I took piano lessons from the time I was 6 until about 13, but didn’t really get into music until I had a chance to play piano in the school combo my freshman year in high school. The piano player in the group was a senior and had just graduated, and there was no one else good enough to play in the 4-piece dance band.

I wasn’t good enough either, but I was the best of the bunch, so despite the fact that I didn’t know chords and didn’t know how to improvise at all, they took a chance on me and told me I could play if I would learn enough chords to get by in a few basic songs. The idea of getting to be the piano player in a group of older guys was exciting, and so I immediately tried to find out how to learn some simple chords. I sent for a $2. chord chart that was advertised in a magazine, and the day it arrived I learned 2 chords — Cmaj7 and Dm7. That was enough to play “Frankie and Johnny”, and I was hooked on chords!

From then on it was a lifetime pursuit to learn more and more chords and then learn how to apply them in songs. And in that quest I have accumulated many, many chord charts, and even published some of my own.

But up to now, there has not been a chord chart that “talks” — plays the chords so you can hear them and explains the logic of how they are formed. So I thought “Why not? Since MP3 files can now be embedded in PDF ebooks, I’ll make a chord chart that talks and walks the listener through all the basic chords — 96 of them, to be exact.”

To learn more about it, click here: The Talking Piano Chord Chart