Are you toying with the idea of learning how to play the piano as an adult? Do it! Learning piano as an adult is often so much better than it was when you were a kid. You have the time, you have the headspace, and you know what a valuable skill it can be to enjoy a fulfilling hobby at home. There are loads of benefits to learning how to play as an adult!

A growing trend shows that people regret not having devoted themselves to their piano lessons with greater vigor, and they are now subjecting themselves to practicing scales. A BBC report from a year ago (October 2014) investigated why, and discovered that beyond music being a passion in general (and we know that it is), the percussive element of hitting 88 keys (or some percentage thereof) can be therapeutic. Moreover, playing any musical instrument rewires the brain, as it were, with increased connectivity and therefore sophistication. It’s not incidental – or inaccurate – that people say playing an instrument makes you smarter!

[bctt tweet=” Playing any musical instrument rewires the brain with increased connectivity and sophistication.”]

In fact, being an adult gives you several advantages when it comes time to learn to play.

Your mom’s not nagging

First and foremost is the fact that you are doing so on your own volition, and not because your parents or grandparents have insisted that you learn an instrument. When you choose your own path, you are more likely to find your passion in it.

You KNOW that practice makes perfect.

The odds are good that you have had experience with the effects of practice in the past, and you know that if you want to develop a skill truly, you need to practice. Even if you don’t aspire to Carnegie Hall, you still know that whatever practice, practice, practice you undertake will serve you well (a tidbit that many children don’t realize as they are burdened with practice sessions).

Your ear has earned the advantage of time

Finally, the fact that you want to learn to play as an adult suggests that you have a love of music, and the very fact that you have been listening to music your entire life puts you in an enviable position when it comes to learning the technicalities. That is, once you already have a feel for the music itself, learning which keys to depress is a matter of fulfilling what you already know, as compared to the child who starts from nothing.

Music education isn’t what it used to be!

The other advantage you have is the advancement of educational technology, which has harnessed gaming features that provide feedback in real time, and applies them to learning to play piano, so that the student is guided through the process note by note.

Check out Simply Piano, the latest app from Simply (formerly JoyTunes) to learn the piano basics step-by-step.

Read more:

• How to learn piano in 5 easy steps 

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While “Best Picture” might be the most well-known award in the Oscars, there have been some incredible award-winning songs throughout the years as well. Here is a collection of some of the most unforgettable pieces of music that won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

1930s – “Over The Rainbow”

In 1939, the movie The Wizard of Oz came out and took the world by storm. Contained in the fantastic film were numerous hit songs, with “Over The Rainbow” standing out as the most popular. “Over The Rainbow”, sung by Judy Garland, is listed as the best movie song of all time by the American Film Institute in their 100 song list.

1940s- “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”

“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”, composed by Allie Wrubel with lyrics by Ray Gilbert, came out in 1946 in the Disney movie Song of the South. It’s a cheerful tune that has remained popular in all age groups. Multiple artists have covered this song, including legend Johnny Mercer.

1950s – “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)”

This hopeful song was introduced in the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock film, The Man Who Knew Too Much. This song featured actress/singer Doris Day, and quickly became one of the songs she was most known for. “Que Sera, Sera” was written by songwriting duo Jay Livingston and Ray Evans.

1960s -“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head“

“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1969. It was featured in the movie  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and was written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach. This song was hugely popular when it first came out, and reached #1 on charts in the USA, Canada, and Norway.

1970s- “Theme from Shaft“

This song was written and sung by artist Isaac Hayes for the 1971 film Shaft.  This academy-award was significant because it made Hayes the first African-American to receive the Oscar for original songs. “Theme from Shaft” went on to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the USA.

1980s-“(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” 

Written for the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” was/still is an extremely popular song. It went on to win multiple awards besides the Oscar, including A Golden Globe and a Grammy. This song was written by Franke Previte, John DeNicola, and Donald Markowitz, and recorded by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warner.

1990s- “My Heart Will Go On“

Also known as “Love Theme from Titanic,” this award-winner was the theme song from James Cameron’s record-breaking movie. This song was performed by Celine Dion, and quickly became her signature piece. This smash-hit reached number 1 on charts all around the world, and became one of the best-selling in history.

2000s – Lose Yourself

“Lose Yourself”, written by Eminem for the 2002 movie 8 Mile, was the first rap song to receive the Academy Award for Best Original Song. This was a massively popular song, and went on to win a Grammy and secure the #1 spot on Billboards Hot 100. The quintuple platinum song was also on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

2010s- Let It Go

Even though we’re only half-way through the Oscars of the 2010’s, “Let It Go” has surely sealed its reputation as one of the most well-known movie songs in the world. The 2013 Disney movie Frozen was the highest grossing animated film, which can be largely accredited to its soundtrack. Let It Go reached the top 5 in the Hot 100 Billboard chart, and was covered in multiple languages, making it one of the most globally recorded Disney songs.

Read more: 

• Piano accompaniment and how to master it
• 35 Beatles songs you probably didn’t know
• The 6 most famous female pianists

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When playing the piano, posture is a vital aspect that a pianist must perfect. Learn how to avoid common mistakes and how to improve your piano posture. 

Posture is an interesting topic. It’s not something we give much attention to other than the occasional “yeah, I have terrible posture” conversation, yet it’s crucial to maintain. 

Though we may not put the two together right away, sitting with proper form substantially impacts how we play the piano. Sitting comfortably helps you play for longer, with greater control, and improves your general health.  

So what is the ideal posture for playing the piano? It’s time to shape up and perfect your posture!

Why is posture important when playing the piano?

Proper posture is essential in everything you do; maintaining it while playing the piano is no exception. 

Consider that a piano bench never comes with a backrest. Can you imagine a pianist like Chopin or Beethoven indolently slouching back into an overly plush lazy boy while performing one of their famous masterpieces? 

It’s not conducive to playing your instrument and can lead to some form of chronic pain in the future. 

Proper posture also helps you sit for extended periods without feeling sore and strengthens your shoulders, back, and abdomen, enabling you to play your instrument more effectively. 

What is the proper posture when playing the piano?

People have been studying and playing piano for centuries. Over the ages, they’ve refined how to sit in front of a keyboard and improve their ability to play. 

So how do you sit properly? Let’s start with the lower body.

To learn more about the instrument’s history, check out our blog, A Complete Piano History.

Lower body.

The lower body serves as the base for your posture. It’s where your body meets the bench. 

Upper Body.

Arranging your upper body the right way gives your shoulders, elbows, and hands greater mobility and enables you to play your keyboard more effectively. 

Most common mistakes.

While assuming proper posture may sound like an easy thing to do, maintaining it can be a challenging experience when you first start.

You may be overzealous with keeping your posture, accentuating specific muscles more than necessary.

Keep in mind that there are natural curves in the body. Therefore, correct posture doesn’t mean sitting perfectly straight. Doing that puts unnecessary tension on the body, possibly resulting in injury. 

A proper posture is a balancing act between relaxation and tension.

Final tips.

Posture can be a little confusing when you’re just starting. It can feel unnatural—especially if you’ve been slouching all your life. Be patient with yourself. 

Here are a few tips to help you correct your posture safely:

1. While maintaining good posture is vital for playing the piano, staying relaxed is also essential. Take a small break if your body is sore or tired.

2. Try to maintain proper posture in your day-to-day life. Posture is a habit you can build.

3. At first, proper posture may feel unnatural depending on how you’ve been carrying yourself throughout your life. Be patient with your body. In time, sitting with proper posture will become second nature. 

4. To explain posture, we broke the body down into different parts. However, the body is one organism, one process. So if one piece of your system slacks, it inevitably affects the others. 

Ultimately, knowing how to carry yourself changes how you feel and optimizes your motor functions. And learning how to assume proper posture can enrich your experience with the piano.

There are countless avenues to pursue when learning and playing an instrument. Finding the best resource to teach you all those things can be challenging.

Simply Piano offers users many tips and tricks on various subjects surrounding the piano (posture being one of them). The app makes learning the piano fun. It’s a fantastic supplement to piano lessons. You can use it as a primary resource for your piano journey. 

FAQs.

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Want to write music for a string quartet? You’re in good company! We’ve put a few tips together so you can follow in the footsteps of Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn to write musical pieces that will stand the test of time.

Writing for a group of string instruments is a bit like juggling. You feel pretty confident about what you are doing when you have two balls in the air, but three or more can get a little dicey. 

While duets may be simpler to write, writing for a quartet can be rewarding as you see it come together. 

Here are a few tips to make writing music for your string quartet yield a beautiful result.

Which instruments make up a string quartet?

A string quartet means that four instruments with strings will play together. Traditionally, this group consists of two violins, a viola, and a cello. These instruments work nicely together because each instrument brings a unique personality to the group. 

The famous composer, Rimsky-Korsakov, described the violin’s sound as brilliant, the viola as biting and nasal, and the cello as having a chest voice in his book Principles of Orchestration. 

While we could probably couch those descriptions in more flattering terms, Rimsky Korsakov shows some of each player’s personality and voice.

You can, of course, choose four different stringed instruments and still call it a string quartet. But composers such as Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart used this combination of instruments in their string combinations, so most follow their example. 

Why mess with greatness?

Keep the range and key signature in mind.

If you plan to play the instruments via keyboard or digital piano, you don’t have to worry about the range and keys signatures. 

However, if you plan to wow your audience with a live show and string musicians, these factors will be necessary.

After all, if you’re bringing four different instruments together, you want the instruments to complement each other and not clash. 

Select a voice lead, or let each instrument have equal weight?

When you start writing, you need to decide if you will have a voice lead or if each instrument will have equal weight. Let’s look at these two approaches.

The pros and cons of each approach

Each approach has its pros and cons. Before deciding which way you want to write your piece, remember that the human ear habitually focuses on one melody. This means that the traditional approach sounds more orderly and is easier to write and play. 

A democratic approach with several overlapping melody lines can sound exciting to the ear. In this approach, the musicians need to be very in-tune with each other to pull it off. Otherwise, the music can quickly head into chaos.

Four-part writing.

Writing music for four different instruments in four-part harmony can be a bit tricky. However, we have a few tips to offer so you can break down this big project into simple tasks. 

Expand on basic chorale structure

You can look at a basic chorale structure to get an idea for your string quartet piece. You can break chorales into four voice parts: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. This four-part harmony uses simple writing, so it’s easy for large groups to sing. Chorales often use the German bar form, an AAB melody pattern.

Chorales cater to voices, so they may differ in range and structure from strings. However, seeing how these simple four-part harmonies work together can be a good building block for writing music for string quartets.

Think linearly

While composing your piece in block chords can be easy, it is much better to approach each musical line linearly. When you dissect each musical line separately, it adds more depth and creativity to your piece. 

As you write for each instrument, think: 

• What are its strengths and weaknesses?
• What is its ideal voice range?
• Does this instrument carry the melody line or play a supporting role? 

Things to avoid

Avoid having the violins play in unison when you write for each instrument. Instead of showcasing talent, unison parts can display any tuning differences (however minor), making even good musicians sound out of tune. 

It is much better to have one violin take the main melody line and let the other violin play counter-melody to hide flaws better and give your piece a fuller sound. 

The structure of famous string quartets

String quartets have been the most popular form of chamber music since the 1750s. They use four instruments, and the pieces are usually divided into four movements. 

The structure of a string quartet generally follows this pattern:

• The first movement is in sonata form and played allegro in a tonic key. 
• The second movement is much slower than the first and generally played in a related key. 
• The third movement usually comprises a minuet and trio and is written in the tonic key 
• The fourth movement is also in the tonic key in rondo form.

These movements allow your piece to take on form and tell a story with a beginning, middle and end through music. 

Listen to the following pieces to see how famous composers created unforgettable stories through their string quartets:

• String Quartet Op 76 No 3, ‘Emperor’ by Haydn
• String Quartet No 19, K465, ‘Dissonance’ by Mozart
• String Quartet No 12, Op 96, ‘American’ by Dvořák 
• String Quartet No 14, Op 131 by Beethoven

You’ll notice that each composer took the same assignment but created a different musical story. Feel free to allow your personality to shine as you make your piece.

Writing music for string quartets is not the most straightforward assignment, but it can be rewarding–especially when you hear your piece come together. Before you invite musicians to play your work, you can layer your music on a keyboard or computer to check for any awkward spots. 

Not sure if you’re doing it right? We have a blog post for that. Check out these six things you shouldn’t do when writing music.

FAQs.

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Learning the piano isn’t so bad when you know the basics of reading notes. In this short article, we walk you through the basics of piano notes for beginners.

When you see sheet music for the first time, it could look like some kind of cave-man script from another eon. For the beginner, this can be very unsettling. 

We got you. Let’s begin by walking through the fundamentals of all you need to know to start reading music notes and playing them on piano. 

Reading music notes for beginners

Music is a language of sound. 

When an instrument produces a sound, that sound vibrates at a particular frequency or pitch.

In Western music, we use twelve specific frequencies, called notes. These twelve frequencies repeat themselves across high and low registers of pitch. 

In other words, we call the frequency of a sound pitch and organize them in a system of symbols we call notes. 

We use letters from A to G to name seven of the twelve notes and use sharps and flats for the remaining five. The symbol sharp (#) means slightly higher than the note it’s in front of, and flat (b) means slightly lower. 

Flat and sharp notes have two names, depending on the context. In the end, it looks something like this:

Notes appear in various ways, but all have a circle and sometimes a line. The vertical line attached to the note is called a stem. The circle is the head, and it could be full or empty. These determine the rhythmic value of the note. 

You can write and read all of these notes on a visual structure called a staff.

Learn more about How to Read Sheet Music on our blog.  

The staff and the ledger lines

A staff is a stack of five horizontal lines.  

There are five lines and four spaces between them. Each line and space represent a note, with the low notes on the bottom lines and the high notes on the top. 

Of course, the range of instruments usually exceeds the lines of the staff. To write notes below or above the staff, we use ledger lines. These are short horizontal lines written through or below the circle of the note.

We write piano notes on a grand staff with ten lines altogether, split into two groups of five.

Grand staffs are for instruments with a wide range of pitch or music that requires two separate but simultaneous parts (like a right hand and left hand). 

The middle C note, which is more or less at the center of the keyboard, sits between the two staffs on a ledger line.

The clefs

A clef symbol appears on the far left side of the staff. It indicates which note falls on which line. The range of your instrument determines the clef you use so that the notes are in the right places. 

You use the treble clef for piano to write music for your right hand. The center of the circle of the treble clef sits on the second line from the bottom of the staff and indicates the note G. This is why it’s also known as G clef. 

We use the bass clef to write music for instruments with a lower register, such as the piano’s left hand or a bass guitar. The line between the two dots of the bass clef is an F below the middle C. This is why it’s also known as the F clef. 

Key signature and time signature

There are two more crucial pieces of information at the beginning and to the right of the clef. 

The first is the key signature. It tells you how many sharps or flats are in the music. If a sharp or flat appears in the key signature, it will not appear in notes. If the composer adds an extra sharp or flat beyond the key signature, they write it next to the notes.

The time signature is to the right of the key signature, just before the actual notes appear. This indicates the division of rhythm in the song, alongside the bar lines, which create vertical divisions along the horizontal staff lines to group the notes according to rhythm value. 

The top number of the time signature is the number of beats per bar. The bottom number of the time signature is the type of beat (half note, quarter note, eighth note). You can read more about time signatures in our blog post How to Play Music in 4/4. 

Learn to read music notes with Simply Piano

If you practice on your own, your progress with piano learning can become stuck and frustrating. Download the Simply Piano app to learn all the piano basics at your own pace and space. 

Simply Piano is highly popular and has even won awards like Apple’s Editor’s Choice Award, Parents’ Choice Award, and Best App from Google Play.

The app works with any piano or keyboard and has the following features:

•  Tons of fun songs like Imagine, Chandelier, All Of Me, and also J.S. Bach.
•  Courses for different musical tastes and playing levels.
• Step-by-step learning for everything from reading sheet music to playing chords.
•  Slow down library songs to choose your own pace for easy learning.

Simply Piano currently has 27 different courses divided into two streams: Soloist and Chords. You don’t have to choose between them; you can do them simultaneously, one after the other, or just focus on one. You immediately receive access to two free courses when you download the app. Once you purchase the premium subscription, you receive access to all lessons and songs, updated and expanded monthly. 

Make a note of this 🙂

When you dive into a new world of concepts, language and practice, it’s very common to feel scared and insecure. Have faith in the process, and don’t rush the learning. Learn the limitations of your capacity for new information, and try to touch something new daily. With time, persistence, and patience, you can acquire this new language, and before you know it, you are speaking music! 

FAQs

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Nailing harmonies requires a trained ear and solid timing. Learn how to skillfully sing them with these helpful tips.

Practically every genre of music harnesses the power of harmonies, from holiday carols and hymns to your favorite pop song. You can recognize harmonies when two or more voices sing in unison. It adds a unique and aggrandizing effect to the music. 

When first listening to harmony, you may find them to be complex, angelic echoes. It can seem like creating your own is out of reach. However, just like learning any new skill, learning and improving is much smoother by taking small purposeful steps.

So let’s dive into the majestic world of harmony and build your skill up with these simple steps.

Learn basic music theory.

While it isn’t essential for singing harmonies, knowing basic music theory is an excellent place to start. 

Understanding the framework and the essential moving parts of anything grants you insights you wouldn’t otherwise have. For instance, knowing how intervals work or putting chords together makes timing easier, and choosing notes that resonate comes naturally. It can help with the cohesiveness of your harmony. 

• Intervals–represent the distance between two notes within a scale.
• Chords–are a series of notes that you play together.

Understanding chords and intervals make creating harmonies much more straightforward. In essence, they’re the same thing.

Sing along to your favorite harmonies.

An easy way to get some practice in is to sing along with your favorite songs! However, we’re not talking about the casual shower singing (although perhaps that could be useful too). Start with simple harmonies to get your bearings. Once you’ve got the hang of it, try writing your own!

Timing.

When it comes to harmony, timing is everything. Part of what makes a harmony create the effect it does is how it is used. You can memorize lyrics by heart and sing pitch-perfect, but none of that matters if your timing is off.

While some music genres implement harmony throughout the song, other styles use harmony at specific times–which means timing your entry is crucial. 

But how exactly can you improve your timing? 

(How about a bit of…)

Practice.

Practice, practice, and then practice some more! Like any skill you’re honing, the more time you spend engaging with it, the more innate it becomes. 

There are many unique ways to practice on your own and with others. If you’re feeling creative and have the tech, record yourself and sing along to your recording. You sharpen your harmony skills, but you’ll also get better at songwriting. 

Another great way to practice is to sing with a group. Find other people who like to sing harmonies and practice together. You may even find singers who have a deeper understanding of harmony, which can quickly help you to improve. Not only can singing in a group helps you learn at a faster rate, but it can make your experience more enjoyable. 

Pro tip: Stay positive. No matter what activity you engage in, overcoming obstacles is part of the journey. Our worst practice sessions also define our best practice sessions. Maybe you aren’t hitting the pitch or you don’t feel like singing–whatever the issue is, you just have to accept that it’s part of the journey. Keep coming back for more and it’ll pay off.

Join a choir.

A sure-fire way to practice and improve your harmony skills is to join a choir. It’s the perfect environment, and it’s literally designed to help people develop their ability to sing in harmony. 

You’ll be able to meet other people who are sharpening their skills, and under your teacher’s guidance, you’re bound to make drastic improvements early on in your lessons. Sharing a space with experts for putting together harmonies is the ideal atmosphere to take your singing to the next level.

Singing and composing vocal harmonies takes time, research, and practice. At times the journey may be frustrating. However, with a dynamic approach, and consistent practice, you’ll get the hang of it. 

Harmony is not just for singing. It’s very similar to the chords you play on the piano, and music is a beautiful form of expression where you can mix and match many arts. Another approach to improving vocal harmony and perfecting chords is playing the piano.

Don’t have time to learn everything at once? Try out Simply Piano and see how easy it is to learn to play piano in your free time.

FAQs

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Learning the piano as a beginner has its own challenges, especially if you’ve got a busy schedule and a limited amount of resources to dedicate to it. But when there’s a will there’s a way, and Simply makes that way a lot more, well, simple.

Piano exersizes for beginners should be fun and inspiring, challenging and engaging. That’s why we made Simply Piano instructional, straightforward, and super entertaining. It covers all the fundamentals but doesn’t drown you in technique.

It’s everything you need to start your piano journey. 

This blog compiles some of the initial and essential topics that you’ll learn when you start to play piano with JoyTunes. Reading this will help you breeze through the first few lessons on the app!

Body posture

The art of playing piano starts before you even touch the keys! The way you sit at the piano has a significant impact on how you play. It’s essential to develop good sitting habits right from the beginning so you don’t have to skip piano lessons due to a bad back! The instruction for posture can be summarized into five words: don’t slouch and don’t arch.

When you first look down at the keys, the most natural thing to happen is to round your shoulders and slouch.

First, plant your feet firmly on the ground.

Then, imagine a puppet string gently pulling the center of your head upwards.

Relax your abdomen.

Now, softly tuck your chin.

But careful, though! You’re too rigid if your chest sticks out and your lower back arches.

Let the sit bones become heavy on your seat.

Imagine you have weights hanging from your underarms. 

Hand posture

Hands to a piano are like legs to a bicycle! They must be strong, fit, and at ease. Healthy hand posture is essential so you don’t cramp up early in piano lessons.

Have your arms at approximately 90 degrees to the piano. Check that your wrists are level. If they’re too low, you’ll struggle to hit the keys with power, and your playing will be clumsy if they’re too high. Find the Goldilocks zone! 

Ear training

When you start to play piano, you must understand what you hear.

The process of connecting theoretical knowledge with sound is called ear training. It’s similar to learning a language. The building blocks of ear training are:

• Pitch – The highness or lowness of sound frequencies.
• Notes – The twelve frequencies of Western music.
• Intervals – The spaces between notes.
• Scales – A series of seven notes with specific intervals that help build melodies.
• Chords – A combination of two or more notes you play simultaneously to create harmony.

You can learn about it in Ear Training for piano beginners. 

Basic chord progressions

Once you’ve got a handle on these foundations of ear training, the JoyTunes online app teaches you to play stuff that sounds like music! This is all about getting into chord progressions – what makes a song a song! 

To build a chord progression, select a scale like C major. Then, build chords on different scale degrees using the 1-3-5 formula.

There are so many simple chord progressions you can play with family or jam to with friends. 

Take the 1-4-5 progression, for example. With these three chords, you can play hundreds of different songs:

1: C major (C, E, and G)

4: F major (F, A, and C) 

5: G major (G, B, and D)

Check out Piano Music for Beginners for a complete guide to learning some basic but beautiful songs on the piano!

Finger speed

It’s all well and good to understand chord progressions, but to execute them, your fingers need to know how to dance! Building up dexterity in your fingers happens naturally over time, but it’s good to isolate and develop it. 

The best exercise for this is playing scales with a metronome (a device that plays a beat to help you play in time). We have one built into the JoyTunes learning program! 

Let’s start with the most straightforward scale, the C major scale. Remembering that we number fingers one to five – here are the correct finger placements for playing the C major scale with your right hand:

Play the scale up and down. Be sure to play it in time, one note per click of the metronome. Don’t forget to use the correct sitting and hand posture. When it feels comfortable, speed up the metronome and see if you can keep up!

Counting whole notes

Now that you can loosen up your fingers and play in time, you have to learn about how rhythm divides and articulates in the language of music. 

Put the metronome on a tempo (speed/pace) of 60 beats per minute. Make sure to set the time signature (a division of beats) to 4/4, which means there are four beats in a bar.

A whole note is worth four beats. It looks like this:

This means, if you play one note (any note!) every four beats, you will play whole notes. Try this with the metronome and see how it feels!

Counting half notes

Half notes are double the speed. They look like this:

This means you’ll be playing one note for every two beats. You can try this at different tempos by changing it on the metronome. It can be confusing, but make sure you distinguish the division of beats from the tempo or pace. 

Counting quarter notes

As you might predict, quarter notes are double the speed of half notes! That means you’ll be playing one note per beat. They look like this: 

The language of musical rhythm continues to divide beats into smaller and smaller parts, including eighth, sixteenth, and thirty-second notes! But for beginners at the piano, it’s best to get comfortable with whole, half, and quarter notes. Practice them with the metronome, practice playing your scales on these rhythms, and you’ll have a strong foundation.

Ready to put your piano lessons into action?

This might feel like a lot of information. 

And it is! 

The early days of learning piano can be overwhelming and frustrating. There’s so much new language, technique, and attention to detail. 

However, Simply Piano gives you genuine results in a steady, satisfying, and at-your-own-pace way.

FAQs.

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Want to play diatonic chords? You’ll need to master the major scale. This article explores all possibilities for making diatonic harmony.

The word diatonic means “strictly within a key.” Diatonic harmony is all about using only the notes of a particular scale to create chords. This is one of those situations where limiting your options can open up creative freedom. In other words, if you restrict yourself to seven notes, your inspiration can blow wide open!

But diatonic chords are about more than just knowing which notes to use. Each degree of the scale has a specific harmonic function because of its relationship to the “one chord,” otherwise known as the root or tonic.  This article looks at diatonic harmony in the major scale. 

The major scale. 

The major scale is a series of seven notes with specific distances between them. The degrees of the scale are from one to seven. You can apply their intervallic pattern of tones and semitones to create a major scale starting on any note. This is the formula, with examples in A, E, and F major:

If you’re a little rusty, you can Quickly Learn Piano Notes and Chords for a speedy review.

The tonic = Imaj7.

The tonic is the scale’s root note and how it gets its name. For example, in A major, it would be A. This is sort of the axis on which all the other notes turn. The note feels like arriving home in the context of a song or melody. 

If you’re playing an utterly diatonic song, you should be able to identify this chord quite easily. If the song has key modulations, the feeling of arriving home keeps changing like some nomadic ex-pat. When you build diatonic chords on the tonic, you have a major triad or a major 7 chord.

The supertonic = iim7.

This is the second degree of the major scale. It is known as the supertonic because of its proximity to the tonic. Its sound is recognizable because it leads intuitively to the five chord. This creates the famous chord progression of ii–V–I. 

The supertonic is always minor or minor 7 in its diatonic context. In the key of A, it’s Bm7. 

The mediant = iiim7.

The mediant is the third degree of the major scale. In Latin, this word means ‘middle,’ and it has this name because it is the middle note of the major tonic triad. 

For example, this note is C# in the key of A. If you build a chord on the mediant, it will also be minor or minor 7. It is closely related to the tonic and the dominant, as it shares two notes. 

Check it out:

The subdominant = IVmaj7.

Don’t get too excited. There is nothing kinky about this. It’s just another name for the fourth degree of the major scale. 

The subdominant gets its name because it has a gravitational pull towards the tonic, just not quite as strong as the dominant’s. Another reason is that it is a fifth below the tonic, making it a long-lost dominant cousin. 

A prevalent progression is IV–V–I. The transition from the four to the five creates a gradually increasing tension, which resolves when it arrives home at the tonic. 

The dominant = V7.

If you believe that the world is balanced between good and evil, you could say that diatonic harmony sits in a balance between the five and the one, or the dominant and the tonic. 

Nothing can resist the tension created by the dominant–it just screams to be taken home to the tonic. It is a powerful musical tool that has become so familiar to the Western ear that if you were to sing a dominant chord to any average non-musical person, they would surely be able to sing, or at least sing in the direction of resolution to the tonic. For example, in the key of A, the dominant chord is an E7 (which has a flat seven and is known accordingly as dom7).

There is an apparent reason for the dominant’s tension: the semitone movements that happen in the transition from the five to the one chord. 

The third degree of the dominant chord resolves to the one of the tonic chord (e.g., G# to A), and the flat seven of the dominant chord resolves to the third degree of the tonic chord (e.g., D to C#).

The submediant = vim7.

This is the sixth degree of the major scale. We call it the submediant because it is a third below the tonic (like the subdominant is a fifth below the tonic). This gives it a mediant-like relationship to the tonic in certain contexts. 

The submediant, or relative minor of the tonic, shares two out of three notes in the chord. Think of it as the tonic’s gloomy teenage brother. Or bitter old uncle. (Or whatever.)

The leading tone = vii(halfdim).

If you thought the dominant was tense, you might not be able to handle the leading tone. This is the seventh degree of the scale, and it’s like a dominant chord on steroids. 

Its tension is arguably stronger than the dominant’s because the root note of this chord is a semitone below the tonic (the third degree of the dominant chord), making it irresistibly close to resolution. 

It is always a half-diminished chord, which is extra dark because it has a flat third, fifth and seventh note. This is a great chord if you feel like you’ve used the five chords a few too many times. 

Don’t be a goody-two-shoes.

Understanding the inner workings of functional and diatonic harmony is super important as a foundation. But make sure you don’t become afraid of breaking the rules. 

What makes music beautiful is the moments that take you by surprise. Don’t be the chord police–stay true to your internal artist and make sure you use technical knowledge to strengthen your creativity, not quash it. 

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