How To Play Chopsticks On The Piano – 3 Different Ways

Good morning. This is Duane. The most popular song in the world is probably not the Moonlight Sonata or Fur Elise or whatever you’re thinking. The most popular song in the world probably is Chopsticks and I like to cover today How To Play Chopsticks On The Piano – 3 Different Ways. One for beginners, secondly for intermediates and thirdly for more advanced people. Let’s get to the beginners. If you’re absolutely new to the piano, you would play two notes side by side, G and F. They’re right in the middle of the keyboard, right, kind of south to those three black keys. You’d play that six times I think. One, two, three, four, five, six, and then you’d play, you’d move your bottom finger down to the third like that, four, five, six.

Play that six times and then you’d go up to B and D, and play that six times. One, two, three, four, five, six, and then you’d play that octave C. See what I did? An octave C and then came back together. Four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five. Now, the middle part if you want to play that, starts on E with a third under. One, two, three, so you play it like this. Notice I used two fingers on those two and two different fingers on there. Those two and then two different fingers and then two different fingers, two different fingers. See?

You just come down, right down to the scale and then you go back to the first part which is one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four. If you’re an intermediate, what you can do is play that on the right hand and on the left hand you can chord because there’s only two different chords in this piece. There’s a C chord and a G chord. It doesn’t matter how you play it. I’m probably going to play it upside down. I’m playing the C chord maybe like that and the G chord like that. I would hit a low C and a low G and my damper pedal will be pressed. I’m either going to play a low C with two chords after two C chords, or a low G and two G chords after. Watch.

Now G, C, G, C. Do it again, G, C, G, C. If you’re a beginner, just do that with one hand. If you’re an intermediate, you can chord using just two different chords. C chord, you swing back and forth between the low C and the C chord. The C chord can be in any inversion. You can play it like that, C, E, G or you can play it E, G, C, or you can play it G, C, E. It doesn’t matter. I usually play the inverted but this time just for the sake of beginners, I kept it on the right position. Then the G chord, you play a low G. Push down your damper pedal then you play the G chord. You can play it on any inversion. I played it like this because it’s a little closer to that, to the C chord. If I move up there, it’s a little further. Either way is all right.

If you’re more advanced, what you can do is use chord substitutions and my purpose is not to teach you the chord substitutions but I’ll just show you the principles. [Inaudible 00:05:07]. So there, I played that poorly because I haven’t thought of that in advance, but anyway, you get the idea. There’s at least three different ways. There’s actually an infinite number of ways you can play it, but one, you can play it very simple and any beginner can do that. If you’re a little more advanced, then chord; and if you’re more advanced than that, then you can use different chord substitution.

In other words, for G7, for the G chord, I sometimes use E-flat, E-flat-7. Why? Because G, the chord, the melody note is in that E-flat 7th chord and sometimes I even use G-flat. Sometimes I use E minor 7. You have all kinds of things. You can play it to the wall : and on and on. There’re just a couple ideas of what you can do with a simple song like Chopsticks. If you can do it to Chopsticks, if you can learn to do that to Chopsticks, you can learn to do it to most any popular song. Not classical songs but any kind of popular or folk song. It’s just a matter of learning it step by step.

Thanks for taking the time to be with me today and we’ll see you again tomorrow. By the way, if you’re not already signed up for my free tips on piano chords and chord progressions, be sure and do that. Come on over to Playpiano.com and sign up for that. It’s absolutely free and there’s pictures of chords there, so you can learn all your chords. There’re videos that I teach on each lesson and so on, and a lot of audio instructions as well. Thank you and we’ll see you again. Bye-bye for now.

Here is the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieo9a5QVg5k
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