Guides › Piano Chords for Beginners: Which Chords to Learn First
Good news: to play your first songs on piano, you don’t need to know hundreds of chords. A handful will do, as long as you understand how they’re built. Once you know the recipe, you can work out any major or minor chord yourself, without a chart or a diagram.
In this guide: what a chord is, the difference between major and minor, the chords to learn first, and the pianist’s trick for moving from one to the next without jumping: inversions. With an exercise to try at the keyboard at every step.
A chord is three or more notes played together. The most common are triads: three notes stacked up, each a third above the one below.
On the white keys, the recipe fits in one sentence: play one, skip one. Put your right thumb on middle C, skip D, put finger 3 on E, skip F, put your pinky (finger 5) on G. C–E–G: that’s the C major chord, your first chord. Press all three fingers down at once, then play the notes one after another: blocked or broken, it’s the same chord.
In the left hand, an octave lower: fingers 5-3-1, pinky on C, thumb on G. Each note of the chord has a name:
Tip: Not sure yet where middle C is, or which finger has which number? Start with the guides how to find every note on the keyboard and piano finger numbers: five minutes, and everything that follows will be crystal clear.
Play C–E–G, then lower the E by a half step, to the black key just to its left: C–E♭–G. Listen: the chord turns darker, more melancholy. That’s C minor. Only the third, the middle note, moved.
To tell whether a chord is major or minor, count the half steps from the root. A half step is the move from one key to its very next neighbor, white or black:
Tip: Ear exercise: play C major, then C minor, several times. Then, eyes closed, have someone play one at random and guess: bright (major) or dark (minor)? Lesson 44 trains you on exactly that.
In songbooks, lead sheets and chord charts, a chord is written as a letter with a few symbols after it. The letter is the root; what follows tells you the type of chord:
Tip: Stuck on a symbol? The chord dictionary gives you the notes, fingering and inversions of every chord, for example G7 or Cmaj7.
There’s no point learning chords in alphabetical order: pop and jazz pianists learn them in families, the chords that live together in the same key. The first family, C major, is played entirely on the white keys, with the same hand shape.
Here’s an order that works well, the one used in unit 8 of the method:
Tip: A song in G mostly uses the chords of the G family: as soon as you know the key, you know which chords to expect.
Take C–E–G and move the C up an octave: E–G–C. These are still the notes of C major, so it’s still a C chord, but inverted. Do it again with the E: G–C–E. A three-note chord has three positions, each with its own fingering:
Tip: Look for the biggest gap (two white keys skipped): that’s where the hand opens up, at the top in first inversion, at the bottom in second inversion. Lesson 46 has you play all three positions.
In C major, the progression C – G – Am – F (I – V – vi – IV in Roman numerals) carries a remarkable number of songs, from the Beatles’ Let It Be to Adele’s Someone Like You (in a different key). In root position, your hand jumps from chord to chord. With inversions, it stays almost still around middle C:
Tip: The rule behind the magic: keep the common notes under the same finger, and move the others to the nearest note (lesson 65). Try it: one whole note per chord, then add the root in the left hand (C, G, A, F). The hit-song progression piece in the repertoire has you play it as real music.
Chords stick by playing them often, not for long. Here’s a routine to do every day for a week or two, slowly at first:
Tip: In Pianamo, the chords you learn come back in Today’s Practice, just before you forget them: the review takes care of itself. The method is free, with no subscription or credit card; the first six lessons open without an account, the rest with a free Google account.