Announcing Our All-New Facebook Fanpage! Click here to visit

triads

Here’s a way to multiply your chordal vocabulary… OVERNIGHT!

by Jermaine Griggs · 4 comments

in Chords & Progressions

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ve seen several lessons on “inversions.”

For those of you who don’t know, an inversion is simply a different way to play a chord. And here’s a simple rule to remember…

The number of ways to “invert” a chord is equal to the number of notes in the chord!

Anyone else want to learn another easy way to classify chords?

by Jermaine Griggs · 18 comments

in Theory

Most people just classify chords by name and chord quality (major vs minor, augmented vs diminished). But today, I want to show you another world. Here’s how to think of chords by the number of notes they contain. This will be short and to the point.

How to play songs with just two chords and still sound good

by Jermaine Griggs · 11 comments

in Beginners

Today, I want to slow down and go the other direction.

2chordssmall.jpgI wanna talk to my straight beginners in this post! I want to give you guys some hope that if you know just two chords, you can actually sit around the piano or keyboard and have fun with your kids…

How to Harmonize Melodies to Create Full-Sounding Songs Part 2

by Jermaine Griggs · 0 comments

in Playing songs

(Part two of a two week series on harmonizing melodies. Click here for last week’s lesson).     Last week’s lesson generated many questions so before providing answers to the exercises I issued in the last newsletter, I’ll first take some time to address some key thoughts:     Question #1 from student:   Hi [...]

How to Harmonize Melodies to Create Full-Sounding Songs Part 1

by Jermaine Griggs · 4 comments

in Playing songs

(Part one of a two week series on harmonizing melodies)       Harmonizing melodies is different than laying chords beneath a melody.   You may have heard of fake books and chord charts where you are given chords to play under various melodies. Jazz standards are usually notated this way.   For example, the [...]