How To Create and Play Chords on a Piano!

Playing piano involves more than learning a string of single notes – you’ll often be faced with playing piano chords. All a chord is, is just a collection of notes played at the same time. To understand chords you have to understand how chords are constructed and that there are several different types to play on piano. You have to know the basic notes on a piano keyboard.

A chord is made of several notes – a root and whatever other notes are played along with it. The root note is the lowest note of the chord that everything else is based on. Scales form the basis of chords, so you need to know a few piano scales. The most common chord, C major, is based on the C scale. Just as reference, major chords usually have the root, the third and the fifth intervals. Piano

Notes of the chord are denoted by scale invervals – on piano, this is the major scale. With C as our example, C will be the root note to play for the first chord. As you go up the scale, the intervals are called second, third, fourth, fifth, all the way to octave, which is when the cycle starts over. The actual notes for a C chord are C, E, G and the octave of C. This is also called an arpeggio because major scales contain the root, third, fifth and/or the octave, but the octave is optional.

Put your hands on the keys so they’re lined up with the proper notes. To find C, look just to the left of two black keys. E is to the right of two black keys, and G is two white keys to the right of E, and again, we don’t need to worry about the octave. Play all these notes at once to play a C chord.

This isn’t the only chord, though – there are a few others, mainly G, D, E and F. We’ve learned the location of G. To find B, the third interval of the G chord, look either two white keys right of G or one left of the next C. The fifth, D, is between two black keys.

The next chord is a D chord and you’ll use an accidental here – the black keys. The D scale has F sharp as a note. F sharp on the piano keyboard is the leftmost of a set of three black keys. The next note in this chord, A, you’ll find just to the left of B.

The next chord is an F chord, which doesn’t use any accidentals. You already know where A and C are. F is the left of three black keys.

Finally, you have the E chord. It has the accidental of G sharp, which is the middle of three black keys. The other two notes are B and E.

A C chord is played with C, E, and G. G chords, meanwhile, are G, B, and D. An E chord is E, G sharp, and B, and an F chord is F, A, and C.

These are a few of your basic piano chords to practice playing, and it’s also a good idea to learn how to shift between them by remembering the notes and where the notes are in relation to the keys.