I'm going to talk to you about playing by ear, and give you tips and tricks and go over the basics of training your ear. I hope to shorten the distance between hearing something in your head, and translating that to the piano keyboard. You may think you are tone deaf, but if you can hear an interval going up or down then you aren't tone def. You just don't have an understanding of intervals and how notes go together.

I'm going to go through things like intervals, and understanding how chords move together. I'm going to teach you a bit about understanding scales, and learning how to listen. It's all about understanding the keyboard as a visual representation of what you are hearing in your headOne of the best things about playing piano by ear is that you can usually just sit down and play without having to give thought to what you’re playing. Most pianists, unfortunately, don’t really focus on this because they tend to get caught up in the need for sheet music that can stifle musical expression. It’s what’s comfortable to them and what they learned, so they don’t stray from it. Here’s how you can avoid doing the same. 

A good first lesson to start with is chord structure and music structure. To be able to improvise music, you have to understand the rules behind it. There’s a term in Western (American and European) music that’s called tertian harmony. This means intervals of three; notes are all an interval apart. I’m going to skip the explanation of notes and intervals. Suffice to say, intervals are one note apart; C, D, E, etc. Tertian harmony means, then, that the chords are based on intervals of three. The C major chord, for example, is based on C, E, and G – all third intervals apart.  

Chords are made of notes in a scale. Using the C major scale and chord, you can look at the chord and see that the scale goes C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and C. You can figure out the chord by looking at those intervals. Building chords on top of one another and their quality (major or minor) is determined by the scale. 

So, we know the C major chord – the F major chord as another example would be the notes F, A and C, and A and C also come from the C scale. You can overlap chords like this to create a rather nice effect, depending whether you go major or minor. You wouldn’t use any accidentals like G# or Eb, because they’d make the chord sound very dissonant. Of course, if you want that effect, use it, but be sure you can do it well otherwise it just sounds like you don’t know how to play. Trust me, I know this from experience and it isn’t pretty. You could do the same with a G major chord. C, F and G are the most common ones, but I also like D. Here you’ll use F# as the third interval. 

To find out chord notation for an easy piano lesson, you can think of all chords as being referenced to C. So, a C chord will be noted as 1. D would be 2, E would be 3 and so forth.  

Most songs will use only a few chords, because they repeat and provide a nice counter to a main melody. Once you learn the various types of scales, you can improvise with the scales along with the chords as a backup sound. The most common chord progressions are 1,4,5 and 4,5,1. 

If you understand the progression of chords, you can figure out how to match the right scale progression to it to make your improvised songs sound like they’d been rehearsed beforehand and not just improvised.

I'm going to talk to you about whole notes, as they relate to 4/4 time, also known as common time. In 4/4 time there are four beats per measure. A whole note, as the name implies, takes up a whole measure.

To understand the proper way to play a whole note, start your metronome. Hit a key on a click of the metronome and hold it for four clicks. On the fifth click, a new measure is starting and you should play the note again. Remember that the click that you start on counts as one click. So it goes: note click click click, note click click click, note click click click, etc.

Keep playing whole notes, holding them for four clicks and repeating on the fifth click until you have a feel for whole notes.

 I'm going to teach you a few finger exercises to help you build up speed and dexterity on the piano. Let's start our finger exercise in that old standby, C Major. With whatever hand you choose to start with, play the first five notes of the scale, using all five fingers. Work your way from C to G, then back down again. Don't play as fast as you can just yet. Start off nice and slow and make sure that all of the notes are the same volume. You want steady movements. Don't flick your fingers, move them steady and in a straight down motion.

Now let's move on to a full scale, say the F major scale. Start slowly, playing just one octave at first. Play up and down the octave, nice and slowly. Once you are sure that you are playing the notes steady and evenly, you can begin to pick up speed. It's best to use a metronome for these practice sections. Start at a slow tempo and slowly turn up the pace of the metronome. Practicing this way insures that you will develop a proper sense of musical timing. It's also a fun idea to practice playing blues scales. When you are playing a blues song it sounds really great to play a fast blues scale at an appropriate part of the song.

The last finger exercise I am going to talk about is arpeggios. An arpeggio is when you play the individual notes of a chord instead of hitting them all together. Play the notes of your chosen chord and then work your way up the keyboard, playing higher and higher octaves of the chord.

Whatever methods you chose for finger practice, remember that starting off slow and building speed is the proper way to insure that you aren't learning bad habits. As you practice the exercises your fingers will develop the muscle memory required to play the scales faster and faster without having to think about the notes.

A chord progression is a series of chords put together in a pattern. In the beginning of the video, I play a chord progression in the key of F. That progression is F, B flat, C, B Flat, and back to F.

Chord progressions are based around piano scales, so when I say the song is in the key of F, I mean that its chords are based on the F major scale. F is the root of the scale, B flat is the fourth note of the scale and C is the fifth note of the chord. Because of this we can say that F is the I chord, B flat is the IV chord, and C is the V chord. These three chords are the most popular chords in modern music. A lot of the songs you hear on the radio are written with just those three chords, although in a variety of keys.

Play around with the chords on your keyboard. You can put them in any order you like. For variety you can pick out individual notes of the chord instead of playing the whole thing at once. You can also play around with the pattern in which you play those individual notes of the chords, or play around with different inversions.

Let's build a different set of chords from a new key to help you fully grasp the concept. I'm going to use the key of E major. The root of the E major scale is E. Next let's hit the II chord, based on the second note of the scale, F sharp minor. From there let's play the V chord, a B chord. Now let's return to the E chord for a couple of measures. Another chord we haven't used yet is the VI chord. The sixth note of the E major scale is a C sharp, so let's play a measure with a C sharp chord. From there let's go to the IV chord, which is an A chord, to the V chord, back to the root chord of E.

You can see that we've used a variety of chords in that last performance, but all of them are based on the scale of the key that the song is in. There are several common, formulaic, chord progressions, but if you play around with chords and get a feel for how they sound together, you'll be able to create your own custom chord progressions.

In the last lesson I discussed the proper posture for sitting at the piano. In this lesson I am going to go over the proper hand posture for playing the piano. If you play for any extended amount of time, having the proper hand posture not only insures that you are playing the instrument properly, but helps to reduce fatigue.

The first thing to make sure of is that your wrists are level with the piano. If your wrists are to low, you will have more difficulty hitting the keys properly. If your wrists are to high then you won't have quite the control that you need, and may find yourself accidentally bumping the black keys. Make sure when you strike the keys that you push your fingers down straight and with even strength; don't flick at the keys.

Now is also a good time to tell you how pianists number their fingers. You may hear an instructor tell you to hit a key with your first finger or your fifth finger and need to know which fingers those numbers refer to. The first finger is your thumb, and as you may be able to guess, the index finger is two, the middle finger is three, the ring finger is four, and the little finger is five.

That's it for this lesson. Now that you know the proper way to sit at a piano and the proper way to use your hands, we can get back to actually playing music.

Proper posture is an important part of proper piano playing. In this lesson I am going to give you a quick overview of the proper way to sit at the piano bench. The first thing to make sure of is that you do not slouch. Slouching limits your mobility on the keyboard and will have a negative impact on your piano playing. Slouching also doesn't look so attractive when you are on stage playing for thousands of people. So be sure to sit up straight every time you sit down to the piano.

The next thing to make sure of is that your elbows are at a 90 degree angle. If your elbows are outstretched further than that, you have your piano bench set to far back. If your elbows are pushed back behind your body, then your piano bench is to close to the piano. Sitting a proper distance from the piano also insures that you will have the full reach and mobility that is needed to play the instrument.

As you get into a song and the emotion starts flowing, you may find yourself naturally leaning into the piano, or hunkering down to really jam out. This can be called artistic movement, and is perfectly acceptable. The guidelines in this document are designed to make sure that you have a solid foundation when you are starting to learn the instrument, not to limit your expression.

When you first sit down at a piano keyboard, it can be a bit daunting. In front of you, there are 88 keys. Some are white, some are black. Whenever you are beginning something new, it is helpful to have a starting point. The starting point for learning to play the piano is a single note, Middle C. In this lesson, I'm going to take you from playing that simple note to playing a short chord progression. Don't worry if you don't know what a chord progression is right now, I will explain it a little bit later.

For now, sit down at your piano and find Middle C. The video will show you where it is at. From middle C, I am going to show you how to play a complete C Major Scale. The C Major Scale is an easy one because it consists entirely of white keys. So, let's just play the white keys in order, starting at Middle C. The note directly to the right of Middle C is a D. As we continue moving to the right we play E, F, G, A, B and then finally return to C. That last C is an octave higher than Middle C. This collection of notes is the C Major Scale. The scale doesn't need to begin on middle C, it can start and end on any C on the keyboard.

Now that you know a scale, you have an important building block to music. Scales are used to create melodies and to construct chords. A chord is a collection of three or more notes, all played simultaneously. Go back to Middle C and play it. From there skip a note and play the E, and then skip another note and play the G. Those three notes form a chord known as a triad, which simply means that there are three notes in it. Now that you know the notes of the C chord, play them all at once.

Music wouldn't be very interesting with just one chord, so I'm going to show you two other chords that can also be played with just the white keys. Let's start with an F chord. You remember where the F key is right? Good, hit the F key now and follow the same pattern we did to create the C chord. From F, skip a note to A, then skip another to C. Play them all together and you have an F chord. Now I'm going to show you the G chord. Where do we start the G chord? You guessed it, on the G key. From G skip a note to B, and skip another to D. Play those three notes together and you have learned three chords.

If you play those three notes in order, you'll find they have a choppy sound to them. We can smooth that sound out using what are called chord inversions. Play a C chord. Now, keeping your first finger on the C, move the other two and play an F note and an A note. Take a look at the notes you have just played. C, F, A. Remember an F chord is made up of the notes F, A, and C. What you just played is an F chord with the C on the bottom instead of the top. Moving the notes around in this manor is called inverting the chord. Another way to invert a chord is to take the root note and put it on top. If we do that to the G chord, we end up with the notes D, B, G. Play that inversion of the G chord from the F inversion that I just showed you. Now when you play all three chords together it sounds much more smooth and melodic because your hands aren't jumping around the keyboard as much. It is also slightly easier to play.

But playing the piano is more than just your right hand. Now I am going to show you what to do with your left hand. As you play a chord in your right hand, play its root note with your left. The root note is simply the note that the chord is named after. C for a C chord, F for an F chord, G for a G chord, etc. Play a C note with your left hand and simultaneously play a C chord with your right. Now an F note with your left hand and F chord with your right. G note with your left hand, G chord with your right. When we put chords in an order like this, we are creating a musical phrase. This particular type of phrase is called a chord progression, because we are progressing through a serious of chords. C-F-G-C is what we call a 1-4-5 progression.