 Hi guys, this is Jason here from the Nathaniel School of Music and in this lesson, let's do a chord practice exercise which not only trains your technique on the piano but also vastly improves your year as well as your music theory all at the same time, sort of what I call as a three dimensional approach towards practicing the piano. So let's get started, basically you take any note of a scale, let's say in this case I'm taking G which is the first note of the G major scale, isn't it? That's G and you need to first write down all the available chords of the G major scale which is G major, A minor, B minor, C major, D major, E minor, F sharp diminished and the G back. Of course that's not a new chord, it's just the same chord on the top. So now after having written it down, you need to figure out which of those written down chords have the note G in them because my current target for practice is G. So you'll find that there's the G major chord which has G, you'll define the C major chord which has G there and you'll find the E minor chord which again has the G in the middle. So when we normally play these chords, it's all over the place, it's scattered, the sound gets a bit confusing and rather annoying, it confuses the singer who's performing with you and it's also quite tough to play on the piano because your hand keeps moving. So we use chord inversions to make life easy. So I'm just taking chord inversions as the main subject and trying to develop a challenge around that which will train our year, our theory and pretty much everything at the same time. So you take G and your challenge is to keep G always on the top with your pinky ideally because your pinky is at the right. So keep G with the right hand pinky and now you need to re-angle the chord G major and all the other chords which have G in them so that G remains on the top. So what do we do? G major is G, B, D that won't work because G is in the bottom. So we invert it by then doing B, D, G that sticks G on the top. Then you can do C major which has G in it in root position which still has G in the top and what is the other chord which seems to have G in it? E minor which I have to play in second inversion. So G major in first inversion, C major in root position and E minor in second inversion. So you need to toggle that. What's very important is you need to practice all these chords with their true root. So if you take G major in whichever inversion you're going to need to play G in the bottom because G is the name of the chord or the root of the chord and then you go C major with whatever inversion and C is in the base. E minor, E minor is in the base. So here's where your ears come into play. You need to do two things with your ear. The first thing is you need to just sing the top end of the chord. Okay, that's just a single G and while you play the piano with all the chord changes you should not leave that G. You should not lose the G from your voice. So let's see how that goes. Two G, two C. C major with the G at the top. E minor with G at the top. C major with G at the top. And then G with G at the top. Right? So that's your challenge and challenge number two will be to sing the roots of each of these chords. So G, C or E whatever suits your pitch. You don't have to go really base. So G, C, E. So you need to practice this really well. The top end you need to hold your note G no matter what comes at you. You need to keep singing G, G, G and the base movement is extremely important for the harmonic awareness of the song especially for your ear to know the chord changes and not only that even know what the chord is in the first place. So you need to know that the chord went from G to C and then to E minor and C and we know it by theory that the 1, the 4 and the 5 of any major scale are major chords. The 2, the 3 and the 6 of any major scale are minor chords and the 7 is diminished. So you use that theory and you know that whenever you're singing G the chord has to be G major because you're in the G major scale. So the exercise again involves the note G and then all the chords which have the note G played in an inversion in such a way that G is at the top end and then you play the base notes in the left hand and then you need to sing the right hand pinky which is the G and you have to sing the left hand roots of the chord. Moving on you can also consider other notes of the same scale and then its underline chords. So let's say the next note A. Now A what are the chords which have A in them? Obviously the namesake A minor, A C E then you'll also have the D major. D major which has A A at the top and also you have the 7 diminished which is F diminished. A is in the middle there. The same drill you need to take A with a pinky, play your A minor, D major, A minor in that inversion so that A is at the top, D major in this inversion so that A is at the top and then you also do the F sharp diminished slightly tricky if you don't know that chord maybe you could ignore it. So once you've covered all the diatonic chords of the scale in this case G major scale you can then start doing a lot of other interesting stuff. You can start finding chords which have G in it which don't necessarily have to be in a particular key or in a particular scale. So a great way to start will just be all the major and the minor triads which have the note G in it. What are they? Namesake chords G major, G minor and observe how I'm playing them. I'm playing them with G respected at the top end. B D G, D flat D G, G minor then you're trying to find a major and a minor chord where G is the fifth of that chord which is C major. C major then you have C minor, C minor again with G at the top and then the more interesting part is where you're trying to find chords which have G in the middle of them namely E flat major and E minor which is a minor chord which has G in the middle. So the way you look at it is G is the root of G major G minor, G is the fifth of C major G is the major third of E flat major and G is the minor third of E minor. So that's about expanding your chord knowledge and that's also a way to expand your ear at the same time because you have to sing these notes all that G and then the bass and then that's E and so on and so forth. Right and you can take this principle even forward if you're aware of chords which are not just triads for example you could take a major seventh chord which has G in it. What is that? A flat major seventh right? G is at the top end or you could do a minor seventh flat five chord which is A minor seventh flat five or A half diminished. Also do a couple of sus chords like D sus. Again remember G has to still be at the top end and maybe a diminished chord diminished seventh perhaps E diminished seventh will have G in it right. That's a G at the top you could put this all together with the chord progression which I played at the beginning of the lesson which is G major E flat major C major E minor C minor G minor E diminished seventh A flat major seventh A minor seventh flat five D sus four and back to G that's ten chords. So that could be a nice eventual goal to have at the end of this lesson if you're a more intermediate or an advanced learner and also don't forget to sing the bass and sing the top and G. However if you're a beginner or a newcomer to the piano just getting by with some music theory write down all your diatonic chords of G major that's more than enough there are seven chords to work with you can even ignore the diminished if you don't use it that often and then just take a note by note of that scale you're starting with G so take G figure out all the chords in the G scale which have G in it which are G major C major and E minor now you may not even be in the key of G major what if you're in the key of C major in the key of C major G is the fifth note in the key of G major G is the first note so in C C major you could figure out all the C major chords which have G in it which is C major E minor and a very own G major which was there in the other scale as well so this is an excellent way to not only practice the chords of your major scale or the inversions of the major scale it's also a great way to train your year because you're focused on a specific note while changing a lot of other stuff and you're also focused on the bass of the chord at the same time so it's a good technical challenge it's a good year training challenge and I think it's also very good music theory and a way to really improve your vocabulary as well and at the same time this could definitely give you a few creative ideas to improve on your improvisation and perhaps hopefully even compose some music of your own so have a lot of fun with this again this is Jason here from the Nathaniel School of Music thanks for watching and it'll be great if you can subscribe to our channel if you haven't already turn on the bell icon for notifications leave us a comment with what you thought about this lesson like share with your musician friends and whatever else you can do for us thank you cheers