"I sure would like to learn how to play chord changes..."

[Art Hovey]

I played both bass and tuba when I was in college, but did not really start understanding chord changes until I spent a couple of summers with a plastic ukelele learning to bang out the chords to familiar tunes while floating in a rubber raft in Milford harbor.

[ken k]

I often have a similar response when a student tells me they want to major in music, either as a performer or as an educator. I tell them to start taking piano lessons. They usually look at me with a blank stare. But learning even a little about, and being able to get around, a keyboard makes theory much more visual. I use it with my elementary students when I teach the chromatic scale for example. The idea of enharmonics is crystal clear when you look at a keyboard.

It also helps with intervals and building chords.

I would never play piano in public (although I have "accompanied" students in recitals and concerts) but even my rudimentary keyboard skills help improve the rest of my musical abilities.

kk

[Art Hovey]

I wasn't smart enough to work on piano when I was a kid, but when a young musician tries to solo in a jazz band I can always tell if he/she did or did not spend some time learning some kind of chord-playing instrument.

[Donn]

Just an idea: the accordion (typically in most of the world) has that piano keyboard, and on the other side, the "bass" buttons.

In columns laid out by fifths, so if you want to change your chord accompaniment from C to Bb, it's just a matter of shifting down two columns. New students learn about the root, and the IV and V on either side; as needed, a little later they will learn the next three above them, III - VI - II minor chords (and perhaps marvel over the fact that III is sometimes minor and sometimes dominant 7.) As this facility takes root in your head, it gets so your left hand just starts playing the harmonic background for whatever comes to mind, and whether you like it or not because it's kind of hard to stifle that while playing melody with the right hand.

The rows are (typically) two rows of simple bass notes: the primary note that's the root of the chords, and its third. That allows for some simple bass lines, as simple for example as moving to that 3rd before you go to the IV above it. Then there are the chord buttons: major, minor, dominant 7 and diminished. (My accordion is configured in the French style, without the separate dominant 7 row; instead, the diminished is shifted one column down, where it also serves as a root-less dominant 7, leaving room for a 3rd bass row.)

I took up accordion fairly late in life, already familiar with guitar, bass, etc., so can't offer any testimonial as to what impression this would make as an introduction to chords, but it sure seems like a textbook approach. It isn't unusual to find old used accordions for a couple hundred bucks, or could be a lot less (however - they don't get better with age, and they aren't trivially easy to fix up.)

My accordion (again in the French manner) has buttons arranged in a regular array instead of a piano keyboard, and I can barely pick out a simple tune on piano - but when I want to reason about intervals, that's where I go, visualize notes on a piano keyboard.