Beautiful & Emotional Piano Music Made Easy

Excuse my terrible food metaphor, but I’m going to show you how to make an incredible meal with the simplest of ingredients.

So are you hungry? (Ok, I’ll stop now)

But I’m going to show you how EASY it is to make a beautiful and emotional piano piece from the SIMPLEST of chords and melodies.

To start, we need a chord progression

It’s the foundation of this piece, and it’s only 3 chords.

E minor – C – D. That’s it!

We’ll be playing these 3 chords with the left hand over and over again, so spend a few minutes really getting comfortable with these chords and how to play them.

When you’re ready, we’re going to begin with…

Only 2 notes in the right hand

We’ll play an E, and then a second E an octave higher. So technically it’s only one note I guess, but they are played an octave apart so I think they’re different enough.

And with those two notes, start experiment with rhythm, switching between the notes. You can even choose to add in an extra note – a B.

With only those 3 notes you can create something truly beautiful and inspiring.

But if you want to take it even further,

You can add a new pattern

This part is totally optional. If you’re happy and comfortable with what we’ve done so far, then that’s great. But if you’d like to push yourself a little bit and dive deeper into improvisation, this is for you.

We’re going to be using what I call “safe notes” to expand our right-hand melodies. These safe notes are the first 5 notes of the E minor scale.

So they are E – F# – G – A – B

And these 5 notes will work over ANY of the 3 chords we’re still playing in the left. That’s why they’re called “safe notes”.

The great thing about these 5 notes is that you can play them in any order, up or down. This is where you get to be creative and find something that’s uniquely you.

Did you see how easy that was? And we created something really beautiful and full of emotion. If you’d like to create even more beautiful music, check out our lesson on how to do it with just 3 notes!

Lisa Witt has been teaching piano for more than 20 years and in that time has helped hundreds of students learn to play the songs they love. Lisa received classical piano training through the Royal Conservatory of Music, but she has since embraced popular music and playing by ear in order to accompany herself and others. Learn more about Lisa.