
You’ll soon discover that the list is almost endless. All three songs are based on the same four piano chords. Of course, the main thing you should be looking out for when choosing a song to learn is that it’s fun for you to play, so don't pick a song you don't like just because it has a good mix of minor and major chords, say.As different as they may be, all the songs I just mentioned have a very important common feature: they all use the same chords! It may sound unbelievable at first, but it’s actually true. If you’re accompanying a vocalist, you’ll most likely gravitate towards the first approach, while if you’re performing solo, the second technique might be more appropriate. You’ll either be playing low octaves and perhaps fifths with your left hand, coupled with a mixture of chords and melody notes with the right, or you’ll be playing chords with the left hand and all melody notes on the right.
ALL AT ONCE PIANO CHORDS HOW TO
When it comes to deciding exactly how to play these tunes, arrangement styles will vary according to your level of playing experience, but there will be two main approaches to playing songs on the keyboard. With either method, you’ll be able to vary the playback speed or tempo, so start off slow to make it easier to play with accurate timing, then speed up as your confidence grows.

You can of course use a metronome to help yourself stay in time, but it’s far more fun to use a programmed drum beat from a DAW, drum machine or your keyboard’s auto accompaniment section to play along to. Timing is crucial when playing pop songs, as they’re almost always against a steady beat, so it makes sense to include a rhythmical element to your keyboard practice regime to develop a solid sense of timing. Practising arpeggios is a great way to develop overall dexterity as well as increasing familiarity with the notes in a chord and where they're located across different octaves of the keyboard. Inversions allow you to string chords together smoothly so your hands don’t have to leap all over the keyboard when playing a progression.Īrpeggios are where the notes of a chord are spread out and played individually, often in a run up and down the keyboard through multiple octaves. Root position indicates that the root note of the chord is played at the bottom of the stack (lowest in pitch or furthest left on the keyboard), first inversion places the third at the bottom and the root at the top, and second inversion places the fifth at the bottom and third at the top. Inversions are chords where the notes are played in a different order. Songs with a combination of major and minor chords - which to be fair is most of them - will not only teach you how to swap between major and minor shapes from a muscle-memory point of view, but will also serve to illustrate how using both types can affect the overall sound and mood of a chord progression. This way, you’ll be able to play whole songs with only a couple of chords under your belt. So to begin with, when finding songs to practise, it makes sense to seek out tunes that contain relatively few chords. Once you've mastered playing triads, you'll be able to attempt a basic version of pretty much any song there is.

Triads are the basic, three-note chords made up of a root note, a fifth and a minor or major third in the middle. How much cooler would it be if you were able to incorporate scales into the context of playing an actual song? So try looking for songs whose melodies are made up of runs up and down the major or minor scales to make practising them a bit less of a chore. Everyone knows that scales are an important part of the keyboard learning process, but practising them isn't the most exciting thing on earth.
