arranging with Bob Zimmerman in The Netherlands and with Phil Mattson and Michele Weir in the us.TijsFounder and conductor of the Utrecht group Leeuwenhart, Tijs won the first prize at the Dutch Choral Festival, a major two-yearly a cappella festival in The Netherlands, with this group. In 2008 Tijs is interim conductor with the prize-winning jazz choir Dekoor. Until recently he was conductor of the vocal group Vocalicious. Currently he conducts the youth vocal group The Jump and the vocal world music ensemble Pangaea. With the latter he won in 2013 the Balk Top Festival, in recent years the most important Dutch festival on vocal pop and jazz music.Tijs is professor at the Conservatories of Rotterdam and Amsterdam teaching Conductor Vocal Pop & Jazz and he is one of the professors at the conductors course The Ward Swingle Cursus. Having written arrangements for internationally renowned groups including Femmage, Intermezzo, The Gents, Frommermann and Montezuma's Revenge, he has regularly been teaching courses in arranging, most of these organized by Balk.Tijs' arrangements are partly privately published and partly published by Music Shop Europe, Molenaar, ChorusOnline, Ferrimontana, ZoecMusic and Humm A Cappella. For any questions concerning any of these arrangements or for any arrangement orders, please send an email to [e-mail].

Book preview

Tijs Krammer

Playing Piano Chords, Part II

ISBN 9789083368719

© Copyright Humm Publishing 2023

Images, layout and cover: Tijs Krammer

Translated from Dutch by Karen Barnacle

Inhoudsopgave

Block 5

Lesson 37   The pedal

Lesson 38   Six counts

Lesson 39   Three countsw

Lesson 40   Measures and time signatures

Lesson 41   A seventh in a major chord

Lesson 42   Are You Lonesome Tonight with C7

Lesson 43   Nothing Else Matters with B7

Lesson 44   Sevenths in The Winner Takes It All

Lesson 45   Unnoticed seventh

Block 6

Lesson 46   The pedal II

Lesson 47   The scales of F- en G major

Lesson 48   The exact place of the seventh

Lesson 49   A new addition: the maj7

Lesson 50   Cmaj7

Lesson 51   Gmaj7

Lesson 52   Unnoticed major seventh

Lesson 53   Seventh in the bass

Lesson 54   When which seventh?

Block 7

Lesson 55   Intervals

Lesson 56   Minor scales

Lesson 57   The scale of D minor

Lesson 58   Chords outside the scale

Lesson 59   Alternating bass and Latin bass

Lesson 60   A new addition: the ninth

Lesson 61   Am9

Lesson 62   Optional ninth

Lesson 63   Ninth in the bass

Block 8

Lesson 64   Scale degrees

Lesson 65   Scale degrees in F major

Lesson 66   Common scale degrees

Lesson 67   Slash chords

Lesson 68   C /E

Lesson 69   G /B

Lesson 70   F /C

Lesson 71   Am9 /G

Lesson 72   C /D

Overview

Chords

Scales

Songs

Glossary

App

Block 5

Lesson 37

The pedal

In this book so far, you have learned around fifteen songs and should be gaining a lot of experience in playing the piano. Now we will look at ways to make it smoother.

You might have already noticed that it is not easy to make fluent changes between chords. For this, you have to use the pedal.

Sustaining chords

A piano has two or three pedals. The most important of these is the one on the right. When you press it, all keys that are played will be sustained until you release the pedal. You can use this to make smooth changes between chords.

In this lesson, we look specifically at repeating a particular chord a couple of times. (And in a later lesson, we'll discuss connecting different chords.) If you repeat a chord, without using the pedal, there will be a short gap in the sound. This will sound more or less as follows:

→ 37, 1

If you press the pedal the sound will continue:

→ 37, 2

Schematic

Let's look at this once more with a couple of images. Repeating a chord without using the pedal may be depicted as follows:

Until now, there were only circles in the rhythmical images, indicating the starting of notes. In the image above however, there are lines, showing also the length of the notes. The lines get thinner at the bottom. With that we mean to indicate that the sounds gradually fade away.

If you press the pedal, a chord will keep on sounding, even if you release the keys. Thus, there will be no gap in between the chords. We might depict this in the following way:

Different chords

In the next block, we will continue thinking about the pedal and you will learn how to create smooth connections between different chords.

Lesson 38

Six counts

In block 1, we discussed that you don’t always count to four in music. In the song Fallin’ by Alicia Keys for example you count to six. Now you learn another song in which you count to six, namely Nothing Else Matters by Metallica. We will look in particular at different ways to play the rhythms in this song..

First, let’s look at the verse of the song. The chords are as follows:

key signature: E minor

Em                      D       C

So close no matter how far

Em                             D           C

Couldn’t be much more from the heart

Em                  D            C

Forever trusting who we are

      G               Em

And nothing else matters

Rhythms

In the verses – especially when the groove is still quiet – slow broken chords sound appropriate:

This