Your first piece

Introduction
The Basics
Your first Piece
Whole/Half Tones
Common Chords
Fingering
Simple Tunes
Inversions
Slash Chords
Advanced Chords
Chord Revision
Blues
Jazz
Guided Tunes
  Happy Birthday
  Imagine
Video Lessons
  We Are Young
More Tunes
Contact Me
Links
Link Exchange

Page views

Excellent, you're doing fantastic so far! Now I am going to show you how to play your first piece of music, Silent Night. I know, its a far cry from the Beatles but dont worry once you get these few basic chords down you will be able to pick up a Beatles or any other song and play it.

I'm going to throw you in the deep end here, you need to work out the melody for Silent night by yourself by EAR. This means listening to the piece and using trial and error to work out how the melody goes. Its not that difficult and its the only way to learn a tune if you dont want to learn to read music.

Heres a midi of the melody of Silent Night to help you work it out. Let me help you get underway, its all white keys and it starts on G. The first bit goes GAGE, the next bit is DDBCCG. Ok thats all I'm going to help for the time being, you need to learn to pick up songs by ear so you'll have to keep playing the rest of it and working out what notes it contains. Make sure to play the melody with your right hand as we'll need the left hand in a minute to play some accompaniment.

Your first chords

Now that you've got the melody down you want to make it sound a bit more like a piano piece by adding something with your left hand to it. That something is going to be chords. The reason I have chosen Silent Night as your first piece is because it only contains three chords, and they are all of the same type - Major.

Remember, a chord is just two or more notes played at the same time, for the purposes of this song we are going to be using three note chords also known as triads.

So what are the chords you need to know? C Major, F Major and G Major, I will now show you how to play each of these chords on the keyboard. To play the chord simply press the keys marked for the chord. So to play C Major I would press C, E and G at the same time.

C Major

F Major

G Major

You should memorize the above chords because you'll need them when you try to play the song.

The next thing you need is a "chord sheet", this is a way of telling you where the chords come with respect to the melody and lyrics. So If you look below I've included a chord sheet for Silent Night, now what you need to do is play the melody which you picked out by ear earlier and the chords as specified by the sheet below, together.

So to start you off, you would play the first note of the song (a G) with your right hand while at the same time playing the C chord as given above with your left hand. Now simply keep holding the C chord while you play the first line of the song. When the melody gets up to the section where the G chord is simply play a G chord in your left hand and continue with the melody in the right. Continue this all the way through until you can play the whole song with chords in your left and melody in your right hand at the same time. You might want to print out the chord sheet below and take it over to your piano or keyboard.

An example of playing Silent Night with chords and melody at the same time. You'll notice on the example that I am moving the chords around a little bit. That means that i'll play the C chord low down then next time play it higher up on the keyboard. You can try this once you're comfortable with the chords as well, it makes the song a bit more interesting.

C
Silent night, holy night
G C
All is calm, All is bright
F C
Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child
F C
Holy Infant so Tender and mild,
G C
Sleep in heavenly peace,
C G C
Sleep in heavenly peace. <Ending Riff> C G C

And there you go! You're first piano song, that wasnt so difficult was it?

This site is free and always will be. If you like my site, please support it by linking to it from your own website/blog or by sharing on Facebook, Twitter , youtube or any other website you have access to!