Triads and Inversions Second Year Piano Students

Chord studies serve two purposes, technical and theoretical.  Chord drills aid in developing a good hand position to learn the keyboard, shaping the fingers, and developing a general facility for playing in more than one key at a time. 

In the first year students should have learned major and minor triads in root position, dominant seventh chords and subdominant chords.  Sometimes near the end of the second year of lessons students can be taught triads and inversions of majors and minors.  Correct fingering is important for inversions:  students usually want to play the same fingering for inversions as was learned for the root position.  Circle the fingering in each hand for the new inversions.  Teach the chords in both block and broken style.

Triads and inversions should be studied both ascending and descending.  Often students can play ascending but have trouble with descending.  The chords should not be discovered by trial and error using the hunt and peck method.  A strong mental picture of the correct fingering should be established to form an anticipated feeling for successive chords for the pattern.

Sufficient drilling should be assigned so that over time the correct fingering will become automatic.  Students can recite the fingering for the middle note of the chords, as this is the finger that changes in the inversions. 

Students should learn all twelve major and minor triads and inversions. Remind students that the word practice means repetition and spell out how many times you want each item repeated.

Different Kinds of Drills

Drill on Five-Finger Positions on Treble and Bass Staves. The positions are typically shown in the early literature. The piano teacher drills the student in finding these hand positions and then may call for the "five-finger position of the right hand, treble staff, key of G," or "the five-finger position of the left hand, bass staff, key of A-minor," etc. This drill can be reversed by the teacher playing the phrase and the student pointing to the notation in his book. This helps with early fundamentals in learning keyboard fingering.

Theory of Music. Naming the notations, key signatures, names of chords, and so forth are learned incidentally and not through drill. After a while when these are consistently called by their names, students will soon associate the correct names with familiar characters. Drilling theory is distasteful to young children and unproductive. But once notations and their names are familiar, it is good to occasionally question the student to be sure that the association is correct. Don't explain, merely use and call by name. Organized explanations will come in later years.

The Tonic Chord. The tonic chord is learned as it appears in the literature, and then serves for drill similar to the drill on the five-finger positions. All chord study should be presented as sound, not merely as notes.

Writing Music. As chords are studied in later lessons, students can write chords in predesignated keys. Later students are encouraged to discover experimentally the application of these chords in harmonizing the melodies, and to write the chords in the staves of predesignated pieces themselves.

Two-Handed Melodies. Drills can be developed in finding the two-hand positions and alternating the hands on the keyboard. The alternation of hands must be practiced until it can be done without an appreciable break in the legato passage. These little studies should never be played with both hands together.

For more information about piano instruction NJ, contact Barbara Ehrlich Piano Studio.