The “Instant Piano Chord Finder” – Locate Any Chord Instantly

Hi. I’d like to take you on a little tour of the Instant Piano Chord Finder. It’s very easy to understand. As you can see, I have it open on my desktop and a desktop is a good place to put it too, so you can always find it. Let me close that. After you download it, you’ll see a little icon like this and all you do is double click on that icon and you get the standard Microsoft message that says, “Do you trust this publisher?” You say Run and there it is. Very simple. Very innocuous and you’ll see it’s divided into three parts. There is the staff. There is the keyboard and then there are the buttons down here that you click on. For example, let’s say that we want the C chord. We would click on that C right there. It’s already clicked, so let me click on D. If I wanted the C chord, I’d click on C and the notes of the C chord appear in the treble clef and they appear on the keyboard and this shows where the root note of the key is. If you want to see what they look like on the bass clef, you just click this bass clef sign and there are the notes in the bass clef. C, E, G and there they are. You can tell this part of the keyboard is lit up, so it’s in the bass clef, but you toggle it back to the treble clef and you see that’s lit up. There are the notes in the treble clef and there are the notes of the C triad. If you want to see the notes of the C triad upside down, in other words, inverted, click on first inversion and you see now C has gone from the bottom note to the top note, but it’s still the C chord. If you want to know what the second inversion of the C chord is, you click on #2 and there is the C chord upside down the second time, called second inversion and there is the C in the middle. You want to take it back to root, collect that again.

That’s true for any chord. If you want to know what the F major chord is, just click on F. If you want to know what the D flat chord is, click on D flat. If you want to know what the B chord is, click on B. If you want to know what the A flat major chord is, click on A flat. Now, let’s say that we’re in the key of D and we want to know what the scale of D is. We come over here and we click on the scale and we have several scales to choose from. We can see the D major scale or the D minor harmonic, minor melodic and minor melodic down or the pentatonic and I encourage you to click through all of those, but I’ll just collect the major scale for now. I have selected it there and I’m going to click select. Now, we not only see the notes of the D chord, but we see all the notes of the D scale. That’s useful when you’re improvising to know what notes go with which chords. Okay? If I switch to G and I want to know the notes of the G scale, there they are. If I want to know what the notes of the G minor scale are, there is the G minor chord and there is the G minor scale. If I want to know what the notes of the A scale are, there is the A chord and there is the A scale.

Now, by the way, you can just put your mouse over any of those notes if you want to take off the gray for some reason or you can just hit clear and that makes it all go away. Okay? You can have the basic chords here and then the extended chords here. So far, we’ve just talked about major chords. Let’s come back to C and let’s say we want C seventh. There it is. C, E, G and B flat. C major seventh, C, E, G and B. Then again, we can turn these upside down if we want to. All of these can be inverted any way we would like. If we want to know what C minor is, there it is. There it is in second inversion. If we want to know what C minor seventh is, there it is, C minor sixth, C augmented, C diminished, C sus four, C seventh sus four, C sixth, C ninth, C eleventh, thirteenth and so on. You see, it’s very easy to understand. In five minutes, you’ll be as good at this as I am and there’s not much to be good about it. All you do is you point and click. That’s it for the Instant Chord Finder. It’s really … I would have given my left hand for this, no I wouldn’t have, because I play my chords with my left hand, but I would have given my left leg for this, back when I was in college, to have all this information. This is great music theory and it is all on a concise chart on your desktop. Of course, you can get it out of a book, but you cannot turn chords quickly upside down or determine what the scale is and the extensions and so on. It’s worth it’s weight in gold. There is a little tour of the Instant Chord Finder. Thanks for being with me. I’ll say goodbye for now. You can read all about the Instant Chord Finder at www.keyboardchords.com
*************************************************************************************************************************************************