How to play any major or minor chord on a piano in 5 mins

7 min readMay 2, 2020

By the end of this 5 min article, you will be able to figure out and play any chord on a piano within 5 secs, and start playing along to your favourite songs!

With some practice of course . . .

If you’ve started playing the piano, you might have already realised that learning chords is something important when it comes to singing along with music.

If you search online for something like

piano chords [name of a song]
e.g. Google Search — piano chords Hallelujah

you will see something like this below.

Chords for Hallelujah from https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/jeff-buckley/hallelujah-chords-198052

The bold letters displayed above the song lyrics tells you which chord you need to play and when to play it. For example, you will play the C chord when you start singing the word “heard”, then you will play the the Am (A minor) chord at the beginning of the word “secret” .

“So how do I play them??!!”

A chord is simply when you play multiple notes on an instrument at the same time. On a Piano each key (black or white) represents a note. Each key also has a name.

The image above shows all the names of each key on a piano. As you can see the orange letters show the names of the white keys. They repeat from A to G across the piano.

You will notice that each black key has two different names. One with a hash # symbol and another with ♭symbol. When we see a letter with a #, we call it a sharp. If it’s a♭, we call it a flat.

For example

C# is a C sharp. Which basically means the black key to the right side of a C key.
E♭ is a E flat. Which means the black key to the left side of a E key.

Majority of chords don’t use the♭symbol, so you will not see it very often on chord sheets.

Here is an example of an F#m (F sharp minor) chord in a song. Can you guess the song?

“Teach us how to play chords already!”

As I mentioned before a chord is when you play multiple keys at the same time. For example, a C chord is when you play the keys C, E and G at the same time. When you see a chord letter on its own e.g. C, it is a major chord. When you see it with a letter m next to it e.g. Am, it is a minor chord.

So when you see a C written above the lyrics, you will need to press and hold these three notes C E G.

Usually a chord is played with the thumb, middle finger and the little finger.

As you can see, during the line above the C chord will stop being played, and and Am (A minor) chord is played.

When a chord is minor chord it tends to sound more sad. There is a minor chord version for every major (happy) chord. The A minor chord is played with the keys A, C and E.

The technique to play both major and minor are very similar. This will be explained shortly.

How to play any Major chord

A major chord is a happy sounding chord used in nearly every song. Major chords are written like this Fmaj or just F.

Using a F chord as an example.

Step 1: Find the letter of the chord on the Piano.This will be the first key of the chord.

Since we are trying to play the F chord, find the F note on the Piano.

Step 2: Starting from first note, skip three keys to the right, to find the next note in the chord.

So in this case, the A note will be the next note within the F chord.

Step 3: Continuing from the second note, skip two more keys to find the final note for the F chord

You did it!

Using this pattern, you are able to play any major chord.

Tip: Once you find the notes for the chord, you can play the notes in any order, and it will still be the same chord with a different pitch. Some songs sound better with one of the alternative orders for the chord.

Alternative variations of the F chord (FAC, CFA, ACF)

Now try and repeat the method with any major chord.

Let’s see a few more examples of major chords

The A Chord, also know as A major chord (A, C#, E)

D# Chord, also know as a D sharp major chord (D#, G, A#)

How to play any Minor chord

Minor chords are also very common in a lot of songs. They tend to be used more in sad songs. However, you will still see them in a lot of happy songs.

The steps of playing a minor chord is very similar to playing a major chord, the only difference is the order you skip notes.

Let’s see an example.

First line of the song Hallelujah with Am

Let’s use Am (A minor) chord as an example

Step 1: Find the letter of the chord on the Piano.This will be the first key of the chord.

In this case we are playing an A minor, so we will need to find the A note on the piano.

Step 2: Starting from first note, skip two keys to the right, to find the next note in the minor chord.

So in this case, the C note will be the next note within the Am chord.

Notice that we are skipping two keys instead of three like we did for a major chord.

Step 3: Continuing from the second note, skip three more keys to find the final note for the Am chord

So if we skip three notes after the C, we will get the last note, which is an E note.

Tip: Just like with major chords, we can play these notes is any order

That’s it!

You can replicate the same steps on any note on the keyboard to get the Minor chord for that note.

You might be wondering how to play chords like E7. This will not be explained in detail here, but a tip is to look at how an E7 is played, learn the pattern of the skips, and apply to other Major7 notes, minor and major chords will always have a different pattern. Good news is all Major7 chords will have the same pattern, and all Minor7 chords will will have the same pattern.

TLDR (Too long, didn’t read)

The first note will always be the note in the name of the chord. E.g. The note C will be the first note in C major. The note A will be the first note in A minor. The note E# (black key to the right of an E note) will be the first note in E#m.