Advanced Piano Chord Building Technique – Rockmaster Style

Learn how to build chords by stacking major and minor thirds

Advanced Piano Chord Building Technique

For those of you visiting this site who already know how to play, here’s a cool chord building technique that you will
want to try. We generally build chords using degrees of the scale, stacking major and minor thirds. That works quite
well except that you soon run out of fingers.

Here we will build chords starting with basic triads that we already know. By adding the 7th or 6th and raising or
lowering the notes of the triad (R, 3rd, 5th) we can form all of the commonly used 4-note chords. The following
table gives you an example using the C major and C minor triads.

Of course The Rockmaster System Book 1 shows you how to use 3-note substitutions for many of these 4-note
chords so that you will be able to play songs that use these chords even before you learn 4-note chord.