Playing Piano Without Sheet Music, Part I: Introduction

If you were like me, playing piano practically necessitated the existence of sheet music. Anything outside the familiar bass and treble clefs would feel like being up river without a paddle, or canoe for that matter. The only sheetless and purposeful key strokes I made were either to practice a scale or an arpeggio, though usually in the key of whatever song I was currently learning.

It wasn’t until well after my formal piano training, that I ever laid eyes on (and was asked to play off of) a chord sheet. Unlike the sheet music you or I were used to playing off of, there were no measures or bars, and any guidance for correct notes were written out (e.g. A, F#, or Bm). Despite looking foreign, a different worry swept over me. For the song that I was playing chords for, what was written didn’t seem too hard or complicated, rather it seemed too empty.

Before I go into how I would recommend taking your first step into chords, I do want to go into why I believe this is an important step in growing beyond your original music education and training. And the first thing I would like to make clear, is that I believe your traditional music education will complement and aid your journey beyond it. While you might at some point feel like your previous education has made you too rigid, I would encourage you to instead take the view that it serves as a solid baseline of musical intuition.

I want you to ask yourself, “Have you ever played a wrong note while learning a piece, and you truly believed that it sounded fine, just as good, or even better than what was written on the sheet music?” Then congratulations! You have very loosely improvised! Learning to play off of a chord sheet is a great way to practice improvising. As I mentioned earlier, the chord sheets that I have seen looked empty to me, and if you play only the prescribed chords at the prescribed times your music will indeed sound so. But once you get more comfortable, you’ll find that those empty measures between the chords are all opportunities for you to improvise. In fact, even the chords themselves are opportunities to improvise. The chord sheet may simply say C, but whether you play it as a standard 1-3-5 (C-E-G), as an octave chord, as an inverted rolled chord, or even just as a singular C note is completely up to you.

The ambiguity of what is written invites experimentation. And once you’ve experimented enough, you’ll soon learn to play the music your own way. I believe this is one way you can truly make the music you play yours. Depending on how you play the chords, the same song can feel so different if you play it in the style of ragtime or gospel. This is also why some errant “wrong” notes might have felt “right” while you were playing piano in the past, you simply found another harmonious arrangement of the notes.

While this all might feel overwhelmingly vague, or vaguely overwhelming, please consider that music is art and an art. There are some contexts where precision is the thing to strive for, but there are also many in which the primary goal is simply to play something that sounds nice. Being precise doesn’t take away from your ability to improvise, and I have personally found myself revisiting old sheet music for inspiration on how to weave in patterns during my chords. So I hope that you’ll take heart, and that these loose guides will help inspire you to take up piano, perhaps in a different way, but in a way that I believe will round you out as not just a pianist but also as a musician.