Learn To Play Piano Part 1 - Piano Lessons

Piano Lessons.com The #1 Name in Piano Lessons Online Learn to Play Piano – Part 1– Nate Bosch Hi! I’m Nate Bosch from Piano Lessons.com. Today we’re going to learn how to play the piano. Look at his keyboard and it’s 88 keys, some white some black, you want to know where do I start. Right here, middle C. We’re going to start with middle C. We’re going to work our way up to the next C. So here we have middle C, the next white note is D, the next note after that E, then we have F, G, A, then we’ll top it off with another C. That right there is called the C major scale. Let’s play it again; C, D, E, F, G, A, B an then C. So again, that’s the C major scale, now we call it the C major scale because the starting note or the root is C. Let’s play it one more time and just listen to how the scale sounds. [Demo] That is a major scale. Now, with the scale you can create melodies, build chords and we’ll be well on our way to playing piano. So let’s get to the next step and let’s build a chord. We’re going to start on our root note C, we’re going to skip a note D and move to E, skip the note F and play a G. So we’re playing three notes together same time which we call it chord and this particular chord is called the triad but you know how to remember that, we’re just going to—. Well let’s change that a little bit and we’ll start on F and we’re going to build another triad. An A, we going to skip the note from F to the A, skip another note C, there we have the F major chord. Now let’s move up one note again to start with. We’ll start on the G this time; G, skip a note, B, skip over our C, at the top we’ll play a D. There we have the G major chord. Let’s review the root again, so we have C, E, and G. That is the C major chord. We’ll start on the F, A, C. That is the F major chord. Now we’re going to start on the G, a B, D. So G, B and D makes the G major chord. I’ll play them C, F, G. Now these three notes, you can move them in any particular you want. Say we want to put the C on the top, same chord just looks a little bit different, sounds a little bit different or we put the G on the bottom. Those are called inversions but we’re not going to worry about that. I’ll just show you that when we start putting these chords together, these inversions help the chords, you know, play a little smoother than if we were just to play [Demo] Here’s what an inversion allows us to do, when you play the C chord then I’m going to move to the F but only going to move the top two fingers. So here we have a C, an F and an A. you’re saying what is that? Well, let’s put the C back on top and we’ve got our F chord again. So we started with C, move these two fingers up playing an F and now you’re looking at that going like you don’t know what that is, well if we bring the G we put it on the bottom, we see a triad again G, B and D. There’s our G chord. So we have a C chord, an F chord, a G chord and back to C. So there now, we’ve learned the scale, we’ve learned the C major scale, we learned that the root of that scale is C and we started building chords from the notes in that scale. We built C chord, F chord, G chord. We learned about inversions which, you don’t need to worry about that. It’s just different shapes of the chord as how you can think of it. The shape is like a snowman, it is a little bit like that. Okay, here is the next thing we’re going to do, we’re going to take our left hand and we’re just going to play the root of each of those chords. So the root of the C chord is C so put your, you play the C below middle C. Now if you move to the F chord, what is the root or the base of the F chord? Well that is the F of course so were going to move and play with our left hand the F. So the G, you guessed it, G so there. There is the root C, you play them together, F, and G. Now those three chords are very popular chords used in what is called a chord progression. All that means is when you put different chords together in a pattern or in a different, in a phrase, it’s called a chord progression. So if we put a C and an F and a G and another C, we call that a one four five progression. You’re doing what? What do you mean one four five? Here’s another point.