Figuring out what chords to play can be a daunting task. Knowing what notes work together is the first battle. In this tutorial I will show you an easy trick you can use to play any major triad chord. Are you ready? Bring your counting skills and read on.
Playing any major chord on a piano can be as simple as counting to 4. And then counting to 3. I call this the 4,3 rule and you’ll understand why in a moment.
Before we play any chord, we need to understand what makes a chord…well, a chord. A chord is a combination of three or more notes. Any chord is built off of a single note, called the root note. The second note in the chord is called a third. The last note in a major triad is called a fifth.
The first battle, when putting together a chord is to recognize the root note. Thankfully, the root note will always be in the name of the chord. For example: in a C Major chord, the root note would be C. In a G Major chord, the root note would be G. Now that we figured out the root note we can move on to find our third, or in other words, our second note in the chord.
Now the counting will come into play. If we take a C Major chord. “C’ will be the root note. Now we will count up 4 half steps from the root note. A half step is the smallest musical interval between two adjacent notes in a 12-tone scale. For example: Going from C to C♯ would be considered going up a half step. We need to do this 4 times from C.
we count up 4 half steps from the root note to get our third. In this case that note is E.
Now that we have found our third, lets go ahead and find our fifth. To do this we count up 3 half steps from our third (E).
we now count up 3 half steps from the second note to get our fifth. In this case that note is G.
All that played together is a C Major chord (C-E-G). To test the 4,3 rule even further, watch the video below to see how this work’s with any major triad chord.