Fast Piano Lessons Blog

This lesson is a quickie!!!

1. Play along with the video.
2. Then play through all 12 major chords in one hand. Time yourself!
3. Then work on all 12 minor chords in one hand. Time yourself again! Try to beat 30 seconds. I know you can do it! I’ve had a few 5 year old piano students of mine accomplish this!
   

This will help you become one of the fastest piano players in the west!!! …or the east if thats where you live. If you live in the south, sorry you’re out of luck.

You don’t have to be able to play all those chords in 30 seconds, but it does help when you try an learn a new song. When learning a new song, you don’t get stuck on how to play the chord among the 50 million other things you have to learn, your only worry is what chord comes next. So just time yourself and make sure that you can find each chord in both hands fairly quickly!

How long does this take to learn?

I remember that it took me quite a few weeks to practice this and see a lot of improvement. Some of my piano students who practiced a little bit everyday have accomplished this goal to be able to play all their major triads in under 30 seconds in one week though!

What order should I play all the chords in?

They usually play them in this order because its fast: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, Ab, Bb, Db, Eb, F#. That’s useful, but eventually you’ll want to challenge yourself so you keep improving your reaction time and you’re not just practicing a routine. The circle of 5ths shown below is another pattern that you can play your chords in!

The Circle of Fifths:

The image below is the famous circle of fifths. It is a great way to make sure you get through all 12 keys when you’re practicing. Its called the circle of fifths because each chord is a 5th apart. Its a good challenge to find chords that leap so far apart.

After you can get to your chords fairly quickly in both hands, the next step is to add some rhythm and the other hand! These patterns are for accompaniment, meaning they won’t have any melody. It’s perfect for accompanying your self to play and sing at the same time.
 

How to Play Chords with 2 Hands

Right hand plays the chord, left hand plays the root of the chord down lower on the piano. The root of the chord is going to be the name of the chord. If you used the right fingering, its the note you’re playing with your thumb in the right hand.
 

Simplify the Coordination Patterns

When trying these for the first time, I like to break these patterns down to simple instructions and even say them outloud: left right left right. Both left left left. You can also practice them on your lap before even trying to worry about what notes to play.
 

 

3 Accompaniment Patterns for Singing & Playing Piano

• Left Right Left Right for 4/4 songs or Left Right Right for 3/4 time songs where you count 123 123. This is good when you want the music to be uplifting or create some rhythms to dance to.
 

 
• Both Left Left Left good for rock stuff or something with energy. You can add your right hand in as much as you want for more punch.
 

 
• HOLD each chord for 4 beats - Good for jazz and ballads. or if you are just learning a song and trying to get the hang of playing and singing it.
 

WHATS THE NEXT STEP?

If you get these basic patterns down, its really easy to add a little variation in the rhythms to create a lot of new vocabulary for your playing. When you start to try and sing along with these patterns, go slowly at first.
 
These are perfect for playing and singing at the same time because they are simpler than a piano arrangement. The patterns are repetitive allowing you to focus on hitting the right pitches with your voice and remembering the lyrics. GOSH!!! There is so much multi-tasking going on!

Here is an arrangement of thriller by michael jackson for solo piano. It sounds even cooler if you can stomp your foot for a beat or have a drum machine in your keyboard to play along with. Its in a different key than the original for two reasons. Its lower so people with regular non-michael voices can sing it. And this key has many less black notes, therefore it is easier to play.

Putting your hands together:

Learn the bassline hands separate first. Then learn how to go between an A minor and D major chord in your right hand. Slowly put the two together… Playing both hands together took me a couple hours of slow practice with a metronome.

When you’re first learning the song, simplify the bassline only playing the roots. That lets you focus on the learning the chords and the major parts of the song. Then refine and polish later. Scan to 2:00 in the video to see an example of this.

1:25 - Just hold down the chords in the right hand for long periods. After you play it and hold it down, you can forget about that hand and focus on the rhythms that your left hand is playing.

Building basslines:

Thriller is a really great example of how to make a bass line groove. Normally we would just play a single A note in the bass on an Aminor chord. In thriller, the bassline uses these tones: the flat 7th, root and flat 3rd. On A minor that means its going to be the G, A and C notes.

Thriller Video Lesson Outline:

1:05 - slow walkthrough of thriller / learn the verse piano parts
2:01 - simple bassline version of the verses
4:00 - recommend playing the melody with the simple bassline show here
4:25 - showing how chord shakes look and sound

Chorus Chords:
Amin C, C D Am, D9 Fmaj7 G6
Amin C, C D Am, F D G… Back to the verse chords

Verse Chords:

Amin -> D

Hooray! Lets learn the intro to “Your Song” by Elton John. When I started making this video, it was the most requested song in the valentine poll. Make sure to download the chart!!!*

THERE ARE THREE PARTS TO THIS LESSON:

1. Your Song - Easy PDF Chart Download
2. Performance VIDEO - (over the shoulder demonstration)
3. Chart Walk through VIDEO - Talking you through reading the chart with the letters written in.

Give me your feedback and I’ll incorporate it into the lesson for the rest of the song!

#1 YOUR SONG - PDF for the introduction

#2 YOUR SONG - PERFORMANCE VIDEO

I recommend watching the performance example and then skipping ahead through the commentary to the slow performances and copying it step by step.

Table of contents:
:10 - Performance example of the 4 measure introduction
:21 - SLOW walkthrough
3:27 - SLOW performance, chord by chord. I’m saying each chord.
4:05 - Holding down all the notes in the chord at once

Its just the first four measures, but this is the epitome of elton john’s style:
Rolling arpeggios and chords in inversions.

#3 LEAD SHEET - HOW TO READ THE MUSIC - VIDEO

Practice Goal:

Learn all of your major and minor triads, AND their inversions. Then practice rolling them.

Please post a comment and let me know what you think!!!

In this piano lesson, we cover the music that plays for 15 seconds or so in the Super Mario Brothers video game series when you get an “invincible star”. Video game music has been a great teaching tool for me. I find that nothing inspires young kids more than to learn a song they’ve heard a million times on their favorite video game.

The chords are Dmin7 and Cmaj7. The rhythms are almost a jazzy samba type pattern.
Most of the video game music from the mario series was written by koji kondo. His original venue was the video game console, but now his music is played by orchestras and bands all over the world!

You get the star if you learn this song!