Dear Mr. Chappell:

My piano teacher is trying to teach me more about looking at the music I am playing and trying to see chords instead of just seeing note, note, note. I am wondering if you can tell me something to help me with this.

— Generalizer

Dear Generalizer:

What you are describing is the ability to see groups of notes instead of individual notes. I suggest that you play lots of chords on the keyboard—twelve major chords (starting from each of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale), twelve minor, and so forth.

You should also find other ways of thinking groups of notes in one thought, such as playing a scale (example: C major) with four fingers of each hand (L.H. would be C, D, E, F and R.H. would be G, A, B, C) and putting all eight notes down simultaneously. This is perhaps not so nice to hear, but if you can do this with all of your major and minor scales, you will enhance your cognition of the scales and increase your ability to think "in the key of".

The next step for you would be to play the seven chords found in each scale. Example: in C major, you can play chord number 1 (based on the first note of the scale) as C-E-G, chord number 2 as D-F-A, chord number 3 as E-G-B, 4 as F-A-C, 5 as G-B-D, 6 as A-C-E, 7 as B-D-F. If you can also do this in the remaining eleven major keys, you’ll be way ahead.

Finally, look at a piece of music you are learning and try to identify the chords in the piece as chord number 1, 2, 3, etc. in that key.

This will get you grounded in seeing patterns in music and in perceiving how groups of notes relate to other groups of notes.

— J.C.