Amazing Grace On The Piano – For Beginners & For More Advanced Players

Good morning. This is Duane and today I’d like to take a look at Amazing Grace on the piano.  We’re going to be able to play Amazing Grace with just three chords. If you are a beginner, or a semi beginner, you can get by with just three chords or with many, many chords, okay, and I’ll just illustrate that. Say we play it in the key of F, then we base our playing on the scale of F, which just has one flat, B flat, right? The one chord in the key of F would be F of course, that’s the F chord. The four chord would be B flat and the five chord would be C and we know from our previous studies that the three primary chords in any key are always one, four and five. They’re the homeboy chords. They’re the ones that belong in that key and they’re used far and away the most, okay? So, the in the key of F, the F key is obviously used more than any others. The second used chord is either the four chord or the five chord. They’re both used a lot, okay? Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t use other chords. You can use many other chords, but those are the most likely to occur in any given song. Let me just play through Amazing Grace with just with the three chords. That’s the F chord,  F. F, C, F.

…By the way, that’s a Plagal Cadence. It’s simply a four chord pointing to a one chord and you voice a kind of like that, you just play, one, four, one. It’s a nice ending to a song. It’s kind of like the end of a hymn, okay, and is used in lots of other contexts such at “still crazy after all these years” by Paul Simon, so it’s used other places as well.

I played through the Amazing Grace with just those three chords, but I can use many others, couldn’t I? How do I do that? I ask myself, what other chord this melody note. Now the melody is F. What else will fit in beside F? Well, the D minor chord has F in it, so I can do that. I can use a G 7th chord because that has the notes of a G 7th chord in it. It’s kind of a play a little cadence there. B minor again, G 7th, B flat, F, B flat, F, okay? Now, I can take it a lot faster. I can use a lot more chords than that so, let me just illustrate. Let’s take it that far. I used E minor 11th, and then I slid down to E flat 7th and then D minor, and then B flat and then I could play A minor, D minor, G 7th. That’s G minor 7th and that’s going to C or G 7th. Now, instead of going to F, I could go to C minor 7. That’s C. I mean, that’s the B flat chord, but it’s not a major 7th. A minor, D minor, G 7th, that’s B flat. Major 7th over C and then the final note is F, so I could go home to F, but I could also go to D flat, because D flat is a…The D flat chord has F in it. D flat, F. You see, there’s, excuse me, I apologize for my voice again. There’s almost an infinite variety of chords you can choose, other than the three chords, but you want to start out with the three primary chords and then grow from there. Well, my voice is running out, so I’ll see you tomorrow with another piano tip, so bye-bye for now.

***For lots more good stuff on piano playing come on over to my website at https://www.playpiano.com and sign up for our free piano tips – “Exciting Piano Chords & Sizzling Chord Progressions!”

Here’s a great little book on chords and chord progressions on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Piano-Chords-Chord-Progressions-Exciting-ebook/dp/B0076OUGDE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404158669&sr=1-1&keywords=piano+chords+duane+shinn

You’ll learn piano chords galore and how to apply them when you play piano – major chords, minor chords, augmented chords, diminished chords, 6th chords, 7th chords, 9th chords, 11th chords, 13th chords, suspensions, alterations and more. Chords are the “missing link” in most piano lessons and you can learn them all easily. Learn piano playing and music theory at the same time – it will make your progress faster and you will understand music like you never have before.

Here is the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBa0_9w_W4o&feature=youtu.be

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