How to memorize chords for piano or guitar
Hey, it's Dave Dolphin at practicalworshipblog.
Com, and today I want to answer the question how do I memorize chords for piano or for guitar.
It's becoming a little bit more popular in churches to instead of having a music stand to playing from memory.
So, if that's something that your church is wanting to start to do or you just want to push yourself for your own benefit, then this video's for you.
Now, at the end of this video I'm not going to give you like five tips and you're going to be memorizing chords by the end of it, but if someone were to come to me and say I want to learn how to memorize chords for songs so I can play by memory, I would tell you that you need to spend time learning the Nashville Number System.
So, take this piano for example.
It's got 88 keys on it, and if you didn't know anything about music or piano and I said, hey, play a melody, this is pretty intimidating because there's 88 options.
But if you know a little bit about music you know that there's really only 12 options over and over and over.
You've got 12 notes and then they go up.
there is low ones and there's high ones.
If you know a little bit more about music you know that if you're in a certain key of the song you're most likely only going to have seven options.
And so, if you were to tell someone, okay, sit at this piano and play just the white keys (so we're in the key of C) and they did melody and went.
They could do something pretty easily.
So it's the same thing with chords to a song.
You know those chord sheets that show you every possible chord you can play— all the normal notes, the sharps the flats, the seven, the majors, the minors, the sun's, the diminished.
If you're playing along and any one of those options could be the next chord of the song, that's going to be really overwhelming just like if I were to sit at the piano and I think I have 88 options of keys to play for the next note.
So the Nashville Number System is a way of taking the chords of a song and numbering them based on the tonic or the root chord of the key.
So for example, if you're in the key of G, the G is 1, A is 2 B is 3, C is 4, D is 5, E is 6 and F# is 7, and when you start to think of songs in terms of numbers, it becomes really easy regardless of the key to recognize patterns really quickly.
So here's an example.
I'm going to play a really popular chord progression.
I'm going to play a G, I'm going to play a D, I'm going to play an Em, and I'm going to play a C.
So that can be "Blessed be the name of the Lord, Blessed be Your name.
" "Your grace is enough, Your grace is enough.
" "Lifted up, You defeated the grave.
Raised to life, our God is able.
" That's just a few.
Now what if I said, okay now I'm going to play a D, an A, a Bm and a G.
If you don't know anything about music, you go well okay he's playing some of the same chords.
Some of the chords he was playing he's not playing anymore.
He's got some new ones in there, and they're all in a different order.
But if I play it like this do you recognize that that's the same pattern, because that progression is 1 (in the key of D) 1-5-6m and 4.
So when I have to memorize a song, I'm not memorizing the chords.
I'm memorizing that pattern, that the chorus of that song is 1-5-6m-4, and then I play the appropriate chords for that key.
So, some of the patterns you'll recognize right away is that the 1, the 4 and the 5 are almost always going to be major chords.
The 2 and the 6 are going to be minor chords almost every single time.
The 3 will also be a minor chord, but something you'll notice a lot is the 1 over 3 (1/3), where if you take a 1 like in the key of G, but you move up in the bass to a 3 you might recognize that.
Now, the 7, you'll very rarely ever play a 7 chord.
chord.
I can't think.
I don't think I've ever played a 7 chord.
Maybe a 7 flat, and that's beyond the scope of this video, but one thing you might recognize is a 5 over 7 (5/7), so if I'm in the key of G, I'll play G and then I'll play a 5 chord up here and I will play a 7 here in the bass.
So this is how I would get started.
I would take the SongSelect charts that you're getting week to week, and I would write in the numbers of the chords above the actual chords that you're playing.
Now the goal here is not to play a chart that is just numbers, although there's benefits to that.
Remember, our goal is to memorize chords for guitar or for piano.
We don't want a chart at all, but if you can spend a couple of weeks or maybe a couple of months of writing in these patterns and staring at them, you'll begin to see a very small amount of patterns emerge over and over and over.
And so, if you can memorize what those patterns are—1-5-6m-4 or 6m-4-1-5 or 1-4-1-5—you can memorize these patterns and then memorize the 1, the 4, the 5 and the 6m for the keys that you play in a lot.
If you can memorize those two things and put it together, you can quickly play songs by memory.
So that's how I would encourage you on how to memorize chords for piano or guitar.
I would learn the Nashville Number System.
If you've got any questions about that, hit us up in the comments below, and we will have a discussion that way.
If this was helpful, here at the Practical Worship Blog YouTube channel we love to share videos just like this which are like tips and tricks and ideas for the everyday worship leader.
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That way we can get this information out to more and more people.
And for more great practical information about leading worship check out practicalworshipblog.
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