This is your introduction to chords and how to play them on the keyboard. There are primarily two different types of chords you need to be familiar with – major chords and minor chords. A fundamental difference between the two is in terms of their sound.

A major chord is usually a happy sound, whereas a minor chord is a bit sad or melancholic. So, how do you play chords as opposed to notes which you’ve been playing all this while? We’ll start with something simple, what we call a chord triad, which is basically three notes played together, at once.

Forming Chord Triads

Place your right-hand thumb on the middle C and arrange the remaining fingers to the right. Now play 1-3-5 (C-E-G), that is hit the keys with your thumb, middle finger, and pinkie simultaneously. The particular triad you just played is the C Major triad.

What you need to keep in mind is 5 and 4 semi-tones. Those are the steps between your 1-3 and 3-5 in this triad. Once you understand that, you can play a major chord in any key by just playing three notes – that particular key, 5 semi-tones to its right, and 4 semi-tones further to the right.

The technique is quite similar for a minor chord as well, the only difference being you need to reverse the order of the steps, that is 4 and 5 semi-tones, instead of 5 and 4. Now going back to the C Major chord, how do you practise this as a beginner?

Practising the C Major Chord

First play just the C (finger number 1), then you add the third finger, and play just these two together. Keep doing this until you get comfortable, and then and only then, add the fifth finger to play 1-3-5 together, which is nothing but your C Major chord.

To practise the C Major chord with your left hand, use a similar approach. The only difference would be the finger positions being inverted, that is 5-3-1 (5 being your pinkie and 1 being your thumb). Now apply the semi-tone concept (5 and 4 for major chords, 4 and 5 for minor chords) to different keys and arrive at chords such as F Major, D Major, and so on.

Check out our upcoming post to see if you got the chords right. We will be exploring four basic chords in the C Major scale – C Major, F Major, G Major, and A Minor. That should give you a fair understanding about triad chords – major and minor – on the keyboard.