Piano & Keyboard For Beginners: Play By Ear Chords & Songs

Want to play new pop songs on the piano? Or old trendy songs? Want a tutorial for songs like ABCDEFU-GAYLE, or Easy On Me-Adele? A step by step guide is the best solution for beginners. Since I started teaching piano, I wondered why there was so many students that genuinely wanted to play piano, but were not satisfied with the songs. I created this class to solve the problem. We will go through songs that everyone know like A Thousand Year, Can’t help falling in love, No Sleep (Martin Garrix). Yes even EDM songs are covered here for a simple reason: We are learning to play by ear and not a tutorial on how to play like others. You are going to develop your own method of playing by ear through this course that was structured to start from the beginning. If you already know some piano, no problem. I am sure you can find out some useful informations on how to play by ear or improvise. We are going in this can from a super beginner level, to an advanced level!

There’s more than 130 lectures. What are we going to do through all of those?

The short way of explaining it is: We will learn some basic informations, use it to play new pop songs and then use all of this to play by ear. After playing by ear we are going to make it sound fancier by playing in our full hands on literally all the piano keyboard.

It’s divided into 14 days:

DAY 1: Piano keys

• Know the white & black keys
• Walking through all key names together to memorize it

DAY 2: Scales

• What is a Major and minor Scale?
• Start playing on the piano different scales
• Play piano octaves

DAY 3: Chords

• How to play Major and minor chords?
• How to make the chords better using inversions
• Variation of chords (5′ chords, 7 chords, Sus 2 & 4 chords)

DAY 4: Mastering Chords

• Going in depth into chords
• Start basic chord progressions
• Play different patterns to make the process easier
• Play our first song!

DAY 5: Diving Deeper into songs

• Playing the song: Perfect – Ed Sheeran
• Playing with 2 hands at the same time
• Using the Pedal (If you have one)

DAY 6: You can play lots of songs!

Here, we will do many follow-along videos, playing some songs using all the techniques that we learned in the previous videos. I will go slowly in my explanation, leaving you with the time to pause the video and practice while I am playing. The songs are: Can’t help Falling in love – Elvis Presley and Easy on me – Adele

DAY 7: PLAY BY EAR

Here, and fortunately, I will have the chance to share with you the ways that I found the most effective to play by ear. And because I believe that we learn by doing, we will learn by discovering together how to play the song A Thousand Year – Christina Perri and A Sky Full Of Stars – Coldplay. I will give you a challenge to play 2 songs and correct this together by sharing with you my thought process behind playing by ear. The songs are: Stay with me – Sam Smith and All of me – John Legend

DAY 8 & 9: Fast Learning

• Discover techniques to quickly know the melody by ear
• Discover techniques to directly recognize the chord progression
• Discover techniques to directly know the scale
• The exceptions to the rules

DAY 10: Make it sound Magic

This is a special part of the course, where I will guide you through my ways of playing like a pro on the piano, and use my full hand to play. But it’s not all theory: We will learn a song called ABCDEFU – GAYLE, and trending song by the time I am writing this. My goal is to make you independent as much as possible, so in the future you don’t have to refer to tutorial videos on how to sound like a pro. I placed everything you need to know here, to make the songs that you play sound magic. You will be amazed by how much you can do with the knowledge we gained!

DAY 11: Improvisation

Here, we are not going to do in depth into improvisation, since we already are able to transform songs from boring to exciting. We learned how to play melody and chords in the right hand at the same time, and how to play octaves with your left hand all over the piano. But this section, is going to be dedicated on how to play a melody you like it. So it’s more like composition or improvise your composition. It’s a fun section if you want to level up in piano.

DAY 12: Reading Notes

• Learn how to read Treble and Bass clef
• Use key signatures

DAY 13: Rhythms

• Dots, rests
• Time signature
• Reading notes together (a follow-along video)
• The different rhythms that we can use

DAY 14: Advanced part

Here, we are going to to over some information that we used, and play jazz with it.We will also go over a music sheet, and using our knowledge, we will play it directly on the piano. I will also here tell you what I was used throughout this course so maybe you want to use MuseScore or Notion

• The different rhythms that we can use
• Dots, rests
• Time signature
• Reading notes together (a follow-along video)