Single-finger chord functions

For some people, chords are difficult to learn and remember therefore making a hobby out of playing the piano hopeless. To solve this problem, the single-finger chord function is featured with every keyboard to give a helping hand to people who are having difficulties. This function allows the musician to assign major and minor chords to a single key to make playing the piano easy. For example, to play a C major chord, you would just have to press the C note, for a D major chord, press the D note and repeats for all the chords. Of course, this is a clever feature to help beginners, however, the single-chord function made its debut not on the keyboard, but on home organs.



Before digital keyboards were created, people who could afford it had their own home organs to practice on and play songs on them for a hobby but some find it difficult to use chords in songs which they found disappointing. However, some organ models such as the Hammond Chord Organs came with a series of buttons on the left hand side of them which allow musicians to play chords with just one finger. This made playing chords very easy for beginners to play songs instantly and learn the proper chords when they are ready. Today, most keyboards come with this feature and popular music programs also have the function built in such as Cubase, Reason and Logic.



Newcomers to playing piano are not the only people who use this function either. Some more experienced musicians use the function to speed up creating their own music and so they dont have to concentrate as much when playing. In conclusion, both beginners and experienced musicians use the single-finger chord function to their advantage as both a learning tool and as a simpler option to avoid confusion.    

Chords

Chords are essential in order to play the majority of songs that can be played on a piano and there are 12 chords to remember. the chords are split into 2 different groups which are slightly different but sounds completely different. These groups are known as the Major Scale and the Minor Scale and i will give a brief explanation about what sets them apart.

The Major Scale

The Major Scale chords are a set of 6 chords which are named simply from C Major to B Major. The best way to remember what are the right keys to press to find these chords is to remember the number 158. The way to use the number is to start from the letter of the chord you want to use, count up to 5 and that will be your next key, then count to 8 to find the last key to press and you should have the key you want to use. For example, to play the C Major chord, start with C as the 1st key, count to the 5th key along to reach E, then finally carry on counting to the 8th key to reach the G key and all of them keys together result in C Major.

The Minor Scale

The Minor Scale chords are another set of 6 chords which range from C Minor to B Minor. However, where the Major chords sound upbeat, the Minor chords have a darkish tone to them. The easiest way to remember these types of chords is the same way as remembering the Major chords except the number to remember is 148. for example, to play C Minor, start with C as the 1st key, then count to the 4th key along to get to D Sharp, then finally count to the 8th key along which is G and all of them together result in C Minor.

Practice Makes Perfect

The 2 numbers will help in knowing where the chords are but while playing a song, you wont want to pause in the middle of a song to count the keys so here are 3 small goals to do to keep all the keys within memory.

• Play all 12 chords in 30 seconds with your right hand.
• Play all 12 chords in 30 seconds with your left hand.
• Memorize all 12 chords