I’m Robert Estrin. Welcome to LivingPianos.com. One of the most essential techniques for any pianist is achieving a smooth, connected sound, particularly when dealing with repeated notes and chords. While it may seem straightforward at first, this is actually a tricky task due to the unique mechanics of the piano. On other instruments, creating legato in repeated notes can be relatively simple, but on the piano, it presents a great challenge. Let’s take a closer look at why this is and how you can improve your approach.

The Challenge of Repeated Notes

When playing repeated single notes on the piano, you have the ability to change fingers, which makes it easier to create a legato, or connected, sound. By alternating fingers, you can maintain a smooth flow of sound without it becoming choppy. This simple finger alternation technique allows you to play smoothly without the harshness that might come from using a single finger for every repeated note. However, this technique is impossible when you’re dealing with repeated chords.

Legato in Repeated Chords: A Bigger Challenge

Achieving legato in repeated chords is much more difficult because you don’t have the option to change fingers for each of the notes. This issue is especially evident in pieces like Chopin’s E minor Prelude, where repeated chords are a central feature of the piece.

Without proper technique, the sound of repeated chords can become disjointed and lack the smooth, flowing quality that you want. It’s tempting to rely on the sustain pedal to help connect the notes, but doing so can lead to a blurred sound and makes it impossible to use the pedal to enhance the melody line.

Pedal Use vs. Hand Legato

The key to achieving legato in repeated chords lies in your fingers, not just the pedal. While it’s common to use the sustain pedal to connect notes in situations like this, relying on it too much can compromise the clarity of the music. If you use the pedal without playing the chords legato, the sound can become muddy, especially in faster passages or when multiple chords are involved. Instead, the goal is to create smooth connections between the notes of each chord with your hands. This allows the pedal to serve as an expressive tool for shaping the melody, rather than simply connecting the notes of the chords.

When you focus on playing the repeated chords legato with your hands, you gain more control over the sound. The pedal can then be used to enhance the tonal quality of the meldoy and bring out the expressiveness of the piece, rather than relying on it to make up for a lack of hand legato.

The Art of Connecting Chords

To effectively play repeated chords legato, you need to keep your fingers right on the keys. Be sure to allow each of the keys to come all the way up without ever losing contact with the keys. Each note within the chord should be connected smoothly, which means avoiding any breaks between notes. This requires careful finger placement and awareness of how your fingers transition from one chord to the next.

When you master the art of hand legato in repeated chords, you can use the pedal more creatively to add warmth and expressiveness to the melody. The pedal should not be the sole means of just connecting the chords but rather a tool to elevate the music as a whole. With proper legato technique, the pedal becomes an extension of your playing, allowing you to shape the sound and add depth to your performance.

Applying Legato in Other Pieces

This technique is not limited to just one piece or one style of music. It’s essential in many classical works, such as Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata, where smooth, legato playing is needed to connect repeated chords in the left hand. In these cases, using the pedal to smooth over the notes can often lead to a less refined sound, as the pedal blurs the melody line.

When you focus on playing the left hand legato without relying on the pedal, the results are much clearer and more expressive. By combining legato with careful pedal use, you create a much more refined and musical sound.

Using Legato and Pedal Together

To sum up, when you’re playing repeated chords or notes, your primary focus should be on achieving legato with your hands. Don’t rely on the pedal to connect what your fingers can already make smooth. Once you have a solid legato foundation with your hands, the pedal can be used more effectively as a tool for musical expression, enhancing your sound without muddying the melody. By practicing this technique and focusing on hand legato, you’ll find that your piano playing becomes more fluid, expressive, and controlled.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com! I’m Robert Estrin. Understanding diatonic chords can sound a bit complicated at first, but when you break it down, it’s actually quite simple! This foundational concept can make learning music a seamless experience and help you improvise effortlessly. Let’s dive in and explore what diatonic chords are and why they’re so helpful!

What Are Diatonic Chords?

To understand diatonic chords, you first need a solid grasp of major scales. Everything in music theory builds on a foundation of basic concepts, and understanding scales is similar to knowing your multiplication tables in math. Imagine trying to solve algebra problems without knowing how to multiply. It would be impossible!

The same goes for music. Once you’re comfortable with major scales and key signatures, understanding diatonic chords is easy. If you’re not yet familiar with scales or key signatures, don’t worry—I’ve covered those topics in other videos. But if you’re already confident with them, then you’re ready to tackle diatonic chords, which appear everywhere in music.

The Basics of Diatonic Chords

Let’s start simple. In the key of C major, we begin with the C major scale:

C – D – E – F – G – A – B – C

From this scale, we can build a set of diatonic chords by stacking thirds (every other note) starting from each scale degree. For example:

C major chord (I chord): C – E – G
D minor chord (ii chord): D – F – A
E minor chord (iii chord): E – G – B
F major chord (IV chord): F – A – C
G major chord (V chord): G – B – D
A minor chord (vi chord): A – C – E
B diminished chord (vii° chord): B – D – F

You can also extend this idea to seventh chords (which add another third above the top note of the triad):

I7 chord: C – E – G – B
ii7 chord: D – F – A – C
iii7 chord: E – G – B – D
IV7 chord: F – A – C – E
V7 chord: G – B – D – F
vi7 chord: A – C – E – G
vii°7 chord: B – D – F – A

Diatonic Chords in Other Keys

The concept of diatonic chords is not limited to C major. It applies to any key. Let’s look at D major as an example. The diatonic chords in D major would be built from the D major scale:

D – E – F# – G – A – B – C# – D

The diatonic chords in D major would be:

I chord (D major): D – F# – A
ii chord (E minor): E – G – B
iii chord (F# minor): F# – A – C#
IV chord (G major): G – B – D
V chord (A major): A – C# – E
vi chord (B minor): B – D – F#
vii° chord (C# diminished): C# – E – G

This same principle works in any key. And remember, these chords can be inverted, which simply means you can rearrange the notes of the chord so that a note other than the root is on the bottom.

How Diatonic Chords Help You Learn and Read Music

One of the greatest benefits of understanding diatonic chords is how they simplify reading and learning music. Take Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, for example. In the third movement, there’s a section where the chords are simply diatonic chords in inversions, as shown here:

The first chord is an F-sharp minor chord (in this case, using the natural minor scale).
The notes in each chord follow the steps of the scale, either going up or down.
When you understand that the notes of each chord simply follow the scale, learning and reading the music becomes so much easier. You’re not just seeing random notes on the page; they’re all related to the scale you’re working in.

A Second Example: Kabalevsky’s Fairy Tale

In this piece, Kabalevsky’s Fairy Tale, you can hear diatonic chords being broken up in a similar way. For instance:

The left hand starts with an E-flat major chord in second inversion (E-flat 6/4) with B-flat on the bottom.
The notes then move step by step through the E-flat major scale, creating a beautiful, flowing progression.
This stepwise movement through the scale makes it easier to understand and internalize the music, as it’s based on diatonic harmony.

Improvising with Diatonic Chords

Once you understand diatonic chords, you’ll find it much easier to improvise. For example, in the key of C major, you can create progressions by playing the diatonic chords in various orders. You can even add seventh chords to give your improvisation a richer sound.

Similarly, you can apply this approach to any key. In D major, you might play a progression using the diatonic seventh chords, such as DM7 (I7) and Em7 (ii7), to create a smooth, harmonious feel. The beauty of diatonic chords is that you can transpose them easily to any key, making your improvisation seamless and natural.

Understanding diatonic chords is an essential tool for any musician.

Understanding diatonic chords helps you read music more easily, makes learning pieces less intimidating, and opens up new possibilities for improvisation. The key is building a solid foundation with major scales and key signatures, which will allow you to navigate diatonic chords effortlessly.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you why you must practice your music in chords first. There are so many benefits to this! I’m going to dive right in and show you. One obvious example of how a piece can be reduced to chords is Bach Prelude in C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1.

The entire prelude is just a bunch of broken chords!

By practicing in chords first, you will get it into your fingers and your head. You’ll understand the harmonies. It’s much simpler to initially learn each phrase of this piece in chords first. You can discover the best fingering and understand the structure of the music. There are many other examples of this that may be less obvious. For example, an Alberti bass in Mozart, like in his famous K 545 C major Sonata. The left hand can be reduced to chords as you learn each phrase. This will help you to digest the score.

There’s much less to learn, and then you can break it up after you’ve learned it in chords.

There are some other examples that may be even less obvious to you at first glance. For example, the very first Grieg Lyric piece. That one is basically just chords. It’s so much easier to learn it when you just reduce it down to those chords. I’ll give you one more example. This one is a little bit harder because you can’t necessarily reach the chords; at least my hands are not big enough to reach them. But it’s still valuable to play it in chords, even if you have to break them. The first Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) of Schumann. Once again, you can break it down into chords. You don’t want to necessarily play the whole piece in chords. But as you learn each section, first playing in chords will help you learn the music.

You can utilize this technique in your practice of so many different pieces of music!

It will save you time, you will develop good fingering, and you will understand the harmonies in a much deeper way. How many of you practice this way already? I’d love to hear from you! Let us know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you must know your primary chords. What are primary chords? Well, I’m going to break it down for you today. I’m going to show you something called diatonic chords first, because that’s how you can discover what your primary chords are.

Diatonic chords, simply put, are chords built on every note of the scale.

The simplest chords are triads—three notes arranged in thirds. What are thirds? Thirds are every other note of a scale. If you play every other note of a C major scale, you have a C major chord. If you go up the scale, you can play all your diatonic chords. So D-F-A is also a diatonic triad. E-G-B, and on up the scale forming all the diatonic triads. This is essential to understand, and it can help you immensely in digesting a score if you’re reading or learning it. It’s also valuable just for listening to music.

I’m going to show you what are referred to as primary chords.

If you are vaguely aware of this now, this is going to be a revelatory moment for you. So let’s go through. We start with the one chord, and you notice that you have four half-steps on the bottom between the C and the E. That’s called a major third. Now on the top, there are three half-steps between the E and G. That’s a minor third. When you have a major third on the bottom and a minor third on the top, that is a major triad. This is really fundamental to music. We’re going to go up and discover where the major triads occur in Diatonic Chords. So far, we’ve established that the one chord is indeed major. That is the first primary chord. Where is the next one? If you go to the two chord, on the bottom, you have three half-steps between the D and F, which is a minor third, and you have four half-steps on the top between the F and A, which is a major third. So that’s a minor triad. So the two chord is not a primary chord; it’s a secondary chord because it’s not major. What about the three chord? I bet you can figure this out now that I’ve shown you the secret. You have three half-steps on the bottom and four on the top, so that is a minor triad again. The three chord is also a secondary triad. The four chord has four half-steps on the bottom and three on the top, so it is a major triad. So the one chord and the four chord are both major triads; therefore, they’re primary chords. Are there any other primary chords? The five chord has four half-steps on the bottom and three on top. So that’s another major chord.

The one chord, the four chord, and the five chord are your primary chords.

The six chord has three half-steps on the bottom and four on top; therefore, it’s a minor triad, another secondary chord. We have one more left. The seven chord has three half-steps on the bottom and also three on top. What the heck is going on here? That’s not a major or minor triad. Two minor thirds forms a diminished triad. It’s the only place where a diminished triad occurs in a diatonic chord. To recap, you have your major triads, which are your primary chords, the one, four, and five; you have your secondary chords, which are the two, three, and six, which are all minor; and you have your leading tone, the seventh chord, which is diminished.

Why is this so important?

Those basic one, four, and five chords are intrinsic to Western harmony. It’s a classic, authentic cadence and a great way to establish the key. You can go through all your keys this way. It’s a great way to gain comfort in all the major and minor keys. It’s a terrific way to have your primary chords literally at your fingertips! It makes reading music, understanding the harmonic underpinnings of your music, and learning music much easier.

You should know your primary chords in all keys.