How To Play Piano The Easiest & Fastest Way: Chords
How To Play Piano The Easiest & Fastest Way: Chords
Good morning. This is Duane.
 Today I’d like to talk about how to play piano the easiest way using chords. Now, anybody can learn to play piano. Most people learn to play it by learning to read music. So they practice their scales like this [Duane playing piano], and then they eventually learn to play [Duane playing piano] by reading music, and that’s great. If you can [Duane playing piano]. If you have time and the money to do that, then you certainly ought to do that. But there’s a much faster way to get to playing the piano so that you can enjoy it, and that’s through the use of piano chords. Once you know chords, then you can do marvelous things on the keyboard without having to read music. Now, I’m not putting down reading music. I read music, and all my students read music as well, or most of them I should say. If you just want to get started playing, then you ought to learn piano chords. I learned piano chords first, and then I went back and learned how to read music and went to college and got degrees and so on. So I kind of came through the back door. You can too if you want to.
I just want to cover how you can use piano chords to start playing immediately. Chords, of course, are made out of a series of three notes played at the same time. You can just learn a couple chords like the C chord. That’s very easy. Or the F chord and the G chord. Those are called the primary chords in the key of C. With those three chords, you can play a whole whole bunch of songs. You can play hundreds of songs, probably thousands.
For example, I could [Duane playing piano] just with those three notes, I could play Kumbaya My Lord [Duane playing piano]. Then go to the F chord [Duane playing piano]. You see that? Then if I match the chord with the left hand [Duane playing piano]. Then just by harmonizing my right hand to my left hand, I’m playing. Then by learning a few piano techniques of broken chords such as the Alberti bass. Watch this. [Duane playing piano]. That’s called the Alberti bass. If I speed that up a little bit [Duane playing piano]. Then if I learn how to break up chords in a bigger way such as arpeggios, open voice arpeggios. Listen to this. [Duane playing piano]Â Then if I learn how to chord and swing bass like this [Duane playing piano]. You get a bigger sound. Then if I learn how to change octaves and fill in my right hand [Duane playing piano] It’s just a progression on to more advanced stuff, but you start very simply by just learning how to play a melody like that and how to match the chords in the left hand. Then step-by-step you gradually learn all that other stuff, the styles, the chord progressions, and so on. It’s not that hard.
There’s lots of places online you can learn that, including at our site PlayPiano.com. We have a free newsletter that you can take that will teach you major chords, then minor chords, diminished chords, augmented chords, sixth chords, seventh chords, ninth chords, eleventh chords, thirteenth chords, and chord progressions. You can learn all that. I have a newsletter that goes out, and we have videos and audios on it so you can watch me do all that as I instruct you. I urge you to come on over to PlayPiano.com and sign up for our free newsletter and get started playing through chords. Thanks for being with me, and we’ll see you again soon. Bye-bye for now.