Keyboard chords

[Guest al3xandar]

hello. If I have keyboard infront of me I can play a melody just by pressing the keys one by one, but never managed to play melodies with whole chords included. How do I make the chords? Say... C, what notes it contains and how is that known? Or F, D...how do I form the chords. Is there any way to learn how to play the correct chord without knowing it?

 

Help from advanced musicians needed

 

Thanks

[Cybernetika]

first of all, I'd suggest you have a look at this site:

http://www.musictheory.net/ - they can explain it better than I

 

To play a simple major chord, go up 4 halftone steps from the base note and then again 3 steps. For example, C - - - E - - G ... if you want to play a minor chord, just lower the middle note by one halftone, that makes 3 steps and 4 steps: C - - Eb - - - G

hope that helped you already

[Guest al3xandar]

thanks!! it really helped me, just to start from somewhere...

[slyman604]

this is a really handy little tool for this type of thing

http://www.apassion4jazz.net/keys.html

[Guest al3xandar]

[fuzzikitten.]

hello. If I have keyboard infront of me I can play a melody just by pressing the keys one by one, but never managed to play melodies with whole chords included. How do I make the chords? Say... C, what notes it contains and how is that known? Or F, D...how do I form the chords. Is there any way to learn how to play the correct chord without knowing it?

 

Help from advanced musicians needed

 

Thanks

233549[/snapback]

 

Well, I'm not an advanced musician, but I've experienced a similar frustration as you seem to describe here.

 

Creating chords is the same as creating melodies, just a bit more advanced. When you pick notes to write a melody, you're probably choosing notes that sound good together, right? Now if you pick three notes that sound pretty decent and you have a little melody that you're playing on these notes, try playing the three notes at the same time. That's a chord. Any combination of notes played simultaneously is a chord (2, 3, etc).

 

I like to think about music as being like cooking, and the notes are ingredients. Some are sour and some are sweet, and some notes only sound sour when you play them with sweet notes. That last bit is an important one - the notes you choose will sound very different depending on the notes you pair them with.

 

There are no 'right' chords, though there are certainly more common ones. If you just can't seem to find combinations of notes that make decent chords, check out http://www.looknohands.com/chordhouse/piano/ .

 

But most of all - experiment!

 

peace,

 

-Alex