Piano chords for beginners

You can accompany a lot of songs with four chords and one hand. This page is the shortest route to that, and it deliberately skips most of what a theory course would cover first.

A major chord is a shape, not a memory test

Put your thumb on a note. Skip three semitones and put your middle finger down. Skip four more and put your little finger down. That is a major chord, anywhere on the keyboard.

Counting in semitones means counting every key, black and white. Four then three, from the bottom up.

• C
• F
• G
• D
• A
• E

Notice the shape stays identical while the pattern of black and white keys under it changes completely. That is the useful part. You are learning one shape, not twelve chords.

Minor is the same shape, middle finger down one

Three semitones then four, instead of four then three. In practice: play a major chord and move the middle note one key to the left.

• Am
• Dm
• Em

Why one semitone changes the mood so much gets its own page: major and minor.

The four chords

In the key of C, these four will get you through an unreasonable number of songs: C, G, Am, F.

• C
• G
• Am
• F

Play them in that order, four beats each, and you will recognise the sound immediately. Play them as C, G, Am, F and you have another few hundred songs. The pattern matters more than the key, which is what the Roman numeral system on the chords page is for.

Stop your hand jumping

Played in root position, moving from C to F to G means hauling your hand around. It sounds lumpy and it is unnecessary.

Every chord can be rearranged without changing what it is. Compare:

• C
• F, root
• F, rearranged
• G, rearranged

With the second versions your hand stays in roughly one place, and the common notes between chords stay put instead of leaping. This is called voice leading, and it is the difference between sounding like a beginner and sounding like someone who plays.

If you learn one thing off this page, learn this one. It is worth more than another dozen chord names.

Adding the left hand

Simplest version that works: play the root of the chord, one note, low down, with your left little finger, while the right hand holds the chord.

That is it. Octaves and broken patterns come later, and both sound worse than a single well-timed bass note if the timing is not solid yet.

What to practise

Four chords, four beats each, round and round, with a metronome, slowly enough that you never stop. Speed is not the goal and stopping is the enemy.

When that is comfortable, take a melody you know from the song catalogue and try to find which of the four fits under each bar. Getting that wrong and hearing that it is wrong teaches more than reading about it.

You can play all of the above on the browser keyboard, though a real one with weighted keys will teach your hands more.