Learn Piano Chords in 3 days! (Worksheet included) Play your favorite songs with shapes

1. Intro - Welcome!: Hi, My name is Jacob Lam. I'm a musician and a music teacher. Thank you so much for looking at my course on learning piano in just three days. I'm convinced that by the end of this week you'll be able to play your favorite songs on the keyboard. We're going to learn about moveable shapes that we can take anywhere we need to on the piano to play our songs. Join with me in the next lesson, and we'll learn piano together in three days. 2. Day 1: Half Steps and Whole Steps: Welcome to the first official lesson. Now, to play piano, we really need to understand something called half-steps and whole-steps. And these are actually very simple. Half-step on the piano is the smallest amount that you can move with white and black keys included. And so when we're moving half-steps, we're moving from key to key with nothing in-between. Whole step is just two half-steps put together. We're moving from a key to keys over and they'll have one key in between. We have half-steps and whole-steps. Now as an example, if I wanted to start at this key and move a half-step up, I would move right here, the black key above it. If I wanted to move a whole step up, I'd skip the black key and move up to the next white key. That's two half-steps to make a whole step. Now if I started here and I wanted to move a half-step, I'd actually move up to the next white key because there's no black key in-between these notes. And so that would be a half-step. And so a whole step from this note would actually be up to the black key above it. That's a whole step with one key in-between. Half-steps and whole-steps are crucial to what we're learning since we're going to build our movable shapes using them. Once you understand half-steps and whole-steps, I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Day 1: Names of the Notes: Now that we understand half-steps and whole-steps, it's time to learn the names of the notes on the piano. And we're going to start with the white keys. Now, notes on the piano reference the letters of the alphabet from a through G. And then it starts back over at a. As long as you can count to seven and you know your alphabet to G, You're ready for piano. We start piano with a C note. Now, C is right before the two black keys on our piano. Now as we move to the right of the keyboard, we go through the letters of the alphabet in order. If we move to the left on our keyboard, well then the alphabet starts moving backwards. Very simply, if we want to find the next note, we just think of the next letter in the alphabet. If this is a C, Then our next white key up would be the next letter in the alphabet, which is D. Next up then would be an E, then onto F, G, a, B. And finally you're back to another C. The best way to memorize the notes on the piano is to find a couple anchor notes and then count up or down from there. What I mean is C is at the beginning of two black keys. That's a good anchor note for us to remember. And then we can count up or down our alphabet from C. Likewise, f is at the beginning of three black keys. If we start just by memorizing those two and then counting up or down for their note that we need. That will be plenty and we'll get faster at counting and eventually not even need it. We can just look at the piano and know what note goes where. It's sort of like learning a second language. But for now, we'll have two anchor nodes and then count up or down the alphabet to find the node that we need will also get plenty of practice in this class doing that. And so by the end of this class, you may be a little more comfortable these notes. For now, I want you to try to find a, C, an E, a, G, and a B note. If you can identify those and feel comfortable with those, then we can move on to the next lesson. 4. Day 1: The Black Keys: This is our last setup lesson before we actually play our instruments. Now what we're going to talk about here is names of the notes on the black keys. And thankfully, we already know what those are. Sort of, they're actually just the letters of the alphabet as well. And they reference the node before them. The black key right above C is going to be a kind of see note, but these are called sharps. Most notes have a sharp above it. Before we move on to the next letter. Between C and D, we would have something called a C sharp. You can hear the difference between a C and a C sharp. Now, sharps are going to be used in most of the movable shapes that we've got. And so as we're counting half-steps and whole-steps to build the shapes we'll use in our songs. We want to be mindful that these black keys are sharp notes, and we'll call them sharp notes. So if we're ever looking for a G sharp, we can just remember it's the black key right above G. If we have the white keys down and understood, then we'll also understand the black keys that reference them. Then we know every single note on our piano. Just like that. We can move on to building the shapes we need and playing songs. 5. Day 2: What is a Chord?: Now it's time to build the actual shapes we'll be using in our songs. This is the fun part. Now these shapes are actually called chords. And a court is simply any three or more notes that we play on the piano at the same time. Sometimes I'll have a student press down just a whole bunch of random keys and ask, is this accord? Technically, yes, you can slam down on your piano and play a chord, although it might not be a very good sounding one. A court is any three or more notes at the same time. But for our purposes to quickly learn how to play songs, we want to learn a certain type of chord. Now, these chords we're going to count using half-steps and whole-steps. Now there are two types of chords we want to learn. The first one is called Major, and the second one is called minor. Major chords tend to have a much more happy sounds to them, like this. Minor chords have a much more somber, sad sound to them like this. The best songs out there use a blend of major and minor chords. Even happy songs are going to have minor chords in them. And even sad songs are going to have major chords in them. We want to learn both of these shapes and how to use them on the piano to play songs. 6. Day 2: Our Major Shape: We're going to start with a major kind of chord. That means we're going to learn how to play a happy chord from any note on the piano. Now, we do this again by counting half steps. For this example, I'll start with a C note. What I'm going to do is I'm going to count out four half-steps from C. And that's going to be the second of my three notes in this court. I have my C and then I'll count 123. For. That will be my second note in this major chord. Now we need one more note. We need three notes to build a chord. Instead of counting four half-steps. Now I'm going to count three half-steps from my second note. So I'm going to count 123 until I have all three notes in my court and then I just press them down at the same exact time. We've just put together a major chord on the piano. Now, the first note of a chord is always the name of the chord. And I'll repeat that. The first note of your chord is the name of your Court. This Court is a C chord because it starts with that C note. I can take that same exact shape, four half-steps and 3.5 steps, and move it to another note. And then I've actually changed what chord I'm playing. So instead of starting from a C note, maybe I want to start this shape from an F note. From an F. I can count out 1234 half-steps. And then again on top from that middle note, three half-steps, 123. Now once again, I've got the three notes I need for my court, but this time my starting note is F. And so I'm not playing a C chord, I'm playing an F chord. Let's try to start our code from one more place. But this time we're going to start from one of the black keys. And so I'll pick maybe my D sharp note. Now, the rule is exactly the same. We want to count four half-steps and then three half-steps. So I'll count here from D-sharp 1234. And then from that note, 123. Now that would be a D-sharp chord. 7. Day 2: Let's Play! Our First Chord Progression: Now that we understand how to build a major chord counting four and then three half-steps from any note. We can practice these major chords, these happy chords with something called a chord progression. This is just a set of chords in a row. There are what actually make the songs you love on the radio. Often times it's just three or four chords repeated multiple times, and then you sing over them. So a great way to practice right now is to take some major chords and just practice doing them in a row. For example, maybe we want to do a C chord to an F chord, to a G chord. And then we can come right back to a C chord. For my C chord, I'm going to start from a C note and then count 1234. And on top of that 123, I'll do the same thing with the F chord 1234. And then 123. And I've got my F. And then from G, I'll count 1234123. I've got my G chord. Now, I can go ahead and play the chord progression in front of me. The workbook for this class, you're going to have a few different chord progressions to practice in a row. And of course right now they'll all be major chords because that's the kind of chord that we know no matter what the court is or how crazy it looks. Just remember whatever note you've got in front of you. You build four half-steps and then three half-steps on top of it. And then that's the name of your chord. 8. Day 3: A Minor Shape: We've got major chords in our chord arsenal now. But like we mentioned before, the best songs use both major and minor sad chords. Now we need to learn our second movable shape, the minor chord. Now, this time we actually count in a very similar way from each note we need. But instead of counting four half-steps and three half-steps, we're going to flip those numbers and start by counting three half-steps and then four half-steps. You can think of it as a major chord, starts with a bigger shape and has a smaller one on top. And the minor chord starts with the smaller shape. And then it has a big one on top. Let's start in the same place with RC note. Now for a minor chord, we want to count 3.5 steps first, so 123. And we land on one of the black keys. Now on top of that, we're going to count out our four half-steps. So 123 for those three notes are going to give us our C minor chord. Now, just like we did with the major chord, we can also start this from one of the black keys. Maybe this time I'll pick the black key above F, which would be an F sharp. Now, I'm going to start with my F-sharp note. And then count 3.5 steps on top of that one too. And three. Now from that second note, I'm going to count four half-steps, 123. Then four. Now I've got a minor chord starting from an F sharp note. This chord would be called F sharp minor. Quick and important note. When you see a chord written out and it's just a letter, it's assumed that the chord is major. We don't need to specify when we're looking at a major chord. When a court is minor, then we put a small m and we specify. Sometimes you may see maybe a minus sign instead of an M, but most often you'll see an M. We don't need to specify with a major chord. And we do specify with a minor chord. When we combine major and minor chords together in this class, you'll better see what that looks like in a chord progression. 9. Day 3: Our Second Chord Progression: We've got our minor chord shapes now and it's time to practice those in another chord progression. This time through, we're going to look at a minor, G minor, E minor, and then C sharp minor. Now that's a lot. So let's take them one at a time. We'll start with a minor. And so we want to find our a note. Then count 3.5 steps and four half-steps. So I'll count 123. And then on top of that 1234, I've got my a minor. Next we're going to look at G minor. So same thing. I'll start from a G and count 123. And on top of that, 1234, and I've got my G minor. Then I'll look at my E minor. So I'll find my E note, count 1231234. I've got my E minor. Then finally our sharp minor, C-sharp Minor. I'll start from a C sharp note. Again, count 1231234. Now I'll play those chords in a row. You may notice that as we learn major and minor shapes, they change how many black or white keys they're using. That's because when we start from different places and count following our rule, we're going to land on different notes depending on where we start. The most important thing is that we keep in our head the rule of 43 for major and 34 for minor. Then we can take those shapes and move them all over the piano to play whatever chord we need. 10. Day 3: The Helpful Root Note: Now we want to blend our shapes. We want to use both major and minor chords together in a song. But before we do that, we want to talk about something called a root note. Now the root note in your court, I'll put a C chord up as an example, is the first note in your court. It's the root that the cord builds out of. The reason that's so important is that we can use root notes to expand the range, the sound of the chords that we're playing. We can do that by playing the root note lower on the piano with our other hand. Here's what I mean by that. Let's say I'm playing a C chord. That's great. It sounds good. But I can actually make it sound bigger and have more depth by taking the root node and adding it in lower on the piano. With my other hand, when I play a C chord, maybe with my right hand, I will play a C note with my left hand. So here's a C chord. And then here's a C chord with the root note. Now that sounds bigger and our root note moves with our chord. If I wanted to play a C chord to an F chord, my root note will follow along playing a C and an F, C chord with a C note. Then both hands move together to an F chord with an F note. In the next lesson, we're going to combine major and minor chords. When we do this, we're going to add in these root notes. Now the root note does not change. If a chord is major or minor, it will always stay the same. The root note for a C chord is a C. The root note for a C minor is also just see. 11. Day 3: Our Last Chord Progression!: Now we're going to practice blending major and minor chords in one progression and doing them with root notes. Now I know that sounds like a lot, but we'll take it step by step. Our chord progression is going to be C minor, G to E minor. We'll start with a C. Now. It doesn't specify minor, so we know it's a major chord. And we're going to start from a C note. We'll start on C. Then we'll count up 1234123. There is our C chord. Next is an a minor, will start on a, and this time we'll count three and then four because it's a minor chord from a will count 123 and then 1234. Then we have our a minor. Next is going to be a G. So we'll start from a G and count 43, there's G, and we'll count 1234. Then on top of that 123. Then we have our G chord. Finally, we're going to look at our E minor. So I'll start from E. And then count 123. And on top of that 1234, for my E minor chord, we'll start right here without the root notes. I'll just play C, a minor, G, and E minor. Fantastic. Now, we'll add in the root notes. Again with my C chord, I'm going to play a C note with my a minor. I'm going to play an a note with my g. I'll play a genome with my E minor. I'll play an E note. Now we can put it all together and get faster at it as we get more comfortable with it. This is actually a very common progression for a lot of pop songs. Practice these chords yourself or make your own chord progressions. Maybe you can challenge yourself by putting some sharp chords in there. And remember, our root note really depends on the starting note of our chord. If you play a C-Sharp chord, your root note will be a C Sharp instead of just a C. 12. Wrapping Up: What About Special Chords?: Now this is a very underwhelming lesson. There are some chords out there when you look them up that might have special symbols. You might see a number like a seven or a SAS to or assess for or maybe even a slash chord. Now, I have other courses that go over this special kind of chord. But for us right now we want to learn the basics of piano chords to quickly play the songs that we want. And so here's the neat thing about these chords. If you see them, you can always skip the extra portion of the court. What I mean by that is this C major seven can be played as irregular. See, this G sus4 could be played as a regular. G. Take the first portion of the cord and focus on that. 13. Wrapping Up: Finding Chord Charts Online: Now a little bit of a different format here, but practically, one of the most important parts of knowing how to play the songs you love is knowing where to find the chords for those songs. And thankfully, it is super simple. So as an example, I can look up, just let it be by The Beatles. And the only word I need to add into that Google search is cords. Now my personal favorite website here is ultimate guitar. I know full well that this is a piano course, but I like ultimate guitar, and I'll show you why. They have all of the chords for your song here and available. C, G, a minor, F, all very simple. But the nice thing is at the top here, you can select your instrument and we can go to piano. It will even show you what keys you need to hit for every chord, which as we get used to counting the half-steps for those chord shapes, can be very useful. Now, not only does it show chords at the top of the song, but in the song, if we hover over, it will show us the shape right there. The only thing websites like this don't show us is timing. How long to hold a cord, how many times to hit a chord. For things like timing, we just need to know in our heads how the song actually goes. And typically, not all of the time, but typically the people who write the code sheets will try to put the chord right above the word or the syllable. You play the chord width. So if we're playing, let it be, we would play C over find and g over times. Then we would either hold that core down or repeatedly press or pump that cord until the next word with a chord over it. And so knowing the song when we look at chord sheets like this is enormously helpful to kind of have an idea of how it goes since cord sheets don't tell us anything about timing. But it's a very simple way to find chords online. You can try it now with a song that you like. Look up the title of the song and look up with it. The word chords. 14. Wrapping Up: The Final Project!: Now for our final project, you've done the learning that's incredible. What we want to do now is see if we can find a chord progression that we can show off. If you came into this class with a certain song in your head, you really wanted to learn, find the chords for that song and recorded them. Or if you don't have a song in mind, maybe you could write your own. You can upload that as a video or audio, or even just share the chords, whatever you're most comfortable with. No matter how you share them, I'm very excited to see them. 15. Wrapping Up: Thank You - Email Me!: You did it, you made it. Nice job. Hopefully now you have a better understanding of these movable shapes called chords, and how you can use them to play your favorite songs. If you have any questions or comments, you can always comment or send me an email at Jacob Atlanta Lessons.com. I would honestly love to hear from you. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in another course.