 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this very important chord lesson for piano players and anyone in general, I'm here to tell you 10 things you need to do before you actually start playing those chords or those chord progressions on not only the piano, it could be any instrument be it the guitar or whatever it may be. So do stay tuned till the very end. Each of these 10 things, if you will, each of these 10 practices is what I've kind of evolved over a musical career which has spanned a few years now, maybe two and a half decades and I've learned this kind of the hard way in the sense it's taken me some time, I've made them, I've kind of struggled in certain scenarios and I feel that these 10 things will work for at least me and a lot of my students who I've taught over the last decade and a half especially to kind of have a stress-free and enjoyable and a future-proof way of figuring out chords on the piano or any instrument for a song. It'll also help you train your year, it'll help you improve your theory and it'll also help you to understand the song better and just have a lot of fun along the way. At the end of the day, that's what it's all about. So before we get started, it'll be awesome if you would consider getting the notes of the lesson on our Patreon page, it's handwritten for you, there'll be a nice downloadable PDF of whatever I've written for this lesson and pretty much all the other YouTube videos of the past and the YouTube videos of the future. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already and there's a bell somewhere so please ring that bell. May not make a sound but try and ring it, it's fun and now let's get started with the lesson. First off, a very obvious thing. You are trying to learn a song. Now don't look at that as a fancy science experiment. You should think first of all like a lover of music. You love the song, you love music, we all do on planet earth so don't jump in, listen to the song, enjoy the song, just feel the song go out in the garden, just listen to it five, six times. Don't listen to a song with the objective of learning it. That's a very, very important mindset you need to first get into your system. Listen to the song while doing other things, that's another nice thing I would like to do. Listen to it in the company of friends or while you're in the kitchen or while you're at a jog or walking your dog or whatever it may be. So in addition to watching your original artist, the original composer of the song playing these renditions live, it's also very advisable to look at covers of the same song by other musicians. For example, Blowing in the Wind would have been covered by so many people like the great Stevie Wonder and the like. So you could pretty much every song and if you take a song like a church hymn or a traditional you know American folk rock song which was composed in the 1920s or a Broadway musical, you'd have so many renditions of the same song like somewhere over the rainbow must have been played at least 50,000 times. I'm quite certain if you want to count it. Watching many of these musicians perform these songs would give you a sense of what should be your eventual goal for the song. Maybe you prefer a Hawaiian version of the song. Maybe you prefer a blues version. Maybe you prefer a more laid back version of Billie Jean by Michael Jackson. You know, stuff like that. You may get inspired by a cover because that's another artist rendition of the original artist. So we are trying to do justice to the original song but we are equipped with our own skills. So we try to showcase or portray our own skills but give due respect to the original composer. So listen to live performances and covers very very closely. Don't start playing yet. Listen and then we are going to play. So the third thing before you start diving into the song is you need to understand the song structure. The verse, the chorus, the bridge. Is there an intro? Is there an outro? Is there a guitar solo or a saxophone solo somewhere in the middle? Is there a pre-chorus? Is there a post-chorus? Stuff like that. Very important to make a map, a roadmap for the entire song. You may argue why. Why should I bother doing this? Now a song is about four to five minutes long, right? For the most, let's say it's four minutes. If you do the verse, if you know the chords or the chord progression for the verse, the odds that the same chords are going to repeat for verse two are going to be almost hundred percent and the odds that the same chords are going to be repeated for all the choruses are, again, I would go out on a limb and say hundred percent. So if the chords for the chorus were let's say one, five, six, four, it's probably going to just be the same thing. So you might as well map it out and you also don't want to forget the structure when you're jamming with a band and you want to get that structure also into your system. However, for some genres of music like blues, the song structure is in the poetic way of phrasing the music. So it's 12 bar. The form is basically four bars of something, four bars of something, and then four bars of something else. The first four bars will generally be the call and the last four bars will be the response. And then the second four bars will be the kind of repeat of the call. For example, I'm tore down, almost level with the ground. And then they repeat the sense, well, I'm tore down, almost level with the ground. Yeah. And then the response at the ninth bar. Well, I feel like this, where my baby can be found. Almost all blues songs have that structure, that a, a prime and be the rhyming structure if you use the poetic way of doing things. Right. So understand the song structure, very, very important. So that'll kind of take a four minute song and make it just about maybe if you're lucky, 40 or 50 seconds under a minute, you just have one minute of music to learn rather than a mountain, which seems like that at least a four minute or five minute mountain, break it down part by part and get the song structure going. Moving on to the fourth thing, this is more of a psychological thing. This is for your instrument per se. If you're a guitar player or if you're a piano player or if you're a vocalist, always listen to the thing which you are about to do or going to do last. Why I say that is if you're a guitar player, the first thing you're drawn to, if you're listening to a Clapton song is what is Eric Clapton doing. But then you may forget to recognize what Nathan East is doing, the bass player or the fabulous drummers in the band or the keyboard player or the trumpet player and so on and so forth. So a nice thing for the mind, it's a psychological training more than anything would just be I'm a piano player. So I listen to the piano part last and for all of us on planet Earth, we tend to listen to the vocal line first. So you may want to listen to the vocal line last or forget, block out the vocal line with maybe an app like Moises or an app which kind of removes the vocals from a song, so to speak. So that way you really dive into the other elements which are not taking up most of the brain. So listen to your part last. It may take time. That's what we are here to do. We are here to really master that song and get into the mind of the artist, so to speak. So the next thing you need to do are all the music theory basics. You need to know if the song is on A major. You can't just go and play the chords. You need to know, hey, my song is on A major. Let me write down the scale in a maybe in a neat round circle that helps. I also like writing it down with the shape of the scale in a line. Then I like to write down all my available chords. What are the major chords? What are the minor chords? What is the diminished chord which is 7? 1 4 5 major 2 3 6 minor 7 is diminished. Then perhaps a few tried and tested cadences like the perfect cadence which works well a lot. The plagal cadence 4 to 1 or the jazz 2 5 1s which could also work. So then you start figuring out the chords of the song even without knowing the chords in the actual song. You use the power of what theory has to offer, which is giving you tried and tested tools. And then you try and AB compare it with what the actual song is. So your scale and chord theory needs to be on point. If the song is a bit more advanced, if it has maybe secondary dominance, you need to map those out. What if there could be a tritone substitution in there? Well, maybe so there could be some cyclic 251. So be prepared depending on the genre or the scale of the song which you're trying to learn the level of the song which you're trying to digest. And now coming to more polyphonic instrument requirements. If you're a piano player or a guitar player or any chord player, you need to definitely figure out your choices of chords with the correct inversions and voicing. So if you're moving, if you have a four chord progression, you need to take the technicality of playing those chords out of the brain. You need to figure it out. So, you know, let's say D A B minor G, you have to figure out the most efficient way of playing those four chords. There's going to be a lot more challenging things out there like the pattern, the hand coordination or the, you know, if you're doing a guitar pattern, are you going to do some muted pattern which so you'd rather invest your brains effort into learning the pattern or counting with the band or listening to your singer helping out your bandmates rather than be in your own shell, so to speak, which is, Oh, am I going to play it right or wrong? Should always develop that confidence and one less challenge will be inversions and the correct chord voicing which will serve the song best. So figure that out very importantly. Now I'm still not going to allow you to play the chords yet. You need to listen back to the song and figure out when the chords are changing. Sometimes chords may change in usual regular ways. One, one, two, three, four, change two, three, every four beats. So you need to count the beat structure of the song. Just move your head, move your body to the song and just you don't have to play the chords, but you just have to say okay, chord number one, four counts, chord number two, four counts, chord number three, four counts, chord number four, four counts, but it could be a scenario where there could be two chords which happen within a bar. It could be one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. And that third chord happened for four, or there could be a case where it may be one, two, three, three. So you need to know where the chord hits occur. And then how long do they last? Like kind of like note duration when you're transcribing a melody, how long is the note? In this case, figure out how long is each chord. When the changes occur, you could literally, if you have a chord chart in front of you, could look at the chords, listen to the song and say okay, D, point, three, four, A, point, three, four, next chord, you know. Next chord, quick change. Oh, that one. And then or it could be one, two, it could be a climbing scenario like three, four, one, two, three, that's four chords in a block of pretty much a bar of music. Jazz songs will have a lot more chords in them. Pop songs will have a lot less chords in them. So it depends on the genre as well. So you need to figure out the chord changes and prepare a chart showing you how long each chord is. If there's any repetition, maybe using different colors would be very helpful. So each set or each part of the song would have a different color. So you could see some of my chord charts which are available on our Patreon page, which we post very regularly, right? So now you have the theory backing, you have the song kind of in your radar, you know the structure, you need to now figure out the rhythm because when you play chords on an instrument, you don't just go two, three, four. Obviously, there'll be some kind of a rhythm pattern. Now, how does this rhythm pattern reach you? Or how does this rhythm pattern come to you? I think you should look at more organic techniques, especially when there's no piano in the song. Let's say you take a song by John Denver, Country Roads, you know, you listen to the track and he goes country roads take me home to the place but that melody doesn't help you rhythmically, doesn't help you with actually what what to play on the chords or which chord pattern to play. If you listen to the bass line in Country Roads, it kind of goes something like that. It's a very country pattern. And the right hand goes the right hand could follow the banjo or the guitar picking pattern which is there. Would stake me home to the place I belong to that's the guitar in there. And that's the bass guitar. So you have the bass followed here by the pianist and pretty much two instruments going on. And you didn't need to even figure out what the piano is playing in this song. There is no piano to begin with. But at the end of it all to the place. Doesn't sound too bad. In fact, I think it sounds quite authentic. I wouldn't mind playing this pattern at a gig if I have a gig in the next few hours or whatever. Right. So very important. Decide your rhythm pattern with respect to the actual song and what ingredients are there in the song. And it's a very powerful approach because then you can just play a rock song which doesn't have piano. You can play folk music which you know doesn't even have your instrument or you can decide based on just the vocal melody which is already rhythmic in nature or just forget everything and just play with the drums. See what the drummer is doing. Right. So decide your rhythm pattern with all the other ingredients and then the next step or the penultimate step in this lesson would be once you get that rhythm practice it with just one chord. So let's say I take a major and I want to get this rhythm into the play. Doom cha. Doom ta. Doom ta. Doom ta. I like that rhythm for some reason. So practice just that with one chord. Or maybe there's an arpeggio pattern you want to build out of the guitar strumming pattern which is ding-tick-tack. Ding-tick-tack. Something like that. Then you can once you invest the time over this one chord then you take the same pattern now you figured out your inversions you figured out the progression all the chords for every section and then you use it use the same pattern over the chord progressions. Maybe the verse will have that pattern and the chorus could have a more country pattern. Right. So before you play the rhythm pattern with the chord progression decide the pattern especially when you're new to your instrument played over one chord and enjoy the song with just that one chord and hopefully this will all prepare you to tackle the song and it'll make the process of then playing these chords with the original song running with you. You don't have to play the song on your own. You can play it with the actual song. Maybe you could slow it down a bit but apart from that you should actually play these songs with the original or in a live real-world environment with a singer with a band with a choir. Ideally don't play songs especially when you're accompanying alone. You need to accompany with people or try and make the environment as real world as possible. And I'd like to leave you with one final thing to prepare yourself for learning chords. This is more from a technical or a technology perspective. What you need to do is download the song or listen to the song in the highest possible quality. So that means the input coming into you the file rather and it also means the output medium what you're listening on. So you need to perhaps start with the output first because at the end of the day the songs are all pretty much in a very unified sonic quality these days unless you maybe want to compare YouTube with Spotify or Apple music. I would say the streaming guys will sound much better than the YouTube video unless you watch the YouTube video and proper full definition. So that comparison aside you need to at least ensure that your listening mediums your earphones your headphones your speakers are all decent enough you'd want to invest on hardware or gear which not only gives you the good sound but sometimes when you can't hear things well you tend to amplify the level of the device and that in the long run may affect your ear. So you want the best possible listening environment the best possible listening tools be it headphones earphones or speakers whatever your budget can afford of course but focus on that that is very important. Once you have all this in play the the song and a good set of headphones speakers or whatever you would need to listen to this song in a clever way. So if your music player has an equalizer you can play around with the equalizer to listen to maybe the bass a lot more clearly you can say I want to listen more of the 60 to 100 hertz or the up to 200 to 50 hertz range which is what the bass will play immediately you can kind of detect the chords easily maybe you want to adjust your music system to not hear too much of vocals so you can reduce the highs. However there's an app these days which quite a recent app called Moises you can go to their site Moises.ai and it has the ability the unique ability to successfully remove vocals from a song and not only that you can solo the drums and bass just few ingredients completely remove the vocals or reduce the vocals and have a metronome to practice the features are endless so you should check out Moises for sure. I use it in a lot of the classes at the music school whenever we do our transcription or ear training lessons whenever we have to listen we tend to always use Moises. So that's about it from a technology perspective and hope you found the lesson useful from the point of view of preparing to play chords for pretty much any song normally on our channel there's a lot of playing there's a lot of exercises there's a lot of notation here it's just more of a guidance from a person like me with a a good amount of years of experience playing music in different professional circumstances be it with a choir or a band or in a recording environment with a producer or a director and of course having taught this been lucky enough to have taught this for a decade and a half with students from across the globe. Right guys thanks a ton for watching the video again this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. Cheers