What’s up my piano friends! Today we’re going to go over my ultimate step-by-step simple version of chords on piano for beginners.
In this blog post I’m going to simplify the process and give you a couple of easy step-by-step formulas for finding any major or minor piano chord. On top of that, I’m even going to give you some downloadable PDF cheat sheets so you can check your answers and find any chord almost instantly. Then, you’re going to learn an actual song using chords.
I looked up a lot of YouTube videos on how to learn chords and many of them talked about theory of chords but then they never showed you how to put these chords into a song you actually want to learn. So, we’re literally going to sit down and learn the song “All of Me” by John Legend by using chords, without reading sheet music and without playing by ear.
At the end of the blog post I have a little quiz for you just to make sure that you truly did learn everything I’m talking about today and that you are mastering all of the chords.
Alright, let’s get started!
What is a Piano Chord?
First off, what is a chord? It’s simple, a chord is just a collection of notes. I could play a few notes and name that collection the “Zach Chord” because a chord is just a group of notes we add a name to.
The two most common types of chords are major chords and minor chords. Major chords have a very happy sound to them while minor chords are the exact opposite, sounding very sad. One of the reasons major and minor chords are so popular is that by mixing them we can get happy, we can get sad, and we can get any human emotion in between. If you know your major and minor chords, you’ll be able to play 99% of popular songs out there.
How do we figure out these chords? I’m going to give you a couple very simple step-by-step formulas. Let’s do major chords first.
How to Find Major Chords (The Boom 4-3 Method)
The formula for finding major chords is what I call the “Boom 4-3” method. How it works is let’s say you want to find a C major chord. You start on C (Boom) then you count 4 notes to the right for your next note and 3 more notes to the right for your final note. So our C major chord will be C-E-G. Also, if you want to watch me finding the C major chord with the “Boom 4-3” method check out this video.
We can use this “Boom 4-3” method again to find the F major chord and we’ll find that it’s F-A-C. Let’s say we do a little trickier one – a B flat major chord. Even though it’s a little trickier, it’s the exact same formula, we just have some black notes now. The chord will be B-flat – D – F.
At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Zach, what’s up with the boom?” The reason is, when I first started teaching this, the biggest mistake beginners would make is they’d count the first note when they’re doing the 4-3 method and they’d end up playing the wrong notes. I know saying the “boom” is a little elementary school-ish, but trust me, it helps you remember it and whatever helps you remember it, that’s what we should be doing to learn things faster.
How to Find Minor Chords (The Boom 3-4 Method)
Minor chords are the opposite of major chords. It’s the yin and the yang. The happy and the sad. So, if major chords use the 4-3 rule, minor chords use the 3-4 rule. So, major chords are “Boom 4-3” and minor chords are “Boom 3-4.”
So, for minor chords, we would do the exact same thing as for major chords, but simply count 3 notes first, then 4 notes. A video example is here. Does this make sense to you now?
At this point, I’m going to give you the cheat sheets, because in reality, when we’re playing songs, we have to have these chords memorized otherwise it would take us forever to figure out every chord of the song.
Cheat Sheets for Memorizing Chords
The following cheat sheets are great for memorizing these chords and also allowing you to check your answers to make sure you’re learning these chords correctly and not drilling in bad habits along the way.
To access the cheat sheets click on this link where you’ll be directed to my free piano course that includes a bunch of cheat sheets. When you enter your name and email you’ll be directed to the main page of the course. Scroll all the way to the bottom where you’ll see a section called “extras” and this is where I put all the additional resources from my YouTube videos. You’ll click on the link that says “Piano Chords: The ULTIMATE Guide for Beginners (Easy Version) – PDF’s and Quiz.” All the resources from this blog post and this video will be in that section of the free course including cheat sheets for major and minor chords as well as a quiz on chords.
The major chords cheat sheet is a basic PDF file with a visual of all the major chords. I recommend printing it off and putting it by your mirror so you can look at it while you’re brushing your teeth or looking at it on the subway on your way to work. This cheat sheet shows you the chords with notes for that chord highlighted and also is organized by the order of notes. So, the first ones list the white-white-white note chords and then the white-black-white chords, followed by the black-white-black chords. You’ll be surprised at how beneficial knowing the pattern is when you’re memorizing these things.
The minor chords cheat sheet is just like the major chords cheat sheet, just showing you all of the minor chords.
Finally, you’ll see the close chords cheat sheet. This looks complicated, but don’t worry I’ll simplify it later. These are the chords you’ll use when you learn an actual song.
Chord Inversions
I could get very complicated on the different kinds of chord inversions, but that’s not necessary for learning how to play a song. An inversion just means you can play the notes of a chord in any order anywhere on the keyboard.
Let’s say we have a C major chord with notes C-E-G. We can play inversions of this chord and play a C-E-G anywhere on the piano and it’s still going to be the same chord. Any C-E-G, anywhere on the piano, in any order, is going to be the same chord. A good demonstration of this can be found in this video.
The reason inversions are so important is they make it a lot easier to play chord progressions, which are different chords in a row in a song. For example, let’s say our song starts off with a C major chord and then it moves to an F major chord. This will be really annoying having to move our hand all the way down from the C chord to the F major chord. This may not seem that challenging, but as a beginner, moving our hands all around the piano will be really challenging as we try to land on the right notes.
Instead, what we want to do is keep our hand in the same spot and play an F major chord inversion to play notes that are really close by. Let me explain what I mean by this.
Let’s say we have a C chord and we want to play an F chord. The F in the F chord is really far away, so instead we’ll play a closer F. Same with the A. The C in this chord is already close by so we’ll keep that C where it is. This part of the video demonstrates this well. To give you another example, we’ll go from a C chord to a G chord. The video for this example is here.
Learning How to Play a Song
At this point, we’re going to start learning an actual song using chords. I hope you’re excited! This is the fun part of the lesson. The song we’re going to learn is “All of Me” by John Legend.
The first part is to know the chords of the song and here’s the secret – you don’t need to download the sheet music, you don’t need to know how to play it by ear, and you don’t need to use your magic genie wishes to figure out the chords. All the chords you need for any popular song are already on Google, free online. I try to look for the version online that has at least 4 stars. One of the examples I found for this song was chords for a guitar, but it doesn’t matter – chords are chords.
If you look at the chords in this example, some of them will have chord extensions. I want you to ignore all the chord extensions as a beginner because even if you play the chords without the extensions they will still sound great, the extensions just add a little more flair.
Now, after going to one of our websites from the Google search results of the chords, we have all of our chords in the song and we have our cheat sheets to figure out the chords. The nice thing about most popular songs is that they repeat chords over and over again. “All of Me” is the same way.
For verse one of “All of Me” it simply repeats E minor, C, G, and D. So really you just have to learn these four chords and you can play the entire first verse of the song.
How do we find these chords? We use the cheat sheet. For this particular song we’ll use the close chords cheat sheet I mentioned earlier. What the close chords cheat sheet does is give you a list of chords that are close to each other. This is going to save you a lot of time because I’ve already figured these out for you.
The close chords cheat sheet will look complicated, but I organized it in a way that’s easy to understand. The first two columns of the sheet go together and so do the last two columns. One other thing you’ll notice is that some of the chords have multiple names, that’s because they’re actually the same notes. For example, G# major and Ab major both use the same notes. It’s a more advanced concept that you don’t need to understand right now.
Going back to the “All of Me” chords, the first one we had was an E minor chord. We’ll find this chord on the cheat sheet and we’ll see that the notes are B-E-G. This is our first chord.
Next, we find our second chord, which is C major. Going to the cheat sheet we find that the notes are C-E-G. That’s our second chord.
Our third chord is G major, which we find at the top of our cheat sheet, second from the right. These notes are B-D-G. This is our G major chord.
Finally, we have our D major chord. On the cheat sheet we see that the notes are A-D-F#.
At this point, you know the chords, and remember, if you don’t know any of these you can always go back to the cheat sheet and look them up for any song that you’re learning.
Alternating Chords
Alright, now this is the part where everyone freaks out. Now you have to learn the chords fast enough so you can actually play the song. Most people try to learn all four chords at the same time, but this is a very inefficient way to learn. It takes a long time this way, people get frustrated, and they end up quitting.
Instead, what we’re going to do is use a strategy called “Alternating Chords” where we learn two chords at a time. Our first chord is an E minor chord, B-E-G, and we’ll move from this to our C major chord, C-E-G. All I want you to do is alternate between these chords. You’ll notice there’s only one note that changes between these chords. I want you to alternate between these chords until you have it completely drilled down.
Next, we’ll do the next two chords, our C major chord to our G major chord. We’ll alternate between these chords as well, just like we did with our previous two chords. These chords are a little more challenging because we have to move our fingers a bit farther. Practice this sequence a bunch of times until it’s drilled into your muscle memory.
For the next two chords we’ll go from our G major chord to our D major chord. Some people freak out at this one because we’re playing a black note now, but don’t worry – black notes aren’t any harder to play than white notes. It’ll be helpful for this one to check out the video to see exactly how this progression is played.
Next, I want you to go back through all four chords again, alternating between two at a time, to really drill down this entire series.
Finally, we’re going to put everything together. If you’re a beginner, you might have to come back the next day to finish this step because when you sleep on it, it actually helps solidify all this muscle memory in your brain. So, I want you to try this right now, but if you don’t get it, don’t be frustrated, you might just have to try again the next day.
Alright, let’s do all four chords together. We’ll start with our E minor, move to our C major, down to the G major, and lastly to the D major. We’re going to play these four chords in a row, over and over, and drill them into our muscle memory.
After getting all four chords with your right hand down, you’re going to simply add in the left hand. Make sure you have the right hand chords pretty solid by this point, otherwise it’s going to be pretty tricky.
For the left hand, we’re simply going to play the root note of the chord. The concept of the root note is easy to understand, whatever the name of the chord is, that letter is the root note. So, for the C major chord, the root note is a C. For the C minor chord, the root note is still a C. Same goes for the G major chord where the root note is a G. So with our E minor, C, G, D chord progression, our left hand will play E, C, G, and D. I want you to repeat these four notes very slowly in order to drill them into your muscle memory.
Playing Hands Together
Putting all that we’ve learned together, we’ll start with our E minor chord, playing an E with our left hand and B-E-G with our right hand. Then, we’ll move down to our C major chord. Again, we’re going to alternate between our E minor and C major, playing hands together.
Now, I know these alternating chords seem very tedious, but I promise you 100% so many students have used this and it works so much better than trying to learn everything at once and getting sloppy with it.
Moving on to the next two chords, we’ll play the C chord and then the G chord, alternating between just these two chords.
Lastly, we’re going to use the last two chords of our progression, going from the G chord to the D major chord, repeating this over and over again.
The final step is going through the entire chord progression. We’ll start with E minor, then C major, to G major, and finally to D major. Keep practicing this progression, these four chords, over and over, until it’s drilled into your muscle memory.
Before we go any further, I just want to say that the first time you learn this it will take a lot of time. You’ll be looking up at your cheat sheet repeatedly, finding the notes with your fingers, struggling to get hands together, and it might seem like it’s going to take forever to learn songs, but once you learn 3 or 4 or 5 songs all of a sudden you’ll start repeating the same chords and it’ll get easier and easier to learn. If you just learn these chords and spend the time now, you’ll be a lot faster at learning chords in the future.
The next step involves going over money patterns. Money patterns involve using the same notes with different rhythms or patterns. You’ll notice how these are used to play “All of Me” in this example and I will show you a few other options in the video as well.
On the resources page for this lesson, the same page where you’ll download your cheat sheets, you can get my money patterns if you click on the link that says: “Learn 4 Chords Learn Hundreds of Songs.” To access the quiz I mentioned in the beginning, you’ll click on the link for the quiz on that same page. The quiz is 10 questions long and will help you learn even more. Let me know how you end up doing on the quiz!
I really hope you liked this blog post and accompanying video! I spent a lot of time trying to make it as easy and simplified as possible.
If you’re really serious about learning piano, I do have a free Become a Piano Superhuman Course available which you should definitely check out too!
