{"id":182,"date":"2019-06-25T06:45:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-25T13:45:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2023-01-12T10:56:02","modified_gmt":"2023-01-12T18:56:02","slug":"perfect-song-tutorial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pianote.com\/blog\/perfect-song-tutorial\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Play &#8220;Perfect&#8221; By Ed Sheeran"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">Ed Sheeran wrote &#8220;Perfect&#8221; for his wife. Their love story is so nice. They actually were childhood friends who went to school together, and then reconnected later in life!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\"><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/pianote.s3.amazonaws.com\/blog\/pdf\/Perfect-LeadSheet.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">&lt;&lt; Download the free lead sheet here &gt;&gt;<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">She&#8217;s a lucky lady to have this song written for her, but today you&#8217;re the lucky one because we have a tutorial for you!!! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">This song is as beautiful as it is simple. We&#8217;ll be playing in the key of G Major (the original is in G# Major), and we will only have to learn four chords.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">Those chords are G, Em, C, and D. That&#8217;s it! The order of the chords does change for the chorus, but the chords themselves are the same throughout the whole song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">This is a &#8220;Perfect&#8221; example (excuse the pun!) of how so many popular songs only use four chords.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" style=\"font-size:28px\"><strong>The Most Challenging Part<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Now &#8212; just because the chords are simple and they repeat a lot &#8212; doesn&#8217;t mean that there aren&#8217;t any challenges when playing this song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The biggest thing will be left-hand pattern. We&#8217;ll be playing arpeggios of all the chords in our left hand. That might take a bit of practice, especially when we play hands together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If it is too challenging, to begin with, we can just play the root and 5th of the chord with our left hand. But I would encourage you to try and play the arpeggios because it&#8217;s so satisfying when you are able to master it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Other Tricky Thing<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>You&#8217;ll notice when you play this that our right and left hands share the same space on the keyboard. In fact, right away there is a G note that we play with our right hand, and then just two beats later we&#8217;re playing it with our left. This might feel confusing and a bit squishy at first, but it is a good skill to practice. It&#8217;s important to be comfortable at the keyboard in a variety of positions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If this is just too weird for you to begin with, you can always play the left hand an octave lower (you might like the sound better as well).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" style=\"font-size:28px\"><strong>The Outro<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The final challenge is the outro. In the lead sheet, we have notated the chords that you will be playing, but in the video, you can see that I break those chords up with my right hand to make it sound a little fancier. It&#8217;s up to you how you would like to play it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One thing that really helps in that section is to notice the notes that DON&#8217;T move. Eg. in the right hand the first four chords all have D as the bottom note. So you only really need to move one note each time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that&#8217;s it! This is a beautiful song to perform for a loved one or just master on your own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And I hope it will help you see that songs written and performed by professional musicians aren&#8217;t always super complicated. Sometimes the simple chords and melodies are the best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Have fun!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:10px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<iframe class=\"email-form-include-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.pianote.com\/weekly-email\" frameborder=\"none\"><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:20px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Learn how to play &#8220;Perfect&#8221; by Ed Sheeran. This beautiful ballad only has 4 chords, making it the perfect (pun intended) song for beginners!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":803,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1105,508],"tags":[1086],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-rock","category-song-tutorials","tag-l3s"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pianote.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pianote.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pianote.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pianote.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pianote.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.pianote.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10699,"href":"https:\/\/www.pianote.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions\/10699"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pianote.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pianote.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pianote.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pianote.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}