Playing Piano Without Sheet Music, Part II: Chords and First Steps

If you’re still with me, I’m happy you’ve followed thus far. This section will center around picking up and playing chords for the first time. Everyone starts somewhere, so please be patient with yourself in this journey.

Chord sheets contain the simplified notation for a song in a specific key. Usually the song is meant to (or can) be played as an ensemble of more than one musical instrument and is led by vocals. Because of its simplified nature, it’s meant to be much more accessible to begin playing.

To level set expectations, please note that playing the chords themselves will very often not include anything resembling the melody. If you’ve been playing off of sheet music your entire life, you’re probably used to playing the entire ensemble of a piece. But most chord sheets are meant to be instrumental accompaniment, which means that the notes you’ll be playing will mostly be harmony and rhythm. You can almost think of the chord sheet as what is played by the ‘left-hand’ on sheet music.

To begin, pick a familiar song (hopefully one you also like, and won’t mind playing over and over again) and look up the chords for it. One benefit of playing from chords is that guitar chords will work as well for you. Once you have picked one, familiarize yourself with how each chord is played and the key the song is in.

It seems a bit unnecessary to specify this step, but you should begin playing the song now, with the base chords that are prescribed. There is no substitute for practice and real life experience, and throughout your journey in music or in any endeavor I believe getting your hands dirty is the surest method for improvement (though not always the most efficient).

The reason I specified a familiar song is so you intuitively know what the tempo should be (as chord sheets usually do not have timings), what it should ideally sound like, and what it shouldn’t sound like. If you’re having a hard time keeping time, play a recording of someone singing or playing the song (ideally in the same key) and match your chords accordingly. One option to get a sense of how you sound is to play the recording through a singular earpiece, and on a separate device record yourself playing.

Play through the song a couple times or until you’re familiar with it, and listen to your own recordings if you made them. What do you think? It probably sounds pretty uninteresting, right? This is where you can start to experiment! Here are some common dissatisfactions and some suggestions you might want to consider when replaying the song and finding out ways to make it sound better!

If it sounds too empty, consider doing the following in between long chord breaks:

• Pulsing (replaying) the last chord on tempo
• Arpeggiate the chord by playing each note of the chord in succession. You can do this either up or down.

If it sounds too repetitive (there are many songs that repeat either the same chord in succession or the same progression of chords), try playing an inversion of the chord. This is one of my favorite tools for making my chords sound overall more interesting. You can invert a chord by playing the same notes, but in a different order. For example: you might have a song that plays the C major chord (C-E-G) a ton. Instead of playing the same chord each time, consider also playing (E-G-C) or (G-C-E). You might even find that after inverting a couple chords, you might be able to find something close to the melody inside these series of chords.

I have personally found that the highest note in a chord usually sounds the most distinct. Even if you’re insistent on playing the same highest chord each time, swapping out the bass notes gives the music a bit more variation.

Mix up if your chords rise or descend or neither: if you have a progression that is C (C-E-G), Em (E-G-B) and G (G-B-D), the natural inclination is to play this ascending up the octave in the base chords described. But by inverting the chords as described above you could also potentially barely move your hands at all. Supposing you have your fingers 1-3-5 (thumb, middle, pinky) on C-E-G to start: instead of repositioning all of them in the same (1-3-5) orientation onto E-G-B, you could instead just move your thumb from C down one note to B, now playing B-E-G. And then you could play the final G chord by moving just your middle finger on E down a note to D, playing B-D-G.

You’re still playing the same notes associated with each chord, but by rising, falling, or just staying you can make repetitive chord progressions sound more distinct!

Hopefully this is enough to get you started and experimenting on a piece! Above all else, find the mix ups that work and sound good to you and have fun while practising!