The First Song : Barney's Theme

Without learning any music theory, one  can start playing the piano by knowing what  notes to play with the right hand and knowing how to play the chords with the left hand. Below is the song from the kids' show "Barney."  This song shares the same melody as "This Old Man."

Part A shows how to  play only the right hand. Part B includes the chords. If you can play this song, you are well on your way to playing piano without reading sheet music.

A.  The melody

5     3       5        5      3      5
I    love   you,    You   love   me


    6     5    4   3       2  3  4
We're  a   hap-py    fa mi ly


   3   4     5     1   1       1   1    1      2      3     4    5
With  a  great big hug  and  a  kiss   from  me  to  you


  5        2    2      4     3    2    1
Won't  you  say  you love  me  too



B. Melody and Harmony 

C                       Em
5     3       5        5      3      5
I    love   you,    You   love   me

   F                        G
    6    5    4   3       2  3  4
We're  a   hap-py    fa mi ly

              C                          Am
   3   4     5     1   1       1  1    1      2      3   4    5
With  a  great big hug  and  a  kiss   from  me  to  you

  G                                      C
  5        2    2      4     3    2    1
Won't  you  say  you love  me  too

The System

The Right Hand  :    AlphaNumeric   Nomenclature

During a visit to a friend's house in 1991, I saw a piano book entitled The Easy Way to Play 100 Unforgettable Hits published by Reader's Digest. And all of a sudden - it clicked !  This is what I have been looking for. A way to play the piano without reading notes. The system was simple enough.

The right hand plays the melody as single notes.
The left hand plays the harmony as chords.

Below is the illustration from the book on how the piano keys are notated.

a. The white keys are notated as letters or numbers.
b. The black keys take the name of the white key immediately to the left of it,  with an added plus + sign.

To me, however, the notation depicted above was still  flawed. The names of the notes are NOT unique. For  example, the capital letter C represents the note 'do' in both the second and third octaves.

To fit my purposes, I had to alter  the system a little bit.

a. I changed the notation of some bass chords to small letters to avoid confusion .

b. I added a notation system for the lower bass notes by adding an underline to the small letters.

c. I extended the notes beyond 15.


This simple alpha-numeric (letters and numbers) notation is unambiguous.  Each note on the piano has a unique name and therefore can not be confused with any other note. At least to me, this nomenclature was MUCH easier than the lines and spaces that I have dreaded as a 7 year old.

The  Left Hand :  Constructing The Chords

There are many different kinds of chords : major, minor, seventh, major seventh, minor seventh, diminished, augmented, etc.  A chord has two components, the Root and the Quality.  For the chords G7, Cmaj, and Fmin, the roots are G, C and F.

The following is a simple instructional on how to construct the chords.  This system of constructing chords requires simple counting of semitones.  In the illustration below, the root is the note C. The note E is 4 semitones away from the note C.  The note F is 5 semitones away from note C.

A semitone is also called a half-note.  Two half notes make a whole note (a tone).

The note E is
a) 4 semitones away from note C.
b) 4 half-notes away from note C
c) 2 tones away from note C.
d) 2 whole notes away from note C.

Let us construct the chords by counting semitones.

Major Chord  Formula  :  Root-4-7

To construct a major chord, the lowest note is the root, the second note is 4  semitones to the right of the root and the last note is 7 semitones from the root.

For Cmajor or C, the root is   C and we count the keys as follows ..

So the final components of Cmaj are C, E and G.

(The 4th semitone from the root is actually an interval of third from the root and the 7th semitone is actually an interval of fifth from the root. But more on this later.)


Minor Chord Formula : Root - 3 - 7

Cminor or Cmin would look like this : C, D#, G

Seventh Chord Formula :  Root - 4 - 7 - (root minus 2)

A seventh chord has 4 notes. The first three notes are the same as a major chord. The fourth note is 2 semitones to the left of the next root (that is where we get the minus 2, you move your count towards the left).

C7  would look like this : C,E,G,A#

The other formulae are as follows:

Major Seventh  Formula : Root - 4 - 7 - (root minus 1)

.           Cmaj7  or CM7   :      C,E,G,B

Minor Seventh Formula : Root - 3 - 7 - (root minus 2)

.        Cmin7 or Cm7        :      C, D#,G,A#

Diminished Formula  : Root - 3 - 6

.        Cdim                      :      C,D#,F#

Augmented Formula :  Root - 3 - 8


.         Caug                     :    C,D,G#


Tips in learning the Chords:
a. As a beginner, you don't have to know all the chords at one time.
b. You can learn the chords as you learn a song.
c. For starters, master the major and minor chords of the white notes.

MUSIC in its Simplest Form

I knew that to be able to play the piano, I had to break down everything about the process  in its simplest form. The words of Anatole France guided my search for a system - "It is better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot."

I once heard this story about the creation of music. It goes this way . ..

Sitting exhausted in his throne after creating the universe in six days, the Creator breathed the spirit of Melody into an angel and asked her to sing. And it sounded good. However, it was not good enough -  something seemed to be lacking. He then invented the harp and breathed the spirit of Harmony (Accompaniment)  into another angel. The combination of Melody and Harmony became Music.

From Mozart's Symphony No. 40 to the Beatles'  Help to Britney's Toxic, the marriage of Melody and Harmony to create what we perceive as Music has been unmistakable.

The task at hand was simple enough. Teach the right hand to play melody and the left hand to play harmony (chords).

" If you can't read music, you'll never play the piano. "

After almost a year of piano lessons and still unable to play the first few measures of Long, Long Ago (TH Bayly), my piano teacher finally concluded, "If you can't read music, you'll never be able to play the piano."

I was 7 years old.

My problem was not that I could not read music. It was that I could not read music fast enough. Each note in the treble clef would instantly prompt me to recite 'every good boy does fine.' If there were three notes, I would recite it three times. Then there's the bass clef - reading the notes here terrified me. Giving me the task of reading sheet music to play the piano is like telling  a first grader to read Tolstoy's War and Peace in a day.

My piano teacher's words of discouragement stuck with me for decades. I learned the guitar instead and I learned it really well. With the guitar, I did not need to read music. Instead, I learned the chords and accompanied myself singing. Later on, I learned the finger pick style, allowing me to play instrumental pieces without the burden of reading sheet music.

It wasn't until I was in my thirties that I thought about taking the piano up again.  Dozens of famous musicians, I have learned, could not read music. But yet they played the piano really well.

Thus started my search for a system that would allow me to play piano despite my teacher's pronouncement.