The musical world of melodies, keyboard rhythms, notation, and piano chords, for beginners, can seem quite daunting. Music will only overwhelm you if you dive straight into it without taking baby steps – like any new practice, you should start with the basics.
You’ll want to start out by learning the easiest chords, figuring out your melodies one bar at a time, and learning to read notation slowly. Learning to play piano should be done with care and pride.
What are piano chords?
A chord is a very basic and very important component of music. Chords have been even fundamental to musical composition for centuries and maybe even millennia.
A chord, simply put, is a set of notes that, when played together, harmonize to form a pleasant sound.
Chords can be derived from different scales in music, and often rest at set intervals even between the notes in different scales.
For example, a major chord can be derived from the major scale of whatever key you choose. No matter what scale you use, the basic chord of that scale will follow the same formula the first, third, and fifth notes in a scale.
To devise an A Major chord, you would look at the A Major scale, deduce the first, third, and fifth notes in that scale – which happen to be A, C, and E.
Playing those notes together would mean you’re playing an A Major chord.
For someone who doesn’t know much about music theory, this could seem like a lot of information, but it’s really quite simple. All you have to do is learn a scale, and then you can pick different chords from it!
This is one of the most apparent examples that explains why the piano is such a great instrument for teaching musical theory or visualizing different aspects of musical composition – unlike the strings on a guitar, which can be difficult to pinpoint by eye, the keys of a piano are not obscured when they’re being played.
In fact, the keys that are being used on a piano are actually easier to identify because a shadow is produced from neighboring keys. Trying to tell which string is being plucked on a guitar, with nothing but your eyes, from across the room, will be nearly impossible.
Because of this, it’s easy to show someone what chords to play. This can be very difficult on different instruments – a guitar player typically has to explain verbally which fingers cover which frets, because his or her fingers obscure what strings are actually being used.
What are the best piano chords for beginners?
There’s a lot of different chords out there! Some, even more experienced players haven’t heard of.
The best chords for beginners are typically simple ones – major chords and minor chords. These chords are only three notes each, and can be deduced easily from their respective scales.
The easiest chord a person could learn would probably be the C Major chord. This chord also helps to give a basic understanding of how to build other chords from other scales. Let’s take a look at it.
Building a C Major Chord.
Remember, we discussed that a major chord is made from the first, third, and fifth note in a scale.To figure those out, obviously, we’ll need to know the notes in the scale.
The C Major scale is the simplest of all musical modes – it contains all the major notes in an octave, with C as the root note. With that said, here’s the C Major scale
: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C
It starts at C, plays every note increasing in pitch up until the next octave, when we return to C. To pluck a major chord out of this pick the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes:
C E G
There you go – play those three notes together and you’re playing a C major chord.
Building a minor chord
Minor chords tend to sound much more sad and emotional, compared to major chords which are upbeat and happy. The two contrasting chords are formed pretty much identically, though – minor chords are formed using the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of a minor scale instead of a major scale.
The A minor scale is technically just as simple as the C major, and goes like this:
A B C D E F G A
The notes are the same as the C major scale, but the root note (A) is what determines that scale’s name. Having a different root changes the sound of the scale, as well, and results in the creation of different chords.
For example, to create an A Minor chord, we follow the same pattern that we did to create a C Major chord: first, third, fifth. This time, even though the scales are the same, we get:
A C E
That’s an A minor chord. An A Minor chord is the fundamental chordin an A Minor scale.
Conclusion
Chords are great for a number of different things in music, and today you’ve learned that the construction of chords isn’t actually very complicated.
Though chords can seem immensely more complex than the majors and minors, most of them all follow simple formulas. Once you understand your formulas and scales, you’ll be able to make any chord in the book – by yourself!
Finding a reliable, well-educated teacher is important, so make sure you find a well-established piano instructor!
