Kawai Piano Lessons: How to Practice Major and Minor Chord Changes

Join Michael Seaman for a quick, hands-on piano lesson designed to get you playing chords right away. In just a few minutes, Michael breaks down the major and minor chords in the key of C major, shows you proper hand position, and even introduces simple left-hand accompaniment and rhythmic patterns to make your playing sound full and musical.

Watch the full lesson above, or follow along with the complete transcript below.

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Video Transcript

Hi there. My name is Michael. In this lesson we’re going to be working on chords. If you’re learning piano to play in a band or church, or play for a vocalist or just learn your favorite songs, one of the most important concepts that you’ll be able to learn to play and hear is chords. The basic chords everyone has heard are major and minor.

You’ll find them in any song, ever, in any key. You’re going to have a mix of major and minor chords that you have available to you. But for right now, we’re going to stick to C major, which is just using the white keys. So working in just C major. Just the white keys here. Place your thumb on C.

And leave your fingers to just fall out naturally onto the next four keys — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Now if we play our first, third and fifth finger all at the same time on C, E and G, we get our first chord, the C major chord. Now every chord that we’re going to be using here is going to be made up of the C major scale.

But if we start, put our thumb say on the note right above — D — and do the same shape, we get a minor chord: D minor. Moving up the scale, we have a mix of minor and major chords. C major, D minor, E minor, F major, G major, A minor, and B diminished, which we won’t really worry about — just focusing on these first six chords.

We have most of the chords that we’ll ever need to play in the key of C major. Most songs in pop music and rock are just going to be made up of maybe five or six chords at most. And this is going to get you a lot of them. You’ll hear that this doesn’t sound particularly full if you want to sing along to it.

So we’re going to introduce just a little bit of left hand to maybe just round out, fill out our sound. Instead of doing the full chord in our left hand, let’s just do the bottom note of it down here. So for C we’re going to add this note. For D, we’d add this note.

And finally let’s add a little bit of rhythm to say underscore a pop song or something in musical theater or maybe a rock ballad — a little bit of motion.

Obviously that’s quite a step up. But just to start things off, just focus on your right hand and nailing this shape. You’re going to want to do it with a relaxed wrist and a little bit of curve to your fingers.

As you get more comfortable with the note names, try and really internalize which ones are C, F, G — your major chords — and then D, E, and A — your minor chords. Even some of the best piano players today are still learning new chords, new ways to play them, new ways to use harmony. For us, we’re going to focus on just learning things slowly and hands separately.

If you do that, you’ll level up your piano playing in no time. For sheet music and everything that we reviewed today, visit us at Kawai Us.