Learning How to Create Basic Piano Chords

The basic piano chords are going to be very important to you in learning to play the piano. When you learn to understand chords you will be better able to read music and understand how to play the piano much easier.

Construction of Chords
Chords are made from musical intervals. A chord is composed of three parts. They are the root note, which gives you the name of the chord, a Major third or minor third and a Perfect fifth, Augmented fifth or a diminished fifth.
A Major chord has a root, Major third and Perfect fifth. A minor chord has a root, minor third and Perfect fifth. An Augmented chord has a root, Major third and Augmented fifth. A diminished chord has a root, minor third and diminished fifth.

Making a Chord
Now that you know the basic construction of each type of chord, you can being to create a chord. Major chords are the easiest to create. Simply choose any note as the root note. Now you choose the Major third, which is simply three notes from the root note. Now finish the chord with a Perfect fifth note which is five notes from the root note. An example would be a D chord. D is the root, F is the Major third and A is the Perfect fifth.
As you move into minor chords, diminished and augmented chords the notes you will use will include not only the white keys, but the black keys on your keyboard. It is simplest to start learning chords with the Major chords. For more information check out the Piano Basics page.

Playing Around with a Chord
Most of the time you will be playing a chord with all three notes together. Using our example, a D chord, you would play D, F and A together to form the chord. However, when you start looking at how chords are used in music you will see that they are not always played together. Sometimes you may just use two of the notes or you may play the notes separately.
You can play around with a chord to see all the different ways that you can use the notes within the chord together and separately to create a nice sound. Chords are usually used in the bass clef and played with the left hand, but they can also be use din the treble clef and played with the right hand. Try playing chords with both hands and experimenting to see what you can do with chords.

The Importance of Chords
Have you ever been listening to someone play the piano and they strike a note that doesn’t seem to sound right? Part of the importance of chords is helping you to see how the notes harmonize or go together. This is especially important for you if you are trying to learn to write your own music.

You can use chords in many ways to create many wonderful songs on the piano. Through understanding the basic piano chords you can begin to see how music is written and become a song writer yourself.