Mikes Music Room – Music Articles

When learning chords, most people will start with major and minor chords, then 7^th chords and of course minor 7^th chords. When you have learned to play all twelve minor 7^th chords, you can use the same chord positions to play twenty-four 11^th chords using the correct bass note or pedal.

11^th chords produce a big, full sound and are especially useful for key changes within a piece of music. Good examples of these big sounding key changes can be found in some early Barry Manilow music such as

There are many types of chords but in this article, we will deal with Major Triads and Minor Triads and how to construct them.

First, let us deal with the language used to identify Major chords and Minor chords. If you are familiar with sheet music and you see a C chord symbol above the staff. All you will see is

All keyboard players can use this method of learning chords if you are prepared to play your own bass notes to match the chord.

Keyboards with the

I have been teaching Keyboard and Organ for nearly thirty years, my youngest student was Four years old, and the oldest was Eighty years old.

So the simple answer to the above question would be No. Maybe the question should be, would I like to learn to play a musical instrument? It is fairly probable that you are not going to become a concert pianist if you start learning at the age of eighty but that does not matter. Learning music is about what you personally want to get out of it. You might for instance want to learn to play one piece of music or a book of music or just to see how far you can go. There are no limits. You can learn as much or as little as you personally want.

I have taught many older people that have said,

As an organist, I have been working in clubland in the North of England for the past 30 years or so and one of the crucial qualifications in this environment is the ability to sight read music on demand.

When I say music this can be anything from a beer matt to a ripped piece of paper repaired with selotape and stained with beer.

To be fair most of the music is written by professionals and is nice to read but not always easy.

As a club organist, you do not get a band call. In fact, you are lucky to get five minutes to scan through between 10 and 15 pieces of music. Some written in different keys, and every organist will tell you they hate it when they get the dreaded 6 sharps or 6 flats or even 7 sharp keys in a piece of music that just happens to contain a solo especially written for you.

So how do you improve your sight-reading? Well I asked my music teacher this very question as I embarked on my club land career. His answer was to practice sight-reading. He went on to tell me that session musicians practice by picking up any music book start playing on page one and continue until they have finished the book.

Does it work? Yes it does. Try it for yourself, pick up any piece of music you can find, preferably one that you are not that familiar with, then start to play, but do not stop. If you make a mistake it does not matter, you are not practising how to play this piece of music you are practising sight-reading this piece of music.

If you really want to test yourself. Get yourself an audience. I practice my sight-reading every week in front of a 200 plus audience. Its surprising how your concentration improves.

Author
Mike Shaw
Keyboard Sheet Music

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