Name: Creative Piano Playing Starts With THIS Chord Exercise!
Uploaded: 2026-03-25T10:46:51.000Z
Duration: 18 min 11 s
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One of the things I often get asked is, "What do I practice when I sit down at the piano?" Well, in this video, I'm going to show you a really useful chord warm-up routine that I do every day, and

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the reason why I think you're going to love it: it begins to open up so many doors on the piano in terms of being able to improvise and get a little bit of creativity into your playing.

To make sure you get the most out of today's lesson, make sure you download your free PDF lessonbook.

It includes the notation, sheet music, and backing tracks for every step of this video.

You can download it now using the link in the video description; it's completely free.

So let me just give you a quick blast of what this chord warm-up actually sounds like when I play it through.

It's almost got like a hymn-like quality to it, this warm-up.

There's some little folky influences in there, folky influences like, oh, particularly on this top, that little smudge note.

I'll take you through exactly what's going on in a minute, but just kind of get the sound.

I love playing this warm-up; it's so beautiful.

Well, what I'm actually doing is I'm using a tool called the circle of fifths or the circle of fourths.

Some people call it the cycle of fifths, the cycle of fourths;

it doesn't really matter what you call it, but

it's essentially a way of organizing all of the notes in the chromatic scale, all of the notes on the piano.

And basically, around the circle, if you go clockwise around the circle, each note is separated by a fifth.

So it goes C at the top, then G, then D, then A, then E, and so on.

And if you're going anti-clockwise, it goes C, then F, then B-flat, then E-flat, then A-flat, and

Now, what I'm doing is I'm taking one particular chord around the cycle, and I'm actually going anti-clockwise.

This is why this exercise is quite complicated, because I'm using so many different keys.

It's not like we're just playing in one key, using the main chords in a key;

we're going through every single possible key.

So to start off with, I'm going to simplify what I'm doing, okay?

We're just going to take one chord shape around the circle, okay?

And we're going anti-clockwise around the circle, so it's going to go C, F, B-flat, E-flat, and

all of the chords are going to be major, major triads.

And our chord shape is going to be the root in our left hand, okay?

So we're going to start at the top, which is a C.

We're going to put the root in our left hand, and

then in our right hand, we're going to just play two other notes.

We're going to play the fifth of the chord, which in the case of C is a G, and

then it's going to be an E in our little finger at the top.

So we've got a sixth interval here, and it's just a C major triad, okay?

We've got the fifth, the third of the chord, and the root.

So if we move one step round the circle, we go anti-clockwise, we then go to F.

So I'm going to play the root of F in my left hand, then the fifth in my right hand, and

All I've done is I've transposed the shape from C directly up to F.

If I go round the cycle again anti-clockwise from F, we get B-flat, which is there, the root, the fifth, the third again, and

You can see this is quite hard because you're constantly having to switch, okay, in your head.

There's that E-flat one, E-flat in the left hand, B-flat, the fifth in our right-hand thumb, and

One way to break this down is to only think about four chords at a time.

So far we've done C, F, B-flat, and E-flat, okay?

If you look at where they are on the circle of fifths, I sometimes think of the circle of fifths a little bit like a clock.

If you look, we've got 12 different things around the outside edge, very, very similar to a clock, and

we've kind of done the last 15 minutes, okay?

It's like we've gone backwards 15 minutes.

Let's do the next batch of 15 minutes going back in time.

It goes E-flat, A-flat, D-flat, and G-flat, okay?

So what would that look like with those voicings?

Then A-flat, then D-flat, and then G-flat.

Don't forget, you can pause the video, you can rewind it, you can do the thing where you slow it down, that little gear icon in the corner if you want to really see what I'm playing.

We're going to do the next 15 minutes, which is G-flat, B, E, A, okay?

And then lastly, A, D, G, C, and we're back where we started.

I just wanted to show you something super exciting that arrived in the post this morning.

If I point them down like that, you might be able to see it?

Sorry, I'm not very good with the camera.

Theory for Rock and Pop Musicians: A Practical Introduction to Contemporary Music Theory.

It takes you through everything you need to know about music theory.

I spent the best part of two years writing these books, and

I kind of wanted it to be an essential guide for anyone who just kind of feels that they have gaps in their knowledge.

I know when I was starting out learning the piano and I was doing things by ear, I felt all the time like I was just missing so many bits of the fundamentals of music theory.

So I basically set about writing the books that I didn't have when I was learning piano.

One of the things I really like about them, actually

is they've got these really cool little QR codes which you can scan, and

it will take you to a playlist with a bunch of songs all about the concepts that you're looking at.

I also went into a recording studio with some amazing professional musicians, and

we recorded tracks to go along with every single exercise.

So you can kind of listen to a band playing it and kind of work things out by ear.

Anyway, I just wanted to show you them here on the channel.

Maybe we'll even do some giveaways here on the channel as well.

They come out on August the 27th on Amazon.

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Creative Piano Playing Starts With THIS Chord Exercise!

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