Piano-Akkorde Schritt für Schritt

This is a workbook that you can place on your grand piano, your upright piano, digital piano or keyboard in order to apply what you have just read straight away. It is aimed both at beginners and at experienced pianists who would like to leave their sheet music behind.

For a melody line that you have in your head or have just heard, you look for the matching chords, also referred to as harmonies, and then you can play any piece of music freely and without sheet music. Of course it is not as easy as I describe it here, somewhat ironically, because most of you have only learnt to play from sheet music.

Many pianists who have had classical piano lessons since childhood and have learnt to play from sheet music are often unable to sit down at the piano in company and play when they have no sheet music in front of them.

For this reason I (Bernard Janssen) decided to write this book together with Uwe Scheid. With this book we would like to help you step by step into the world of chords and harmony that you need for free piano playing without sheet music and from chord symbols.

In my many years of work as a pianist, piano teacher and piano tuner I have got into the habit of sitting down at the piano before or after the lesson and improvising, in other words playing freely without sheet music. And everyone who happens to hear it is enthusiastic and asks me how it is done. “How do you manage to play these pieces without sheet music? That sounds great. I would like to be able to do that too.”

The magic word is: “chords, chords, chords”.