Piano Chord Chart

Posted April 17, 2005, 12:40 p.m.

The beauty of learning guitar is chords. You memorize the important chords, and you can play almost any song passably. This makes the instrument accessible to anybody who wants to play without making them go through any formal training (not that there’s anything wrong with formal training).

Piano is not so accessible. Generally, to play the piano passably, you have to invest in expensive lessons and learn all that ‘music theory’ stuff and learn to read music and so on. That’s all well and good, but I (for one) don’t have the time, money, or patience to go through all that.

That’s why I made this piano chord chart. With this chart, you can begin playing piano in an informal ‘shorthand’ chord style just like you can with guitar. Memorize how to play the chords, and you can play almost any song on the piano by using its guitar chords. The only thing you have to do with the piano that you don’t with guitar is to pick your octave(s). Use your best judgment for that.

My two-page chart includes common chords from the guitar world for each note: maj, m, 7, m7, dim, and sus. Print it out and put the two pages side-by-side to begin translating your chordal guitar skills to the piano today!

Piano Chord Chart (PDF).

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.

Quotes

The ballot box produces conformity without unanimity; the marketplace, unanimity without conformity.

Every man has a right to be heard; but no man has the right to strangle democracy with a single set of vocal cords.

Tyranny is . . . not good for the tyrant—because he or she becomes a tyrant, and there is nothing ennobling about that.

The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers.

The next best thing to being clever is being able to quote someone who is.

I wish for nothing more than a good government and a constitution under which our liberties will be perfectly safe.

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.

Sex is for babies as well as for love. That’s a ‘Duh!’ to every culture but our own.

Left entirely to men, the church ought to have perished at many points in her long history.

The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

Modernists have undermined faith far more effectively than atheists. The wolves in sheep’s clothing have carried away many more sheep than the honest wolves.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.

For God has not called us for uncleanness, but in holiness. Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you.

He who feared that he would not succeed sat still.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil, in its worst state an intolerable one. . . .

Western man got rid of God in order to make himself God, and then he became bored with his own divinity.

Governments . . . depend upon acquiescent public opinion for the success of their efforts and, in fact, government is government only by virtue of public acquiescence.

But he who lives a hundred years, vicious and unrestrained, a life of one day is better if a man is virtuous and reflecting.

But if we do revive and pursue the pagan ideal of a simple and rational self-completion we shall end where Paganism ended. I do not mean that we shall end in destruction. I mean that we shall end in Christianity.