If you really want to achieve true freedom from chord charts and music books you need to learn to "feel" your chords. I believe that learning music is made up of a series of small revelations and this revelation for me was probably the most important.

Pretty much any piece of music we hear in movies, videos, or on the radio can be simplified into a basic chord chart. Sure, the melody sits on top, but without the chord beneath it the music would have no direction. This goes for classical music and jazz just as much as pop music. The "verse" of Für Elise, for instance, is just Am to E - tonic to dominant. Imagine being able to hear any piece of music and know instantly what was going on and be able to translate it to your piano!

The way that I did this was mainly by accident. I really wanted to know the chords to a lot of songs that I liked but when I was a teen there was simply no way to know what those chords were unless you asked someone who knew or found the sheet music. I used to borrow the maximum six music books per week from the city library in order to learn every song I could. The books were compilations of songs by artists like The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, jazz standards, songs from the musicals etc. I started to realise after a time that the chords from one song matched other songs that I had played already or they may have had similar chord progressions or basslines or melodies.

Before long I had built up a "box of tricks" of chord knowledge and basic theory that I could apply to any knew song that I heard. I had also started to write my own songs which is a great way to learn how chords operate. When you really need a chord progression to match a melody that have just made up it can speed up your learning like nothing else.

So, don't rely so heavily on printing out chord sheet after chord sheet from the internet. Put them aside and try to figure out what each chord in a key does. The basic diatonic chords come from the major scale. In the key of C major they are C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, and Bdim. C or 1 is the tonic chord - the music starts and ends here or if it doesn't - it wants to. G or 5 is the dominant chord. This has the strongest pull back to the tonic (add a 7th to make it stronger). F is the subdominant and is like jumping on to a ledge above. It feels comfortable and a natural progression until it becomes unstable and wants to go home. After this the minors come into play.

Each minor is like a substitute for one of the majors. Am for C, Dm for F and Em for G. This is because they share two notes in each case. The minors give a beautiful dark or melancholy feel and take the music in a different direction. These minors themselves pull towards other chords. The Dm or 2 pulls towards the dominant, G, which pulls back to the tonic - hence the classic 2, 5, 1. The Am pulls to the Em or the G or back to the C.

There is no substitute for simply experimenting. Play chords in any sequence and see which ones work together and which don't. Sometimes the ones that don't work are the best ones - listen to the music of David Bowie! So, go ahead. Don't be afraid. Don't let books imprison you forever. Venture into the vast golden palace that is music and wander its corridors. Your next revelation is only around the corner!