Roy
If I may put a slightly different thought on chords, I believe that the reason people have so much difficulty in playing chords is because they think in terms of the individual notes in the chord, not patterns. When you think in individual notes ie what specific notes make up a chord, the problem becomes that you are trying to memorize an awful lot of information.
Basically, your really only need to know three basic chord shapes, major, minor and diminished. They are the same in every key. The altered and extended chords all have the clues in the name. A maj 7th chord adds the 7th note of the scale to the maj chord, a 6th the 6th note of the scale and so on. The augmented chord adds a sharpened fifth, the b5 adds a flattened 5th ..
When you think in patterns I think the the whole chord world becomes relatively instinctive. And when you are playing instinctive is what you need. When you think in terms of individual notes, you end up either trying to memorize too much, …….or always consulting chord tables.
If you go down the route of chord tables, you will be stuck in that groove for ever. When you learn to think in patterns, the light bulb will eventually click in, and it will all suddenly seem straightforward.
The real requirement is to intimately know the scales, which is why nearly all traditional lessons and practice emphasize scales, which may seem boring, but are the building blocks of everything in music.
Play scales every time you sit down to play. And if you find it boring, just do a few. Let’s face it, most people learning arrangers don’t play in every key. So just do the ones you commonly use, C F G, maybe Bb. Just do two octaves with each hand, major and minor. Takes less than a minute, but has huge benefits for every aspect of playing - dexterity, fingering, instinctive feel of where those extra chord notes are….
Mike
