Learn basic keyboards to play blues, pop, country and jazz!!

Accompaniment To play pop keyboards, you have to understand how to play a sequence of chords; and you need to understand the rhythms and scales that form the bases of different styles of music.

Theory: Triads A typical chord sequence in a pop, blues or rock song might contain the chords C, F and G. To play these chords you will need to learn "triads", that is the three notes played together to make a chord. Examples:

The C chord is made up of C, E and G.

The F chord is made up of F, A and C.

The G chord is made up of G, B and D.

Basic counting of beats Keeping time is the most important thing in the performance of music, especially when playing with others. We will learn how to count the beats when we play. The most common way of counting a normal pop song is in groups of 4 beats... "1, 2, 3, 4..."

Basic blues progression Most of the pop/rock music developed in the past sixty years has a direct link to the American blues. We will learn its most common structure, the 12 bar blues.

Reading notation A valuable skill in the musician´s armoury is to be able to read and play a melody that someone has written on paper. We start by learning to read the C major scale, i.e. C D E F G A B C. We will then read some simple melodies using the notes from this scale.

Scales Most of the scales we will learn will have eight notes (such as C major mentioned above). We also have to learn how many sharps (black notes) are in certain scales. e.g. G Major has one sharp, F#. There are also two useful five-note scales to learn for popular music: the blues scale and the country scale.

Choosing the Sound There are a number of sounds you can select on a standard keyboard that are appropriate for different styles. Electric piano, organ, strings, acoustic bass, even drums! When you start playing with other people you will need to know which tone fits the sound of the band.

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