How To Memorize Every Major & Minor Chord On Piano

major and minor chords are the most common useful and foundational chords to start learning first on piano you're going to end up using these in some way for pretty much whatever kind of music you want to play we need to start working towards getting these foundational chords completely fluent so you can find them and recognize them starting from any note automatically without having to think about it thinking of them as one shape think about how we read words we don't look at every individual letter we recognize the whole word as one thing and it's much quicker that way there's 12 of each of those types of chords so that's 24 things to memorize but we can start limiting how much you actually have to memorize by just learning the 12 majors and then learning how to change them into minor it's really helpful to split them into four groups of three by shape and then learn one group at a time so just having those organized in those groups and learning one group at a time gives you manageable chunks to work on we're just talking about root position shapes here which if you don't know is like the original chord position it has one of each note in order starting from the root and the root is just the note that the chord is named after i'm to go through these major chord groups first and then the minors talk about some tips for recognizing them and ways you can practice there's timestamps below for each section the first group is the three major chords that only use white notes and that is c major f major and g major i'm not really gonna focus on technique here but just a quick word on fingers you end up using all different kinds of fingers in actual music depends where you've just come from where you're going to as to what's going to make sense but i would recommend just sticking to one thing at the moment you could either do one three and five or one two and four i'm just using one two and three here because it helps me keep my hand out of the way of your view the second group is the three chords that have when they're in root position have a black note in the middle it's kind of form a triangle shape if you connected the dots that is d major e major and a major and just as a reminder whilst these shapes appear different on the keyboard the spacing between the notes is identical even though the chords look like a different shape if you count the amount of half steps between these chords you'll see what i mean that's why they're the same type of chord they use the same intervals and to learn more about that and to approach building chords check out my previous video linked in the description below the spacing between the root and the middle note for a major chord when in root position is four half steps it's probably quicker to see that by jumping two whole steps so if you're in doubt when you're about to play one of these you can check that we call that note in the middle the major third the one that sometimes gets people here is e major because in the head people are thinking oh there's a black key in the middle they sometimes either do that or that by accident so a useful thing is before you even think about the exact notes just keep a sketch of the shape of the chord in your mind so all of these chords whilst not perfectly even they are kind of roughly uh symmetrical so when you play an e major that's pretty much in the middle that note this now has is a much more of a lopsided shape we've got two notes squished together here and a big gap there and the same the other way around if you play that note so remember it's kind of symmetrical as well as learning theory and stuff playing piano is a very tactile thing we've got to get used to the visual side and the feel of these shapes the next group is the three major chords that go black white black so it's kind of like an upside down triangle shape and that's d flat major or it might be called c sharp major sometimes e flat major might be called d sharp major other times and a flat major which might possibly be called g sharp major as well if we just use those flat names a sec if we think about those last two groups d e and a major well like that white black white d flat e flat and a flat major or the other way around black white black and the last group then is three chords that all have unique shapes this is the only major chord that only has black notes in it so we could either call that g flat major or f sharp major if we call it g major imagine a g being flattened like that if we call it f sharp major imagine an f being sharpened and then the last two are b flat major and b major now these go opposite so b major is white black black and b flat major is black white white and again remember they look different but the spacing between the notes is identical and here's another handy tip that works for both the major and minor chords the outside notes of these chords when they're in root position is always a perfect fifth which is three and a half whole steps away but the handy thing about perfect fifths is apart from when we start on b flat and b they're always matching colors so if you get used to the feel of that distance and how that looks and how that feels under your fingers that's a really helpful thing to give you the framework for the outside of these chords and this is helpful when we get to minor chords as well so um a fifth of all the white notes is this distance like this you can see it's the same distance of white notes each time and when you practice this a bit that a sixth just feels too big and the one before it a fourth feels too small and you get to the point where that feels just right and when we start from black keys the feel of the distance is the same except they're now matching black notes so these are all fifths here like this and then we've just got to remember to watch out for these opposite colored places when we start from b or b flat once you have a major chord memorized you can then adjust the pattern like i'm about to show you to turn it into a minor chord you don't need to start learning all 12 major chords before starting on the minors in fact you'll probably find learning both types starting from the white keys more useful and more common as a beginner when we're playing these in root position like this all we're going to do to turn this into a minor chord is lower that middle note by a half step now the middle note is only three half steps or one and a half whole steps from the root but remember the outside notes are the same the note we had before in the major chord we'd call that a major third and now the one we've moved it to is now called the minor third so c major f major and g major then turn into the triangle shapes with a black key in the middle c major becomes c minor f major becomes f minor g major becomes g minor the three major chords that had a black key in the middle when you turn them into minor chords they all become white notes so d major move that a half step down moves to a white note becomes d minor e major becomes e minor move that down a half step and a major becomes a minor so in those two groups they all kind of switch around if we look at the next group turning d flat major into minor we've got another white note in the middle here that's because when we move that down a half step there's no black key in between so we still get the same kind of looking shape and that's going to happen again with a flat major moving that note down there we get this because there's no black heat in the middle there you might encounter some funny spellings here whether you call it a flat or g sharp we're not going to focus on the spellings at the moment i have got a video up on how to spell chords and scales as well you can check out we're kind of primarily focusing on just visualizing the notes at the sec if we look at e flat minor though well when we had e flat major if we lower that by a half step now this time we actually get a black key in the middle and this happens to be the only minor chord that only has black notes in it e flat or d sharp minor and the last group then g flat major goes from all black keys to black white black we put that third down a half step b flat minor looks like this if we convert major put the third down a half step and b major was like this if we convert that to minor and move the third down a half step so we've got a couple of random shapes again then but like i said if you just work on memorizing the major chords then that one trick to changing to minor when you get good at seeing that pattern shift quickly it automatically gives you 12 more chords without having to actually memorize 12 more individual things and the good thing is you can extend that to when you learn different kinds of chords too every new pattern you learn gives you 12 new chords and it limits the amount of things you have to memorize so practicing these on your own then i would suggest to start off by doing one group at a time and you could even just start with literally just going up and down moving through the chords up and down like that do that at your own pace try and get a little bit quicker for a challenge maybe put a metronome on to try and force yourself to find the next one quicker or you could even put a drum track on you could get creative and come up with some kind of rhythm pattern to make it more interesting you could try breaking the notes up too and then mate try this in the next group as well d e and a again try the same tactics come up with the rhythm force yourself to do it quicker and then do that through each of the groups then try mixing groups together you can perhaps do the white notes and then the triangle shapes mix the triangle shapes with the upside down triangle shapes mix and match to try and challenge yourself focus more on any weaker groups or weaker specific chords and eventually try and go through all of them and here's a couple of tactics when you're doing basically anything when you're trying to hit all 12 keys a good way to do it is to move up in half steps so start from c start from d flat start from d so you go c major d flat major d major e flat major e major and so on and then you could repeat that with minor chords and this one's really good because it really gets you used to how those shapes morph um depending on where you start so as you're doing that basically each note that you're playing moves up by the same amount and you imagine if something moves up by the same amount the spacing between the things that you move is gonna stay the same and when the spacing's the same that means it's the same type of chord a couple of other ways to hit every key is to move around something called the circle of fifths if we move a chord up a fifth each time it's actually going to end up hitting all 12 keys and come back round to the beginning to save constantly getting higher and higher or running off the edge you can just change the octave so if you look at the circle of fifths i'll put that up on the screen it would be c and then g and then d and then a and then e and then b and and so on you could do that backwards as well which is actually moving around in fourths we sometimes call that the circle of fourths too or you could try doing the chords from just the white notes and then just the black notes so c major d major e major f g a b and then the same from the black keys and lastly one more thing you could try you could try doing major and then minor so c major c minor d major d minor e major e minor and so on just little things to challenge yourself to find these shapes quickly you don't have to do this for ages and occasionally if you're ever using these chords and when you're actually playing music and you find yourself stuttering over when you're using them perhaps it's time to take a quick five minutes um a few times in a week for a little bit just to brush up on your fundamentals

Channel: Piano From Scratch

Views: 1,643,025

Keywords: major and minor chords, major and minor chords piano, difference between major and minor chords piano, memorize chords, memorize chords piano, piano from scratch, beginner piano lessons, beginner piano chords

Id: 06pyLmYs-1g

Length: 11min 41sec (701 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021