African American Christian Wedding Songs : Understanding

Friday, September 28, 2012

Understanding the C6 Chord

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If you're playing pop music on the piano you have doubtless run across the C6 chord. There is a simple rationale that will help you to easily form chords like this, and the same rationale applies to all chords of this type, such as G6 or F6, and many more.

Assuming you know how to play a C chord, the C6 is a simple addition, a suffix, as it were.

The notes of the C chord are, from the bottom, C, E and G. The G is on the top.

To form the C6 chord, add a fourth note, A, on the top, right next to the G.

Now you have four notes: from the bottom, C, E, G, and A.

There's another way to calculate the C6 chord, or any sixth chord, for that matter.

From the top note (whatever it is, in the case of C6, it is G) play the next note, which is black, skip it, and go to the next note, which is A.

In other words, play a C chord (C, E, and G) and then skip the next note above the G, whether white or black, and add the note above that.

The reason for this rationale is that not all sixth chords will have a WHITE fourth note. Some will have a black key as the fourth note.

The sixth chord is useful in many styles, but predominantly in standard songs of the Big Band era, although you will see examples in all eras.

Gershwin, Rodgers and Berlin were all crazy for the sixth chord, and generally one can substitute a sixth chord for almost any major triad (three note chord.)

The probable reason for the addition of the sixth chord goes all the way back to Bach, who used them in many pieces in very subtle ways. But the real reason that the sixth chord became used more and more as history progressed was that it added thickness.

Think about it for a moment: a four note chord is thirty three percent thicker than a three note chord. As time went on, composers accepted this thicker sound and began to use it everywhere. The golden age of its usage was the Big Band era.

As the 1950's came in, the sixth chord became dated and reminded listeners of the previous era, and was thus shunned until the Beatles, who adopted it as a subtle sign of nostalgia.

Here's a link to a page where you can hear and play the sound of a C6 chord on a virtual piano: http://www.pianoiseasy2.com/dictionaryC6.html

John Aschenbrenner is the author of the Piano by Number series which you can see at http://www.pianoiseasy2.com/. It's a great way to get kids started happily at the piano.

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Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Understanding Piano Chords

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Piano chords are easy to understand: take one piano note (key) and then stack others on top of it. Imagine you have a stack of three books, each book representing a note of the chord. Stack them on top of each other, and you have a chord. The trick is the subtle mathematical distance relationship between the book/notes in the chord.

Chords (three piano keys played at the same time, in its simplest form) are the building blocks of all of music, the very DNA that governs the sounds to which we listen.

Here's a way to visualize a chord. Below is a C chord, consisting of the piano keys C, E and G.

G
E
C

C is on the bottom, and G is on the top. That's all it is, a stack of three things: books, notes, anything. Here it just happens to be notes, or piano keys.

Once you understand that simple three-note form, it is easy to get an idea of the inner workings of chords.

Think of the Periodic Table of the Elements. In one sense, it represents chemical entities that cannot be reduced further without destroying their essential nature.

It is the same with chords.

The "elements" are the major chords, and all other forms of chords are created by ADDING TO or CHANGING the three basic notes of the chord.

There are four main types or families of chords.

The MAJOR chord sounds happy. That is the first form of chord.

Starting with a major chord, move the middle note down and it sounds sad, as a MINOR chord. That is the second form.

Starting with a major chord, move the top note up and it sounds unstable, haunting and spooky, as in an AUGMENTED chord. This is the third form.

Starting with a major chord, move the top two notes down, and it sounds downright scary and dangerous, as in a DIMINISHED chord. This is the fourth form.

All we have done is change the relationships between the notes: move a note up, down, or move several notes.

Imagine that you can add fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh notes to the original three notes, and you will get some idea of the complexity of chord construction. But the sounds are easily understood emotionally by even a child: chords produce feelings.

This is a little difficult to visualize, especially if you are not fluent at reading music.

There is a way to understand chords without reading music, and it involves numbering the piano keys so even a child can see the construction easily.

Chords are easy to understand by listening: each chord gives you a feeling.

But chords are quite complex unless you number the piano keys to see inside their peculiar "biology" of sound.

Here's a link to a virtual online piano on which you can try all the types of piano chords without a knowledge of reading music, using Piano By Number: http://www.pianoiseasy2.com/dictionaryC.html