E Major Chord on Piano
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Playing E major on the piano is easy. If you have followed the previous lessons where showed how to play a C major chord, F Major Chord and G Major Chord you'll have no problem with finding how to play an E major.
What we always do when we look for a chord is placing the thumb of the right hand on the root note of the chord. If we look for E major we will place our thumb on E (the one next to middle C).
Now let's try to look for the chord by ear first. Usually we will skip the white key next to E and go to the next one with the third finger. We'll end up with pressing the G note with the right hands' third finger. If your ear is musically developed you'll already hear that the interval between E and G doesn't create a major third. It sound to mellow.
A more careful inspection will reveal that we play a minor third because the musical interval between E and G is of one and a half tones. An E major chord should have a major third, that's why we call it E major. Let's raise the G in half a tone and press on G# with our third finger instead.
Now we have a major third and we only miss a minor third on top of it. Let's try working intuitively first. Our fifth finger will probably hit the B note to begin with because if we wanted to stick to the plan we would probably play E-G-B with the 1,3,5 fingers. That's how we found the previous chord right?
So if you'll press the E-G# and B notes it will sound right. The distane between G# and B creates a minor third (One and a half tone) and that will bring us to the final result. an E MAJOR CHORD.
My advice to you? It's easier to solve this sort of issues by developing a good musical ear.
Just trying and trying until you succeed.
If that doesn't help or you wanna be sure you can count the intervals and double check your ears
aren't misleading you.
Now let's invert the E major Chord into all possible inversions. If you have no idea what I'm talking about Click here to follow the Chord Inversions piano lesson.
The possible chord inversion are given in the image.
Now that we know how to play five chords in all chord inversions we can play the song Imagine by John Lennon. Cool ha?
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