Play a B-minor chord after a D-major chord and the music will seem to flow better than if you follow a D-major chord with an E♭-minor chord. Some chord progressions do seem to just hit the ear better than others. Let’s take a deeper look at major and minor chords. We’ll put diminished and augmented chords to one side for now, as it’s unlikely that you’ll encounter them all that often in music for beginners - especially if you like to play pop, rock or other popular-music genres. A semitone is the interval that separates any two neighbouring keys (revisit the graphic above if you want to try counting out the semitones between various notes).Īnd because they’re are four different ways to combine neighbouring major and minor thirds, there are four different types - or qualities - of triad: major, minor, augmented and diminished. In this context, the interval can be labelled as a major third or a minor third, distances of four and three semitones respectively.

This is because they match the first, third and fifth scale degrees of the scale that begins on the root note of the triad.Įach note in a triad is separated from the one next to it by a gap - or an interval - of a third. The three notes in a triad are known as the root, the third and the fifth. Triads are far and away the most prevalent chords in music, and that largely comes down to three factors:

You might have noticed that the chords above all consist of three notes, and that’s what gives these chords their name: triads. These go into a bit more detail on the theory as well as the complex terminology it can involve. We’re simply going to concentrate on that wonderful, adaptable building block that plays a key role in so much of the music that you love: chords (specifically those of the piano variety).Ĭaution: if there’s any musical jargon that confuses you below, it might be worth dipping into piano notes for beginners, how to read piano sheet music, or the music theory cheat sheet. Everything else that we touched on in that other piece - theory, practice, memorisation and so on - still applies. For now, it’s best to consider piano chords - which are in effect simply groups of notes - to be a kind of subcategory of piano notes. We’ll come back to focus on the relationship between those two subject areas further down. A companion piece to the previous post on piano notes for beginners, the key difference being, as the title suggests, that here the focus is shifting from piano notes to piano chords.

Chord chart piano for jazz