Transcription
So I've got my cup of coffee, and I'm ready for an intense 30-minute piano lesson, looking at piano chords from the very, very beginning in real time. Hey, what's up guys? Joseph Sakura here from Creative Piano Academy, and today, yes, we're looking at piano chords. I'm gonna take you from the very beginning, step by step, and by the end of this video, you're gonna be able to play all the basic chords in the key of C. The theory behind building chords, so you'll be able to play any chord you want. You're going to know what chord inversions are, and finally, we're going to look at a few basic chord progressions, so you can start playing and start having some fun.
Now, if that sounds good to you, as well as other videos like it, then smash that subscribe button, as well as that little bell thing you've got next to it, so you know when I upload new videos. So I hope you're ready. Let's get going.
Okay guys, I hope you've got your laptop, your tablet, your phone, whatever you're watching this on. You're sat by your piano, and you're ready to go over a real-time lesson with me. So this is a bit of a new thing I'm trying out. So hopefully, when I'm not just gonna give you a load of information and hope you go away and practice it, we're gonna try and tackle all this together. And this time, we're going to be looking at piano chords. Now, I want this video to be perfect for you if you're a beginner and you're excited to learn piano chords. So let's get straight on with it.
Now, there's a few real basics that we need to kind of cover off to make sure we're all on the same page and we can go through all this together. So I'm gonna very quickly run through a few things that you need to know. Now, let's take you want to be sat right in the middle of the piano, okay? And this should be, it should be really obvious. Right in the middle of the piano, you've got these two black keys here, and I want you to go to the left of it. This here, this, this note right here is called middle C. Now, if you're not familiar with all the names of the notes on the piano yet, then don't worry. You can still follow along with everything I'm doing, but I'm gonna put a video in the cards for you that goes over every single note on the piano, and you'll know it like the back of your hand. So check that out if you need to.
So really quickly, we've got a C, D, and E, and F, and a G. It's like we're running up the alphabet, back to the beginning of the alphabet, A, B, and then we're back to C, okay? So we're going to start building our chords on all of these, all of these notes right here. In your right hand, you've got fingers one, two, three, four, and five, okay? Your thumb is finger one. Same in the left hand, one, two, three, four, and five. When you're sat in front of the piano, you want to be relaxed. You want your shoulders, want to be nice and relaxed. You want to bring your arms down to the piano, and your wrists want to hang, okay? You want to be nice and relaxed here. They want to have a nice, excuse me, they want to have a nice arc about it here, and they want to just hang nice and loose. And when you play these chords that we're about to do, you want to just relax and let your wrists fall down onto those chords. It's like a combination of arm movement and wrist movement here, but the key is you want to make sure you relax at the shoulders and you can flow everything out of there, okay?
So now we've got the basics covered, let's see if we can build our very first chord. So get your right hand and place it into this C position here, which is what we've just done. So you want your first finger on the middle C, your second finger on the D here, your third finger on the E, fourth finger on the F, fifth finger on the G, okay? Now, let's just practice that. So bring your wrist up and place it down, okay? So take your hand away from the piano, lift your hand up, and just place it down onto those, onto those keys. Try and make sure each finger has got its unique note on it, okay? So let's try that again. Hand up, down into position. Now we're going to play our chord, okay? And I'm going to go over a little bit of theory afterwards, but let's get you playing now. And I want you to play this C, okay? I want you to miss the D and play the E. Miss the F and play the G, okay? So we've got the C, the E, and the G, okay? And this is a C major chord, okay? That's our very first chord, okay? Let's lift our hand up again, place it down, and see if you can play just those three notes, okay? That's our first exercise. So here, let's take a hand away, lift it up, place it down, okay? Remember, stay relaxed in that shoulder. Lift it up, place it down. And that's why I want to see if you can lift it up and straight away play that chord. This, okay?
Okay, now there's a few things that might be happening here when you play these notes here, this mapping happening. You might be playing that F, you might be playing the D, although it's this finger that's the problem, really. This is quite a weak finger, okay? And so what you want to do is when we play these notes, you want to try and make sure that our second finger and our fourth finger are nice and raised up out of the way. We don't want them to go down together like this. We want them nice and raised up. So that's something you can practice. When you lift your hand up, you play these chords, try and make sure that these two fingers are out of the way, okay?
So now you've got your very first chord. The next thing to do is start building more chords, so you've got more, more chords under your belt, and you can start playing them and mixing them up and sounding amazing. So I'm going to quickly go over a bit of the theory as to how we're going to do this, but bear in mind that this is a video on chords, okay? I just want my ambition is to just get this video so you can sit down and play some chords with me. I'm going to do another video like this, I'm covering, you know, the same kind of thing, but tackling scales instead of chords. And when you go through that video and you put them together, it'll start making a lot more sense. However, in the meantime, really simply, when we've got our notes here in the key of C, we need to convert these into numbers, okay? So C will be note one, D would be two, E would be three, F would be four, G would be five, and A would be six, okay? Now, notice I'm missing B out, which is seven. I'm only missing that out because it's a bit of a strange chord, it's a funny one, okay? You don't need to worry about that for now. It's called a diminished chord, and it's a really fascinating chord, actually, but, you know, and it's used to like change keys and stuff, but don't worry about that for now. Just note one to six. So we've got one, two, three, four, five, and then six here. So the task now is to build a chord on each one of these numbers.
Now, how do we build these chords? So let's go back to our first chord, C major, okay? Let's play this one. We've got a root note, which is the C, the third note above the root, which is the E. So if we count up, we've got root, second note above, third note above, and then we go fifth note here. So that's the fifth note above the root. So we've got root, second, third, fourth, fifth, okay? So we simply build our notes on the root note, the third note above the root, and the fifth note above the root, and that's it, okay? That's all you need to worry about. So this is called one, okay?
Now we need to build chord two. So let's move up our root note. Now is the D, okay? So what's the third note above the root here? So we've got a second above, third note above. So I'll play the third note here, and then we've got the fifth note above. So we've got one, first or root, second, third, fourth, fifth, boom, must play that one, okay? So hand up, that's the D minor chord, okay? So we've got our first chord, which is C major, built on the first note, and we've got our second chord, D minor, which is built on the second note here, okay? So I'm going to describe what a major chord or minor chord is in a second, but let's just practice going between C and D minor. So bring your hand up, okay? Let's play a C, and after four, I want you to move to D minor. So let's play the C, three, and C, two, three, four, D, D minor, two, three, four, C, two, three, four, D minor, two, three, four.
Okay, now there's a little trick. What do you know it's about this? If you notice I'm playing C major here, all I'm doing to play D minor is I'm just moving up, you know, everything just moves up one note like this, okay? And the same is true for the third chord, which is a minor chord. So we're gonna move everything up just one note, and we've got E minor, okay? But again, we can work this out because E is now our root note. We'll go up the third note above E and the fifth note above E, okay? One, two, three, four, five. Now, the difference between a major and a minor chord is something that I don't want to get too hung up on right now, but basically, a major chord here, your major chords, they sound quite bright, cheerful, happy. And minor chords, yeah, they can sound quite sad, melancholic. And that's the difference. One sounds kind of bright, happy, and the other sounds melancholic and sad. And we use this combination between major and minor chords to create interesting music.
Now, when I release my other video that I've got planned on approaching scales, I'm going to go deeper into the theory behind why this is the case. But briefly, it's the third note, okay? So it's always that third note which changes between major and minor. So if you notice on C major here, we've got a third note. And if you count up all these little, what we call semitones, we've got one, two, three, four semitones here, okay? And what gives it a minor sound is what we call a flattened third. From a major chord here, we're gonna just flatten the third, and we get that minor chord. So if we're building this D minor chord again, one, two, three semitones, not four semitones, three semitones, one, two, three, like this, okay? And that's how we know it's a minor chord from a theory point of view, but you can also tell because it's got a very distinctive sound as well. So it's good to train your ears to notice the difference between major and minor chords like that.
So let's carry on. We've got our third chord here, which is E minor. Our fourth chord is F major. So we're going to build on this fourth chord, fourth note here. So we've got the root, the third note above the root, and the fifth note above the root. This is F, okay? Now, the next chord, G, root, third, and fifth, G major. And the last chord, A minor, got the root, the third, and the fifth, okay? So these are our six chords.
Now, here's a little exercise for you. What I want you to do, start off with chord one, so into position, rest down, chord one, and try and play that C major chord. Now, after four, we're going to move up each chord, okay? Like this. I'm going to move up positions, up to chord six, and then back down again, like this, after the count of four each time. And we're going to try and play this together. So after a count of four, we'll play the C major chord, and then after each count of four, we'll move up a chord at a time. So one, two, three, four, C, two, three, four, D minor, two, three, four, E minor, two, three, four, F, two, three, four, G, two, three, four, A minor, two, three, back down again, G, two, three, four, F, two, three, four, E minor, two, three, four, D minor, two, three, four, E minor, two, three, four, rest.
Now, you might notice that on the major chords, I'm just saying the letter name, and on the minor chords, I'm actually saying minor. That's just to simplify things, you know. Typically, when you say major chords, you just say it's assumed that it's major. If you just say play a G chord, you have to specify it's a minor chord, and then we know it's a minor chord. It's just a way of keeping things fairly simple so we don't have to keep saying major and minor every single time.
So let's try this again, a little bit faster. Bring your right hand up into position, okay? And here we go. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, rest.
Now, if you want to make this harder for yourself, okay, I'm not going to go over this again, but in your own time, if you want to make this harder, then you can keep the chord held down for as long as possible. So like this. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, like that, okay? What might be happening is, just as you're getting familiar with it, you might be doing this. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, I'm looking and finding what note, like this, and then the coming on. And that's absolutely fine. As you're getting used to it, you know, it's all part of the learning process. Just stick with it, and then it will get more familiar, and you'll get much better at it.
So we're going to see if we can make things a little bit more interesting for you by bringing in the left hand, okay? And the left hand, we're just going to play the root note of each chord, and it'll be really good for coordination whilst keeping things fairly simple. But it's also going to give you a chord that really nice grounding sound, like it's gonna bring in that bass kind of like oomph behind your chords. So to start with, bring your left hand in an octave below the right. So it's this position here. You want your fifth finger here onto this C, okay? And all you're going to do is when you play the C chord in the right, you're going to play the C in the left as well. So when we play that together, get this, okay? So after four, let's see if we can play that. One, two, three, four.
Okay, now the next chord, chord two, D. Oh, no, it's what I'm doing here. I'm just gonna play the D with this finger, my fourth finger here, okay? So after four, one, two, three, four. Okay, and then we're going to work our way up. So let's do this really, really slowly, okay? And just see if you can follow along. You'll have a few chances to go over this, and you just, if you're struggling the first time, just rewind the video a bit and have a rewind. It was says rewind anymore. I don't know what to say. How would you say go back a bit and watch this bit again? So left hand, um, let's see after four, wait to play. I want you to try and play all these chords with your left hand and your right hand, okay? So watch carefully what I'm doing and then joining. Here we go. One, two, three, four, C, two, three, four, D minor, two, three, four, E minor, two, three, four, F, two, three, four, G, two, three, four, A minor, and all you need to do is just jump this thumb up to the A for now, okay? But down again, one, two, three, A minor, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, E minor, two, three, four, and then back to C, two, three, four. You'll be playing better than me soon. More, yeah.
Okay, let's try this once more. So now you've got that, let's try this one more. C major, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, back down, down to the G, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, rest.
Okay, so by now, you've got six chords. We've got C, D minor, E minor, F, G, and E minor, which we can also call chords one, two, three, four, five, and six. So we can play all those chords in the right hand, and we've also brought the left hand in to give those chords some, some nice grounding, okay? So hopefully that's making quite a bit of sense to you, and you're able to go up and down those chords.
Now, all of the chords we've played have been in what we call the root position. So that means we're just building the chord on the root note, like this, okay? The root note. Now, there's something else I want to go over for you really briefly, and I'm only going to go over the very basics of it. I've got chord inversions, and these can add some really nice dimension to the chords, and it can kind of, kind of just add a subtle sense of melody if you, if you know what you're doing with it, and it can be fascinating to play. So chord inversions. So if we take our C major chord again, we've got notes one, three, and five for the root, the third, and the fifth. And for chord inversions, all we're going to do is take these notes, reorder them, and start our chord on a different number, on a different, on a different note. So we've got root position, which is here, C. And instead of building it on the root, just to see, we're going to build it on the E. So we're going to take these notes and we're going to reorder them. We're going to start on the E, which is a third, then we're going to play the fifth, which is the G, and then back to the root at the top, which is C. So notice how this, yeah, it uses exactly the same notes, but we're playing them in a different order, okay? Like this. Now, that work, that's what we call the first inversion, okay? So just to confuse matters, we've got root position, we've got first inversion, built on the third note, and then we can build on the fifth note as well. So let's try it. Let's bring our thumb up to the G, third finger on the C, little finger on the E. This here is the second inversion C chord. So we've got root position, first inversion, second inversion, okay? And notice again, on the second inversion, it's the same notes, we've got a C, and E, and a G, it's just played in a different order, okay?
So what I want to do now is give you an exercise you can do for this, and I'm not going to go over every single inversion, otherwise we'll be here all day. Now, you should have the tools to be able to kind of go over these in your own time and work out what all these inversions are. So I'm going to show you them in the key of C, which we've just done, okay? Those are our inversion chords. And F, okay? Root position, first inversion F, which is built on the, again, the third, the fifth, and the root, and second inversion, which is built on the, sorry, the fifth, the root, and the third, okay? So it's five, one, three. So we've got root, first inversion, second inversion.
Now, so those are the basics of inversions, and what I want to do now is go over a bunch of exercises so you can walk away from this video actually having done something really productive. And like I said before, I'll take the theory of inversions, and you can apply it to every single chord we've done and see if we can get familiar with those as well. It's a lot of work, but it's well worth doing. So we'll go back to inversions in a bit. And I seem to be doing this with my hands all the time. I don't know why. I seem to be in a, this kind of mood at the moment. You'll have to bear with me.
Let's play some really fun, good-sounding chord progressions. So the first chord progression I want to play is a very common one. It sounds amazing, and you can hear it in virtually, you know, 80% of pop songs. It's a really common progression. You'll have heard it before, and it's called the one, five, six, four sequence. And now you should understand what those numbers mean and what they represent, because chord one, okay, C major, chord five, G major, chord six, A minor, and then chord four, F major, okay? We've got one, like this, okay? So if we play this together, nice and slowly, remember we've got our count of four, so after four, you're coming in, and then I count to four again, you're gonna change chords. So after four, I'm on that C major chord. So one, two, three, four, on the C major chord. Right, also, I am playing with my left hand. If that's too hard for you right now, don't worry about it. Just forget about the left hand, put it down, and just do it in your right hand. That's absolutely fine. It'll still sound good. You, we can still play along together, but I will put my left hand in. So chord one, after four, move to chord five, one, two, three, four, chord five, okay? So hopefully you've got that. After four, up to chord six, one, two, three, four, six, and then after four, back to chord four, one, two, three, four, okay?
So let's try this again, and I'll keep that count going so we can try and get it a little bit smoother. One, two, C major, first, one, two, three, four, two, three, four, G, two, three, four, two, three, four, F, two, three, four, and rest. That's a sale. Let's try that a little bit faster again. If you're struggling, kind of like, where's my fifth chord? I got this one, this one. Don't worry about it. The good thing about this count when we're playing together is you can play the C chord, and then you've got all that time to try and find the chord. Two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Yeah, just if you're just starting out and you're finding this difficult, then, you know, this is all part of the learning process. Just, just keep going.
So let's try this again, a little bit faster. Chord one, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.
Okay, so again, that's something you can practice in your own time as well. Another great chord sequence to do would be four, one, six, five. So notice we're using those same four chords, we're just reordering them, and that's something you can do in your own time as well. Just take those four chords, put them in any order, and usually it'll sound really good anyway. But let's play this one together. Four, one, six, five, okay? So after four, one, after we've got F major chord, so chord one is F major. So let's find F major after four. One, two, three, four, okay? Now, after four, we're gonna move to chord one, which you see here. One, two, three, four, A minor, one, two, three, four, and after four, G major, which is chord five, one, two, three, four, okay?
So let's try and keep it continuous. Back to C, F major, F to start with, one, two, three, four, C, two, three, four, A minor, two, three, four, G, one, two, three, four, okay? Once more, a little bit faster. After start with, one, two, three, four, C, two, three, four, A minor, two, three, four, G, one, two, three, four.
Okay, and when you get better at this, you can start putting them into loops as well. So if C, A minor, G, and then instead of stopping, just go straight back into that count once again, like this.
Now I've got one last chord progression to do with you. It's the same chord progression from Canon in D. Sounds absolutely amazing, and Canon in D is this one here. [Music] Now, this is obviously in the key of D, so we're gonna switch keys to C because that's what we're familiar with for now. And so we've got chords one, okay? So they're not chord five, six, three. When I'm done three yet in a chord progression, so that's chord three, four, one, four, five, like this, okay? So let's see if I can play this together. Let's find chord one, which is C major, okay? After four, you're gonna move to G, which is chord five, one, two, three, four, G, chord six, which is A minor, which is this one, after four, one, two, three, four, after four, A minor, okay, which is down here, okay? E minor, which is chord three, one, two, three, four, E minor, and then chord four, G's F, two, three, four, and then back to chord one, two, three, four, one, and then back to four, two, three, four, and up to G, just got five, two, three, four, two, three, four, and rest.
Okay, so that would it before. Let's see if we can put that all together and see if it can move between the variations. So chord one to start with, one, two, three, four, C, two, chord five, four, one, two, chord six, one, two, three, chord three, one, two, three, chord four, one, two, three, chord one, one, two, three, chord four, one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, and stop. Oh, that's quite impressive actually. I'm impressed with my counting.
So those are some really nice chord progressions you can play around with. And now onto chord inversions. I've got a really nice exercise for you here, and it's going to take a little bit of getting used to. So if you can't do this for now, just do the other stuff, and then keep coming back to this video, keep coming back to this section. And so I showed you the chord inversions of the first chord, which is C, here. These are chord inversions. So we've got a root position, first inversion, second inversion. And F, okay? So we've got the root position, first, the first inversion. Hopefully that's given you a few really nice, fun, kind of chord progressions to play around with.
Now, I want to just go back to chord inversions, and if this is also, if this is all a bit much for you, then, you know, don't worry about it. Just play along as best you can. And the more you play through this video and have a go at it, the more this stuff will start to sort of seep into you, and you'll be able to start playing this kind of stuff. But I want to go back to inversions and show you a quick exercise that I think sounds really, really nice whilst it trains chord inversions as well. And this is what it sounds like. We've got C, it's going to move between the inversions of C and F, okay, which are the two that I showed you. So it sounds like this.
Okay, so let's break this right down so you can see exactly what's going on here. Let's have chord one, two, onto C, and this is the root position. Then we're going to move to the first inversion, and then we're going to move to the second inversion, okay? So let's see if we can practice that after four, wait to come in on the C, the root position, and then after another four, onto the first inversion, and then after another four, onto the, onto the second inversion. So root position, first, you ready? One, two, three, four, C, two, three, four, first inversion, two, three, four, second inversion. Let's try that again. Root position, two, okay? Three, four, root position, two, three, four, two, three, four, second inversion, two, three, four.
After this, we're going to move to the F first inversion, which is an A, a C, and an F, like this, built on this, the red note. And then we're going to go to the F root position, and then down to the F second inversion. So you can see how I'm just simply moving up what's natural with these, these chord inversions here, okay? So from the top, play this one first. Or get into the first inversion F chord position, three, and F, two, three, four, two, root position, okay? And then we're going to move down to the second inversion, three, four, second inversion, okay?
So when we put that together, so let's see if we can play this together, really nice and slowly. C root position, our first chord, after four, and you come, one, two, three, four, C position, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, second inversion, two, three, up to F, first inversion, one, two, three, root position, one, two, three, second inversion, two, three, and back to the root position, C, okay? And that's our loop. So let's say we can play that a little bit faster, okay? One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, two, three, four.
Okay, so your task now is to take that, speed it up, get familiar with it, and you'll find that when you play inversions like this, they'll just start coming out with your playing, and you'll be like, "Wow, that sounded really good. That sounded a bit different." It just adds that spice, it adds that spark to just playing normal triads, and it can be a lot of fun. So I hope that's just that little bit of extra something for you.
So that's kind of it, guys. I really hope you've managed to kind of follow along. And if you've dropped out here and there, then don't worry about it. You know, this video is here forever. You can just keep watching it, keep playing through it. We've covered all the basic chords in the key of C. You should be able to understand how we can build those chords as well. Remember, we've got the root, we've got the third note above, and we've got the fifth note above. We brought the left hand in as well to ground the chord so you can start playing with both your left and your right hand. We looked at some really nice chord progressions that you can use to kind of get used to switching between those chords and try and get familiar with them. And finally, you've got this chord inversion exercise, which is a little bit more advanced, but hopefully over time, you'll get really good at it.
So that's it, guys. Back to me. Okay, guys, so thank you so much for watching. I really hope you managed to kind of keep up with this video. It is 30 minutes, it is intense, and there's a lot packed into it. So if you wanna manage to get through half of it, then make sure you get familiar with the half, and then come back to the video. Let me know how you got on in the comments below, because your comments are so important to me. I can make sure that I'm on the right track with these videos. Am I going too fast? Am I going too slow? And I can tailor them for you. Remember, guys, like the video if you liked it, subscribe to the channel, and I will see you, I will see you in the next video.