Click hereAbout the Course (page 2 of 3)
The secret to success: take one step at a time.
Chords at the Piano is not just a collection of great tutorials, but a carefully planned-out course. Each lesson builds on what you've learned up to that point.
Of course, depending on how advanced you are, you might visit the site, check out a later video like one of the Rhythm Styles lessons, and find that it's exactly what you need--not too easy, not too hard.
But if you don't understand it or it moves too fast, you'll need to go back to an earlier lesson. The tutorial called How to Play a Simple Ballad is especially important. Step by step, it shows you how to practice moving from one chord position, or inversion, to the next. This is one of the key challenges in learning to play. When you can handle it easily, you'll be all set to enjoy the rest of the course.
(A few of the lessons are optional--we'll talk about them in a moment.)
The lesson sequence
The first several lessons of Chords at the Piano teach ground-level theory, including note names and locations, intervals, and chord basics. This part of the course is quick and easy (zeroing in only on what you'll actually need at this point), so you can get right to the lessons in which you begin to play.
"Basic Piano Technique: A Whole-Body Approach" is described in the recent course update.
The lesson on chord inversions is especially important. I've known students who could play any chord in any key, but because they didn't know how to use inversions to create smooth transitions between chords, they weren't able to put their knowledge to use. The Chord Inversion Exercise, together with the lessons that follow, solves this problem.
The four lessons that begin with How to Play a Simple Ballad teach you to accompany yourself on a 3-chord song. They make up the heart of the course, as I mentioned earlier, covering fingering, how to play a bass line, how to read a chord chart, coordinating your singing and playing, and much more. These tutorials not only give you the information you need, but show you how to practice, step by step.
How to Play a 12-Bar Blues Shuffle takes the chords and skills you've learned up to this point, and applies them in a completely different way. You can use this bouncy piano style to accompany songs like Hound Dog, Kansas City, Whole Lotta Shakin’ and many more. Unlike the previous lessons, this one is optional. So if you wish, feel free to skip it and move on to the later "rhythm style" videos, which have a much wider ranger of applications.