Reddit mentions of The Jazz Piano Book

Here is a good summary of four note rootless voicings and Here is a more complete chart.

I start all of my students off with these. The voicings generally take about 1-3 months to get in your fingers (mostly muscle memory). Around 6 months you'll be able to plug them into lead sheets without too much thought, but you probably won't be able to do it in real time. Around 12 months you really won't have to think about them any more. They are a great place to start with voicings because they give you a great sound in a compact one-hand format. Remember that the bass player is covering the root of the chord, so you are more concerned about 3,5,7,9,11,13.

The most two most important things in jazz are keeping your place in the form and playing in time. You can have the hippest voicing but if it's not in the pocket, it's going to sound awful. Likewise, you can have the coolest, most innovative improvisation, but if you're lost in the form, it's not going to flow over the changes.

Play with a metronome, ALWAYS. Explore play-along tracks, Jamey Aebersold books being the most well-known. There are also great online resources for play-along tracks. Check out here for a great place to start. These are also fun.

Get started on ear training yesterday. It'll help a lot. I like this trainer as it has a lot of things tailored towards jazz musicians. It has some simple play-along tracks too.

If you need something basic just to get by for now (while learning the voicings I linked above) then really start to learn the thirds and sevenths of chords. These are called guide tones and they are all you really need to define a chord. Try playing an A3 and an E4 in your right hand over an F2 in your left hand. There's a nice voicing for the Fmaj7 you listed above. It sounds a whole lot cooler than FAC and will get you started thinking about splitting your voicings up to use more of the keyboard. You want to get to the point where you see a chord on the page and you instantly know what the third and the seventh of the chord is. Make sure you get the correct third and seventh:

• Major7th Chord: Major Third, Major Seventh | C E G B
  
• Minor7th Chord: Minor Third, Minor Seventh | C Eb G Bb
  
• Dominant7th Chord: Major Third, Minor Seventh | C E G Bb
  
  Learn those combinations and see if you can get through a lead sheet naming thirds and sevenths as you go.
  
  There's really a whole lot more I could write about the topic, but this might be enough to get you started.
  
  If you have specific songs that you need help with, don't hesitate to ask. I would be happy to work out some simple arrangements/voicings/solos with you.
  
  Good luck!
  
  
  
  

I'd recommend The Jazz Piano Book or The Jazz Theory Book, both by Mark Levine. There's a ton of great stuff in both, and they'll teach you how jazz musicians conceive of how they play—not to mention give you a foundation to play pretty much any popular style that strikes your fancy.

My primer would be one I suggest to a lot of people trying to get a grip on chords. It's essentially the same concept as learning different chord positions on guitar. It's important to be able to play a major/minor/dominant or whatever on guitar with roots in different places, but you have to practice those shapes.

To get started with that, try playing through your chords in the following patterns starting with a C major triad

C E G -> E G C -> G C E -> C E G -> ...

Basically play the chords in each inversion ascending up to the octave, then descend back to your starting point. Do this for all of your keys, probably going around the circle of fourths.

Now do the same for minor and diminished triads. You'll probably notice that a lot of these are basically the same. C, F and G major for example, which are also the same as Am and Em and so on. So it's not nearly as complicated as learning 3 inversions of 12 keys for a total of 36 shapes... much easier.

Then move on to 7th chords with the same idea. So if you were playing G7.

G B D F -> B D F G -> D F G B -> F G B D -> G B D F -> ...

Ascending the descending. Now apply the same for dom7, maj7, minor7, half and fully diminished 7ths. Like before, you'll notice a lot of things sharing shapes. In fact, there are only actually 3 different fully diminished triads period. Even though a Cdim7 and an Ebdim7 are technically different, they are just inversions of one another. Just a fun little thing.

Now try the above exercise leaving out the 5th for dom7/ maj7/min7 since it's not necessary.

Beyond that, try leaving out your 3rd. Sure, the third is important, but it'll get you comfortable with these voicings for larger chords. For example, if you're practicing your Em7 without the 3rd.... now put a C in the bass. You're now playing a CMaj9 without a 5th. Practicing your 7ths without 3rds prepares you for playing polychords without 5ths for 9th chords. Beyond that you'll find that you've covered most of the shapes for all but a few exceptions of very basic voicings for chords up to the 13th.

I'd try to do these in both hands so you're left hand is comfortable if you need to do 2-handed voicings.

I also play this exercise arpeggiated as well. All this together helps a lot with the technique, shape, and accuracy. I actually use them as a warm up sometimes. As crazy as it all sound, once you're smooth at it, you can do pretty much all of them in 10-15 minutes.

A good place to to get comfortable with changing between simple chords would be doing the cadence exercises from this book.

Beyond that, if you want to get in deeper, go for the Mark Levine book which does a good job of slowly building up voicing and movement ideas starting fairly simply and scaffolding up.

Also, you can always check your guitar voicings and apply them to the piano. The guitar is amazing at making well spaced voicings that sound great on the piano, though you may find doing so a bit of a technical hurdle if you're not already comfortable with the shapes of many chords.

Thanks very much for the examples. I'm starting to get an idea of what you're aiming at. I wasn't able to listen to the Epica song due to territory restrictions, but I'm just a bit confused because all of the others were guitar based and didn't have any piano in at all. Can you give me some examples involving the piano style you are interested in?

From these examples I would say that the type of ballad you like is a sub-category of pop/rock. The main difference between this and classical music is that classical music is generally fully notated and performers are expected to play exactly according to the score. Whereas pop/rock is often derived from jamming/improvisation in the studio, and the notated version (if one is even made) is more like a guideline. With jazz even more so - jazz is fully improvised, generally around a given melody or chord structure, and pretty much never notated.

I would suggest taking a look at The Jazz Piano Book by Mark Levine. Sorry I could only find the kindle edition although it definitely exists as a hard copy because I've got it at home. This takes you through the process of learning jazz piano from the most basic elements to full competence. If you can play jazz you will be able to play any pop/rock, because it will seem very simple by comparison.

If you would like to learn classical piano then reacquainting yourself with reading music is the top priority. And it would also be good if you could identify the type of classical piano you are most interested in. Perhaps you could take a youtube tour of the main keyboard composers in different musical periods.

In the Baroque era the three main keyboard composers were Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Frederick Handel and Domenico Scarlatti.

In the Classical era the three main keyboard composers were Franz Joseph Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

In the Romantic era the main keyboard composers were Chopin, Liszt, Schumann and Brahms - but this era bleeds into the next era of Modernism, so there are still composers such as Debussy, Ravel and Rachmaninov writing in a Romantic style well into the 20th century.

Let me know if you'd like some specific examples and I'll compile a list.