When you are driving or walking somewhere, what do you look at to help you find your way? Do you look at the street signs, maybe particular buildings, certain trees, parks or anything that gives you a sense of where you are.
The piano keyboard is like the landscape. The black notes are like mountains and the white notes can be the flat land and sometimes the gaps between notes can represent the rivers.
The piano is the same, we use the black notes to guide us to find the correct white notes. They can also help you to build chords and know what to play where.
When I was young and I was learning to play the piano, I would often fret when my teacher would ask me to play a chord. I would worry about the 3 notes and get confused about what I was meant to play. When I learnt chords, we would learn the 3 notes, and for 12 major chords I would panic about the combinations.
If only Simply Music was around then, and Neil had shared with me then, the 3 main shapes of chords and all that stress would be over.
Using the Simply Music Method, we learn that there are 3 main shapes. Remembering 3 shapes is easy compared to 12 different combinations of notes.
In Accompaniment 1 we look at these 3 shapes. When we join the dots together of the notes, we have a visual representation of the chord and we have either a straight line, a triangle or a curve.
Once we have established those main shapes everything else comes together easily.
Do you fret about chords?
Use your keypad or keyboard and trace the shapes of your chords.
Do you find it easier to find chords now?
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