What can I play now that I know a few chords?

Adult guitarists always seems to get stuck in straight away with playing some of their favourite pop songs from day 1, and for some reason pianists often don’t do the same. I don’t really know why – maybe it’s because a lot of pianists learn within the Western Classical Tradition – and that’s fantastic and definitely what I would suggest you do if you want to play at a high level eventually – a really solid grounding in technique, theory and reading music notation through a classical repertoire is what will take you to the top.

But if you want to play for fun, learning mainly pop songs, perhaps to accompany your own singing, or a friend’s, or start jamming within a band setting, then you can learn to play chords in simple keys and dive into playing loads of great stuff from lead sheets without having to read notation. When I’m doing this for myself or a pupil I usually just type in the name of a song followed by ‘chords’ on a search engine. The results are usually guitar websites but this is no problem at all – the chords on the piano are the same – if a song is played using a C, G7 and F chord on the guitar, it will be played using a C, G7 and F chord on the piano. The main issue you might find if you are a beginner though is that you may find results for a song that are much more complex than you are ready for. So here are a few tips – things to look out for when you search your next easy piano song…

1. Look for a simpler one – if you search for a particular song and it uses chords that you’ve never played before – just look again – there’s bound to be a simpler version, in a simpler key that you might be familiar with. You can even tag on ‘in the key of C’ to your search so that you’re bound to come up with a version using nice easy chords.
2. Ignore the bits you don’t understand – if there are all sorts of additions to the chord symbols that you haven’t learnt about yet – just try playing without them! For example if you see ‘G7’ and you don’t know a G7 chord, but you do know a G chord – just play that. Or if you see Aadd4, just play A. If it says C/G, just play a C chord. It might not sound exactly the same, but you can often get a playable version from just simplifying the chords in this way. The only reeeeeallly vital part you need to know is the difference between a major and minor chord – if it says ‘A’ – that means A major, if it says ‘Am’ it means A minor.
3. Use your own ear to gauge when to change chord – The chords should be written above the song lyrics at the precise moment when the chord is to be changed, but you sometimes find this isn’t the case so use your own musical ear, listen to recordings of the song, and judge for yourself when you hear the chord change.
4. Search using chordgenome – I’ve found this tool to be so brilliantly useful I had to share it with you. If you are starting out and do have a small repertoire of chords which you know you can simply input some of them into this site and it will list loads of songs that use those chords: Search Songs by Chords (and by Genre or Decade) (chordgenome.com)
5. Use these suggestions (and search for more online) – easy pop to play on the piano using just a few simple chords:
   • Lewis Capaldi – Someone You Loved
   • 4 Non Blondes – What’s Up
   • Florence and the Machine – You Got the Love
   • Adele – Someone Like You
   • One Republic – Counting Stars
   • Elvis Presley – Burning Love
   • Eric Clapton – Wonderful Tonight
   • Carly Rae Jepson – Call Me Maybe
   • The Cure- Friday I’m in Love
   • Jason Mraz – I’m Yours
   • Train – Hey Soul Sister
   • Phil Collins – In the Air Tonight
   • Like A Prayer – Madonna

My Adult Chordal/Pop course is absolutely ideal for beginners to the piano who want to learn in the way I have talked about above. It’s almost ready for publishing and will be available on our shop page soon, but if you would like the first lesson for free in the meantime, get in touch via admin@pianotoyou.com and we’ll arrange it!