Master The 1 4 And 5 Chords Of Every Key With This Simple Exercise

[Music] hey everyone today i'm going to show you a really satisfying fun exercise that can help you to memorize the one four and five chords of any key major or minor on the piano keyboard and also help you to work on a number of other skills like improvising on broken chords and using the sustain pedal the 1 4 and 5 also known as the tonic subdominant and dominant are the three chords that are more common than any others in most songs and most pieces of music and if you can develop an instinctive feel for them at the piano it'll really revolutionize your ability to play and to improvise just before we dig into that exercise i want to tell you about a new thing i've got going on over at my patreon.com crowdfunding page that i think you'll really like every month for the next six months so from now september 2020 through to at least february 2021 i'm going to be releasing a monthly piano pack for my patreon supporters this month's piano pack is live on my patreon now it includes six exercises to help you improve your chord knowledge and keyboard skills six problems and challenges to boost your music theory knowledge and creativity a bunch of recommended links and music to listen to and an original piano piece for you to practice plus there's a walkthrough video linked from the pack so you can check you're doing all of it right now if you're not familiar with patreon it's a really straightforward platform you sign up as one of my supporters at one of the set tiers two us dollars five us dollars or one of the higher tiers if you like and each tier gives you access to various benefits i should say that you get access to the piano packs at every tier every time i post a new tutorial on youtube then as a supporter you pay two dollars or five dollars or whatever amount you signed up for plus maybe a little bit of sales tax depending on the law where you live patreon handles all that by the way along with the currency conversion so it doesn't matter where in the world you are yeah i've actually found it's really good at looking after that side of things for you now i've been using patreon.com pretty successfully for several years now i feel it's kind of settled down to become a mature reliable platform i really like it i support a couple of creators on there myself and i'm trying to grow more of a community around my patreon page so if you want to sign up and get access to the piano packs and the various other benefits on offer head over to patreon.com bill hilton today i'll be very glad to see you there okay let's get on with the tutorial what i'm going to do first to show you how this exercise works in c major so it's all white notes really easy and you can get a sense of what you need to do before we really start to have fun with it by moving around different keys breaking up the chords decorating it and things like that all i want you to do in your left hand is play this c this g and this c that's it that's all you have to do your left hand doesn't move from there on top of that in your right hand we're going to play a simple c chord okay so that is a chord of c major i'm not playing it in root position that would be its root position i'm playing it in this inversion but it's a simple c chord but notes c e and g and then in the right hand we're going to move up to play an f-shape okay i don't really mind what fingers you use by the way just for all of this exercise all the way through choose the fingers that you find most comfortable and which are most efficient for moving between the chords okay then we're going to move up to a g shape in the right hand but still with the left unchanging now i'm using the word shape there because what we have across the whole piano keyboard isn't technically a straightforward g chord because it contains notes that don't belong in the g chord notably this c that f isn't a straightforward f chord because it's got a g in it there okay but ignore that for now and focus on the right now these chords we play in the right hand are the basic one four and five chords in the key of c major one four and five the tonic subdominant and dominant c f and g okay but we're just playing them as those shapes in the right hand let me show you the order we're going to play them in we're just going to go up and down so we're going to play a c shape then an f shape then a g shape then back down to the f shape and back to the c shape and that's it wash rinse and repeat that's the basic exercise in the right hands one four five four one plus this fixed base now when you play it just have a go at it notice how it feels and listen to the sound that you're making with each chord you might be wondering what's the deal with this static left hand why is it like that well i've kept it static for two reasons first of all because i want to make it easier for you to concentrate on the right hand on these 145 chords that you're playing yeah while still having a good full satisfying two-handed sound on the piano yeah and also i want to add some musical interest so that this exercise can actually be satisfying to play rather than just you know another boring chord exercise chunking up and down the piano keyboard playing really straightforward chords the musical effect of that left hand is to subtly alter the f and g shapes in the right hand so the basic f chord is f a and c we played it in this inversion and the basic g chord is g b and d which we played in this inversion but taken across the whole keyboard with the fixed bass and those two shapes those two chords become richer more complex and more interesting if you're into music theory you could kind of think of this left hand as maybe a double pedal tone or as a drone or you could say that the effect was to create poly chords with the f and g shapes or you could try to give the shapes names you know you could say that that was a voicing of an f adds9 chord or whatever the terminology doesn't really matter what matters is that you listen to the sound you're making always listen to the sound you're making and that you pay attention to how those right hand chord shapes feel they're all important one four five another important thing is that i'm not asking you to stick to any set beats or rhythms here i've not specified any timing that means you can entirely improvise the timings yeah you can take it slow you can make some chords faster than others you know you can add a beat if you like one two three four two two three four three two three four try all of those things yeah play around because that's how you learn but i'm not giving you a hard and fast rule on timing and rhythm i want you to use your own creative sense there okay one of the joys of this exercise is that you can do a lot with it whether you're a relative beginner or a bit more experienced let's just build out and explore some of the stuff you can do once you're confident with the basic pattern so one of the first things you can do even if you're only beginning to get confident with chord shapes is play around with the inversions the chord shapes you use in the right hand yeah we'll talk more about that in a moment the other thing you can do with those chords is begin to break them up into individual notes so that you're creating broken chord patterns you could also maybe begin just to come off and on the left again okay just maybe to give it a little bit of a push every now and then rather than just changing with every rather than just putting it down again with every chord let me just have a play around in a really simple way and show you what i mean it's really important to stress that what i'm asking you to do here even if you're relatively new to the piano is improvise improvisation doesn't have to be complicated okay here we go [Music] yeah so really quite straightforward and i think pretty easily within your reach even if you're relatively new to the piano let's look at what i was doing so first of all what i was doing was choosing different inversions different shapes of the chords in the right hand let's pretend for now that they're all simple chords unaffected by what i'm doing in the left now as you may know you've got a choice of three basic positions in which to play simple right hand major and minor chords you've got root position where you have the root note of the chord in other words the note the chord is named after c in this case is the lowest note the first inversion where the next chord note up from the root is the lowest note and the second inversion which is where the note furthest from the root in the chord is the lowest note of the chord so root position first inversion second inversion let's do it in a different chord let's do it in g root position first inversion second inversion now you can play any of those inversions as three note chords or you can stick another chord note on the top and play them as four note chords okay the piano keyboard gives you the opportunity to do both now you might have noticed that when i was improvising i was choosing and very deliberately choosing chord shapes that kind of interlocked with each other rather than jumping from group position to root position to root position i was doing things like root position c to second inversion f to second inversion g or i could have done root position c to first inversion f to root position g i've talked about this before if you have watched many more videos in the past but try to make your movement between chords fairly smooth and organic picking voicings picking inversions that interlock as much as possible using shared notes where you can okay so from that c to that f i've got a shared note that's a really good habit to get into especially for improvising on the piano because it creates a more natural flowing musical effect you're not going to want to do it all the time sometimes you need to punctuate things with a jump but it's usually best to avoid jump after jump after jump so rather than going c f most of the time you do something like c f c f reducing the overall amount of movement you're making in that right hand now you'll see that the other thing i was doing there was breaking up those chords and playing playing more kind of elaborate patterns yeah i was beginning to get into a little bit of a rhythm i was beginning to get start playing against a bit of an underlying beat you don't have to do that okay don't feel obliged to do that and the fact that i'm not specifying a rhythm or timing there should make it much easier for you to play around with these broken chords i want you to really mess about with them just take a c chord if you like and really try breaking it up playing the individual notes seeing what you can do creating bits of melody then put the left hand in just do this for a while up and down an f chord then the same with the g chord listening to the effects feeling it all the time internalizing the feel of those one four and five chords the other thing i should say is that clearly i'm using quite a lot of sustain pedal the right hand pedal to stick things together now i want you to have a go at that for yourself if you are relatively new to the piano it should be fairly straightforward mostly you should be able to get away with just holding the pedal down for each chord and re-pedaling in other words lifting the pedal and putting it back down again when you change chord again if you're relatively new timing that might take a little bit of practice at first but it's not really a fundamentally difficult skill and this exercise is also a really good way of practicing it [Music] okay so if you're a reasonably experienced piano player then doing all of that in c major isn't going to be that big of a deal for you so let's try it in some different keys sticking with major keys to start with let's give ourselves a bit of a challenge by going to a key that's got lots of black notes in it e major so in the left hand we want to mirror what we did in c major the tonic note of the key is e so we have two e's an octave apart and between them we have what will be the highest note of the tonic chord played in root position there's our tonic chord highest note is b so let's take a b down here and drop it in the middle if you understand the terminology of intervals by the way you might say that the middle note in that group that b is a fifth above the root one two three four five i'm just counting up the scale there okay but don't worry if you're not familiar with that jargon if you are it's just a handy way of finding that middle note so that's our left hand which as we know just stays the same throughout now in the right hands we have to work out our one four and five chord shapes and there are three ways of doing that firstly you can just use guesswork and trial and error and you might expect me to say that's a bad thing but it's not because using trial and error here means using your ears to judge whether you're right or wrong and using your ears is always a good habit to get into second option and this is a bit of a cheat but it's a really quick one you can just look the chords up if you google find chords of any key and click through for the image results you'll get any number of diagrams and charts that tell you not just the one four and five chords of any key but the two three six and seven chords as well so that's another quick way third and most interesting if you know the scale of the key you're working in you can just figure out the first fourth and fifth note of the scale so there's the scale of e major the first note is e the fourth note one two three four is a and the fifth note one two three four five is b then you build a simple major chord in root position on each of those notes using only notes taken from the scale there you go you've got your one four and five chord e a and b and off you go then we're doing exactly the same thing as we did before free and easy on the time playing around with broken chords arpeggiations yeah going one four five four one all the time i'm really getting a feel of the chords under your fingers practicing your pedaling making it smooth all the rest and what you want to be aiming to do is to work out how to do that across all of the major keys yeah now some keys are more common than others so you might want to focus on them but being able to do that across all the major keys is a really good goal to aim for the other thing you can start to do just to make it more musically interesting and a little bit more challenging is to start adding in little decorative notes from outside the chords you can just do this by trial and error reaching up and down one note note below or above or a chord yeah or just sort of um you know suspending notes from within the chords themselves don't worry too much about moving your hand position just play around not in a very dramatic way reach up a note reach down a note find a non-chord note in the middle and use your ear to work out whether the different things you do sounds good sounds a bit weird interesting whatever yeah just kind of use your ears to get to grips with what you're doing all the time be listening to the sound you're making as well as feeling those chord shapes under your fingers that's really important to help you internalize what you're doing it'll also help you to get a sense of some of the interesting cadences we've got going on here now cadence is the name we give to transitions between chords so between a five chord and a four chord we have a deceptive cadence which is also sometimes known as an interrupted cadence it's quite an unusual deceptive cadence because they usually go to minor chords yeah but we're going to a major chord and it's still a deceptive cadence between the four and the one we have a plagal cadence and they're much more common i want this tutorial to be really practical so we're not going to go off down the rabbit hole of theory now but i am planning to make a tutorial on cadences pretty soon so watch out for that finally what about minor keys here we are in the key of a minor i've left minor keys until last but that's not to say you should neglect them because they are just as important as major keys all the same principles apply that we were talking about for the major version of the exercise it's just that the chords will be slightly different in particular the one and the four chords will always be minor so in the key of a minor the number one chord the tonic chord is a minor and the number four chord is d minor when it comes to the number five chord things get a bit more complicated you might have come across this before but in minor key songs and pieces of music sometimes you come across the minor version of the five chord and sometimes you come across the major version so in a minor the number five chord would be e minor or e major i don't want to dig into the reasons for that because this isn't as i've said a technical tutorial what i would say for now is by and large stick to the major version of the number five chord okay so go minor minor major number one number four number five a minor d minor e major in the key of a minor okay apart from that the exercise works pretty much the same way our left hand is the same two notes an octave apart and the one in the middle the fifth in the middle and we can just play it exactly as we did for the major version what i want you to do though is listen to how the character of the sound has changed yeah very different in the major that left-hand drone or pedal tone whatever you want to call it had a kind of energizing effect it was almost kind of triumphant it was very warm when you put it in combination with the right hand chords but in the minor the effect is much more subtle [Music] it's darker and especially on the dominant chord it's kind of edgier yeah that's a really important thing to notice especially if you want to become a good improviser or even a composer or songwriter on the piano it's all very well learning chords and scales and what have you but you have to pay attention to the sounds they make and learn what musical effects you can create with them okay so once again figure out the 145 across a bunch of minor scales practice it get familiar with it break up the chords arpeggiate them add passing notes whatever you want to do just get the sound and the feeling into your ears and under your fingers so that's it for another tutorial take the exercise play around with it remember it's supposed to be fun as well as good for you and let me know in the comments how you get on with it like i said earlier please do check out my patreon page over at patreon.com bill hilton the first of the new monthly piano packs is live now and they're going to run for at least the next six months which is through to february 2021 and maybe even beyond that if people really like them so patreon.combillhilton to find out more and sign up if you like what you see as i said patreon is a platform i've come to really like and i want to expand the community i have there so that i'm closer in touch with what you guys want and what you think and also so that it can be a sustainable source of revenue for me in addition to my book sales so i can keep making these youtube tutorials and writing new books and producing new stuff way into the future don't forget to to subscribe to my youtube channel if you haven't already just hit the little red button in the bottom right hand corner of the screen also follow me on facebook twitter and instagram links are in the description text below and check out my very popular books especially my best seller how to really play the piano again links are below happy piano playing and i'll see you next time

Channel: Bill Hilton

Views: 57,343

Keywords: 1 4 5 chords, tonic, dominant, subdominant, I IV V chords, IV chord, V chord, piano, piano tutorial, piano chords, piano chord exercises, piano exercises, learn piano chords, harmony, how to play piano chords, how chords work

Id: Kji25Hd6_ww

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020