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.
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6 thoughts on “Why You Must Practice in Chords First”
Although I personally know what chords are, it might have been helpful if you pointed out the implied chords in each example. Of course, to explain the essence of major, minor, and dominant 7 chords–and maybe diminished chords–(the fundamental vocabulary of classical harmony), would require several videos. However, it still might be helpful to skip all that, and (1) briefly define what a chord actually is, and (2) point out that in each of these examples, the broken patterns in the left hand can be “folded” into a block chord. Example, the first Alberti pattern in Mozart K545 is a broken C major chord, Without any pauses to explain the idea of simply turning a broken chord into block chord, this lesson feels kind of “dashed off”. Without a knowledge of chords, an uneducated pianist has no idea when one chord ends, and another begins.
You’re right. Chords are a big subject that can’t be exhausted in one video. Fortunately, I have many videos on this subject. Here are some: https://livingpianos.com/?s=chords&submit=Search+Videos And here are some more: https://livingpianos.com/page/2/?s=chords&submit=Search+Videos
Incidentally, you can search among thousands of articles and videos with keywords here: https://livingpianos.com/blog/
Epiphany.
Hope this helps your understanding of music!
Very much worth hearing this phenomenon demonstrated—and with such telling examples from the repertoire of touchstones!
It’s amazing the range of music working in chords first helps in learning.