Hello and welcome to the Dodeka Youtube channel.
In this lesson, we look at major and minor piano chords and discover how to play them on the Dodeka keyboard.
What are piano chords?
Chords are sets of pleasing sounds drawn from musical scales. (We talked about musical scales
in Lesson 2 of this course). Chord consist of the first degree of the scale - often called root note, the third degree and the fifth degree of the scale.
Major and minor chords
Like scales, there are major and minor chords.
A major chord is composed of an interval of four notes, followed by an interval of three notes. To remember this chord structure, we can count the number of keys. For major chords, the structure is root note, count four keys and then 3. We can shorten it to 4+3.
By contrast, a minor chord consists of an interval of three notes, followed by an interval of four notes. Like major chords, we can count the number of keys to remember its structure. From the root, we count 3 and then 4, that is, 3+4.
You may have noticed that the only difference between the major and minor chord lies in the combination of the intervals 3 + 4 and 4 + 3.
In this light, major and minor chords are the exact opposite. A minor chord is the
upside down version of the major one and vice-versa.