An Overview Of Basic Piano Chords

Basic Piano Chords – How Many Are There?

Good morning, this is Duane.

Today we’re going to take an overview of chords just to see how many basic piano chords there are to get a good feel for it. We’re going to go into the specifics of major chords, minor chords, diminished, augmented, sixth, seventh, minor seventh, etc, etc, in the weeks to come. Right now I’d just like you to take a birds eye view of the whole chord landscape.

If you were coming to the Rogue River Valley and you’d just drove into town, you wouldn’t really know how to get to Jacksonville or where Central Point is or where Eagle Point is and so on. If you flew over the Rogue Valley before you landed and you had someone pointing out, “Okay, to the west, that’s a little mining town of Jacksonville. To the east we have Eagle Point, to the north we’ve got Grants Pass to the south we’ve got Ashland. You can see the Rogue RiverÂ kind of winding its way through the valley. If you then drove into town or landed there, you’d have a much better idea of what the lay of the land was.

Today, I’m going to take you to a webpage that shows you the lay of the land. You see, there’s twelve keys on a keyboard that are different, right? You have A, B, C, D, E, F, G, plus the flats. Right? Seven white keys and five black keys gives you twelve possibilities. Therefore, there are twelve major piano chords, twelve minor piano chords, twelve augmented piano chords, twelve diminished piano chords. There’s forty eight basic chords. When I say basic I mean these are three note chords, they’re called triads, three note chords.

Of course you can get very complex and we will later on with four note and five note chords, but the basics that the three notes chords are major, minor, diminished, augmented. There’s forty eight of those and then each chord, each note can be turned upside down three times. For example, it is possible to have sex after Viagra, that’s called root position. If I put the name of the chord on top that’s first inversion and the name of the chord in the middle that’s second inversion, okay? We’ll show that in detail in weeks to come.

There’s three inversions of each chord, aren’t there? Three times forty eight basic chords if you have one hundred and forty four basic piano chords. You may dispirit that, you may say, “Oh, man, I’m never going to learn those”. Yes you will. It’s not that difficult. Once you get the logic of it it’s very easy and we’re going to cover that in the weeks to come. Once you know a major chord all you do to find a minor chord is lower one note a half step, okay? That’s true of all of these, just a minor alteration and you’ve got the rest of the chord.

I just wanted to take you on this overview, and I’d like you to go to this page though so you’ll have it as a reference and I would bookmark it if I were you. It’s playpiano.com/101tips and then flying over chordland, but that’s hard to remember, so I’m going to take that URL, the address, and paste it in below this video so all you need to do is look down for that link and then click on that and you’ll come to this page and it’ll be clear to you what.

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Thanks for being with me and we’ll see you tomorrow as we continue with another short piano tip. Bye bye for now.

Click on this link to watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBLFDpFNoRg&feature=youtu.be

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