Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Easy Left Hand PIANO CHORDS, Chord Books and Chord Sheets For Beginners

Scott D. Davis
Photo  by ohlin 
As a music teacher, I am frequently asked how to play left-hand easy piano chords when learning to play the piano, electronic keyboard, and organ. Well, the first thing you need to do when learning chords are to learn the popular or basic chords first. These are major chords, minor chords, and seventh chords. These piano or keyboard chords are basically the foundations on which other chords are built. For instance, let's look at the C family of chords:
C
C6
C7
C9
C11
C13
All the chords above are basically a C chord with an added 6th, 7th, 9th, 11th or 13th. So when learning chords it's important to learn the basic C chord first. If you come across a C11 or C13 and you don't know what it is, just play the C chord. That's not to say you shouldn't eventually learn the 11th and 13th chords, but for beginners, just playing the C chord is adequate and harmonically correct and it means you can keep playing the piano or keyboard without stopping, which is what every learner wants to do.

The other thing to consider if you are learning on the electronic keyboard is that if you use the Auto Chord system that many of these keyboards have, then you won't be able to play the more advanced keyboard chords because the keyboard can't recognize certain chords, such as 11th and 13th chords.
Actually, keeping the number of chords you learn to a minimum will help you to play more pieces of music and the way to do this is to learn how to substitute one chord for another as mentioned above. 

For instance, if you learn to substitute all 9th chords for 7th chords, then this would cut your learning time by a hundred percent, obviously, you have to learn the 7th chords first, there are 12 major chords with a seventh and 12 Minor chords with a seventh and we can even reduce this further. Instead of learning all 12 major and minor chords all at once, just learn what you need. You do this with the help of key signatures. Most beginners start learning to play in the key of C and there are only a few easy piano chords associated with this key, they are, C, G, Dm, Am and sometimes F. If you pick pieces of music in this key you can learn these chords faster. When you are accomplished with those chords move on to the next key which is normally G.

This is the easiest and most enjoyable way of learning to play, it means you get to play music virtually straight away and you can move at your own pace, learn as many easy piano chords as you personally want. Many people just want to sit down and play a few tunes, nothing fancy and if you are one of those people then this is the way to go. Remember you don't need to learn a ton of chords be able to play music, just learn what you need and enjoy yourself.



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