I just finished working on this commercial where i wrote and recorded and performed all the music for a salon in seattle called habitude. Composing and recording is a lot of fun!
Technology is getting so good that one person (a piano player) can record all the instruments and have it come out sounding like a live band played together!
This is a wonderful work of animation and poetry! I love all the internal rhyme and wordplay. Plus its about cats and pianos!!! What better subject matter? Its about 7minutes long.
Enjoy!!! But don’t get any ideas about making a cat piano at home…
I’ll begin posting more lessons soon! I’ve been really focused lately on practicing and recovering from fun ulcerative colitis/crohn’s issues.
Stay tuned!!!
This lesson is a quickie!!!
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!
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!
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 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.
I just wanted to get a feel for how many people online read music! Of course there are different kinds of reading music.
Some people can only read chords symbols or just a few of the notes on treble clef. I tried to accommodate all the possible answers, but if you don’t fit in anywhere, just write something in the "other" field or the comments! After answering, the poll shows all the information it has collected and will tell you how many can read music!
This was a paid request to help someone learn Ray Charles rendition of Everyday I have the blues. The song follows the 12 bar blues with a lot of really tasty ray charles fills and variations throughout the whole song. The first 30 seconds of the song just have Ray playing solo piano as an introduction. This video slows down the licks from the first 15 seconds of the video.
SKIP AHEAD TO 1:10 IN THE VIDEO TO SEE MY TRANSCRIPTION OF RAY’S LICKS SLOWED DOWN.
Pick one or two of these licks and learn them really well then transpose it to the key of C so you can get even more use out of them by using them in a blues in C! Transposing it from the key of Bb to the key of C requires you to move every note up one whole step. This is because the keys Bb and C are one whole step apart.
Stay tuned for more on this great song! We’ll be working on some good chord voicings for the 3 chords in a Bb blues: Bb7, Eb7 and F7.
I’ve been in poor health for the past 2-3 weeks… I’ll need to hold off making any new lessons until I get better!
Feel free to keep asking questions though and I’ll try to share some insight 
Please tell me what you wish had further explanation! Anything that you didn’t quite understand, or aren’t sure how to apply it. Just post a comment to this post and I’ll do my best to update the course!
I really want to make the Chords 101 Course better, as you can see I’ve posted a new blog category called “CHORDS 101″ (in the right hand link bar under “categories”) By clicking on that, you’ll find all the videos that have been associated with the Chords 101 E-book. Its easier to show examples of certain piano concepts through video. Its also more fun to watch!
Til now, I’ve just been guessing what concepts you’d like to see explained in further detail. It would be really useful to hear your feedback though!
Thanks,
Chris Marx
Beginning Piano Day One - Learning Half Steps and Whole Steps - Chords 101 Course - DAY 1
Building Major and Minor triads by counting half steps - Chords 101 Course - DAY 2
The 12 Most Common Chords on Piano - Easy Lesson with Picture Chords - Chords 101 Course - Day 3
If you haven’t heard of this charity, prepare to be blown away!
Through http://www.charitywater.org/
Just $20 can give one person in a developing nation clean water for 20 years.
Charity:water has done an incredible amount over the last couple years creating 1,200+ wells.
Challenge yourself to do something to help someone out today! Even if you just want to write a song you can create positive change. Try giving a charity performance… Let your audience know that $20 could give someone clean water for 20 years. Record it and post it on youtube…
Brad had a question, he wants to learn more about gospel music and get away from reading the music… His goal is to interpret and embellish what he reads on paper.
I’m not a gospel expert because I grew up in washington state… I don’t have a lot of experience playing that style of music or in churches! BUT I have really worked hard to make some of the elements of gospel music a part of my playing to broaden some of the sounds I can create on piano.
One of the books I recommend for learning more about gospel music is called Gospel Keyboard Styles. You should be able to read music before working through this book. I like that it has short examples of rhythms or chord progressions that you can pull out and put into your playing.
For example, they give you a cool walk up to do when going from a 1 to a 4 chord, C to F and then its up to you to actually apply that in a song you are working on, or transpose it to a new key! Not too much different than what we do on this blog with licks.
This book is great, because it offers a lot more concentrated information than a video would, going in depth to tell you all about when to use certain progressions and how things developed.
Another good gospel book is Gospel Piano: Hal Leonard Keyboard Style Series. I like all the books in this piano series because they have a lot of good fills and licks and history. The only thing that I don’t like so much is it requires you to be a good reader, but it comes with a CD if you have a good ear.
Just added a table of contents to the top 3 tabs, and there is also a link to it on the right hand side under “PAGES”.
It should help make finding specific lessons easier because there are starting to be a lot of them!!!
Also the About and FAQ pages have been relocated to the right hand side bar in the “PAGES” group as well.
