One of my students is working on playing worship songs from lead sheets this year and periodically runs across chords that she hasn’t learned. Yesterday the A Maj 9 chord stumped her. I don’t exactly play Major 9 chords everyday, either, so I decided to look it up on-line just to be sure that I was telling her the correct notes! And boy did I find a treasure…
PianoChordDictionary.com is so cool! I love that you can see just about any chord in any inversion, then play it on the digital keyboard pictured at the top of the website to hear what it sounds like. Another super helpful feature is the listing of common names for each chord so that you can avoid confusing yourself (or a student!) when various chord charts refer to the chords by different names. For example, in another chord encyclopedia that I have, the only chord close to A Maj 9 that was listed was an A Maj 7 (add 9), so I wasn’t sure if that was a different chord or the same one we were trying to confirm.
The only thing I can think of that would make this site even more amazing would be if you could play the notes onto the keyboard and then it would search its database and bring up whichever chord you were playing. Anyone know of a site that does this? Regardless, I know that this site will probably be getting weekly visits from me now. 🙂
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