Types of Piano Chord Dictionary

There are many physical formats for piano chord dictionaries, but only two types of information they can convey. Whether printed on paper or on a computer screen, this type of volume addresses both what the chord looks like in sheet music, and what it looks like on a piano keyboard. But why do we need these books at all?

The need for piano chord dictionaries stems from the fact that all musical structure, no matter how complex, can be expressed in a chord, a chord being a group of at least three notes (and thus, piano keys) stacked upon one another.

Put simply, he who controls chords controls music. It's as simple as that. If you understand the "biology" of chords (how they fit together) you understand the very DNA of music.

Playing chords is another matter, but the abstract entities of chords are the very atoms of all music and composers are nothing but fancy mechanics, manipulating sounds that exist in the form of chords.

At a certain point in their studies, pianists realize that all they are doing is playing chords in a million different forms. They further realize that, since composers express themselves in a matrix of chords, all the pianist has to do is make a "list" of all the various occurrences. A piano chord dictionary is nothing more than that list, although a lot of its content depends on how much detail (or permutations) one wants to record.

To illustrate the daunting task, theoretically one must find the permutations of the number twelve, which is twelve times itself twelve times.

12x12x12x12x12x12x12x12x12x12x12x12 is almost 9 trillion permutations of twelve original notes.

But in practice we don't use all of these. To illustrate, there are 4 basic types of triad (three note chord.) Multiply 4 times 12 because there are 12 notes. Now you have 48 chords. But a piano has seven octaves, or groups of 12 notes, so multiply 48 times 12. Now you have 576 chords.

Three note chords have three possible positions, so multiply 576 times 3. Now you have 1728 chords.

But wait, we forgot about chords made of more than 3 notes. There are 4 note chords, all the way to 8 note chords and above.

The number of possible positions on the piano becomes staggering at this point, and we begin to see the need for either a piano chord dictionary or an encyclopedic knowledge bordering on photographic memory.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that most popular songs use no more than 4 or 5 chords, always in simple forms that repeat themselves. Some songs use only 2 chords, the most famous of which is the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

But that's the only good news, for the whole picture is dismal for beginners if you don't read music extremely fluently.

One way around this obstacle is to number the piano keys so that rather than referencing sheet music, you are referencing the piano keyboard directly.

Piano chords are extremely easy to memorize on the keyboard itself once you have been shown where they are by some means.

Almost all popular musicians memorize chords visually, because it is the easiest way to keep track of the huge number of chord forms.