Piano Lesson Three - Black White Black Group
(Chords Ab, Db, & Eb) (Download the lessons at the bottom of this page)
Download all the BWB study sheets at the bottom of this page, and practice them as a group. Practice these over and over so they become rote memory. Play them frequently, and enough to memorize the inversions and arpeggios and 1-4-5 chord studies by feel so before long you don't even need to look at the music to practice them. Just look at the music enough, so you can know what to plactice, but once you know the patterns, memorize the way they feel and play them that way instead of reading them note by note. Play them slowly at first, but try to stay consistent in tempo.
Start with the right hand alone, then when you feel you are ready, do the same with the left hand. Then when you are ready, do both hands together. When you are familiar with them you can try chaining the inversions and arpeggios together, staying in tempo, and going from the chord Ab to Db to Eb, then back to Ab. Make up your own chord progressions. Stay in the key of Ab by starting and stopping your chord progressions in lesson three on Ab. As long as you do that, you can mix up the chords Ab, Db and Eb any way you want and they will sound fine. They are a chord family. In the key of Ab, Ab is the one chord, Db is the four chord and Eb is the five chord.
When you have some success under your belt with these, or when feeling brave enough, go on to lesson Four for the next group. You will find all these inversions, arpeggios, and scales in the music I have posted on the 'Piano Music' Page of this web site. That will answer a lot of questions about how to use these studies in real music and give you insights about how to flow from one chord to another as you play real music and deal with fingerings and timings etc.
With what you studied in lesson one and two and three, you have nine chords to deal with so try to use the root, first and second chord inversions, the arpeggios, and scales, as you experiment with using all nine chords. Have fun! When you get this third lesson into your fingers, you will be 3/4ths of way done with learning all 12 Major Chords, and at that point you will be able to use these and their minor forms (just flat the third of your Major triad) to modulate from one key to another and be able to play in any key with a full knowledge of where you are in the music. Keep up the good work...yes it's work, but hopefully it's fun work.