Mary Had a Little Lamb: Adding Chords

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman and in this lesson we'll be learning how to add chords to "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Let's come to the piano to get started. Here I have our E major pentascale. You'll recall that to build a I chord, we use DO MI and SO. We skip over RE and FA, but when we put these three notes together, that builds a I chord. It has a great sound. With your left hand, go ahead and find the notes DO MI and SO of the E major pentascale with fingers 5 3 1, and try I chord. Now remember for smaller hands, if that's too uncomfortable to play that three note chord, you can modify by just playing these top two notes, the G sharp and the B. That can work too, but if you're able to handle it, the full three note chord sounds nice. Now for a V7 chord. What do we have to do? MI moves up a half step to become FA, and DO moves down a half step to become TI. Remember, a half step is the very nearest note white or black, whatever is the nearest note. So you see how those two kind of move in opposite directions, and that gives us our V7 chord. Which if your hand can reach, you'll play with your left hand finger 1 2 on this FA and SO, and your finger 5 will play TI. So try that now. Again, for smaller hands you can just play these top two notes. So this would be your V7 chord. This is your I chord, or if you can do all three, I chord, V7 chord. Pause the video now and just practice going back and forth from a I chord to a V7 chord. Try that several times until you're comfortable with it, then press play to go on. Now let's figure out where to play I chords and where to play V7 chords with "Mary Had a Little Lamb." We're going to be playing the melody in the right hand, and we'll add chords in the left hand. Now how do we know which chord we should use? Well, we're going to figure it out by ear. For example, let's just take these first four notes. Let's try that with a I chord. That sounds pretty good, now let's try it with the V7 chord. What do you think? Which one sounded better? Here's the I chord: Here's the same notes again with a V7 chord: To me the I chord sounds much better. Now, how do we write that? For chords we use Roman numerals, so we'll write the Roman numeral one for I chord, and then in your sheet music which you can download from our website, you've got these dotted lines to kind of help you draw up this first I chord. I'm using a marker so you can see more clearly on my music, but at home I would suggest you use a pencil just in case you make a mistake it's easy to erase and then correct it. Now, let's see what we like in measure two. By the way, these arrows will show us every time we want a chord. Which is basically the first note of each measure. So we have our chord here, by the way, we leave the note heads empty, don't fill them in because that makes it a half note, so it can last the full 2 beats of the entire measure. Let's see what chord we want here. What about another I chord? Let's also try it with the V7 chord. Which did you like better? Because we're playing that MI MI MI, MI's sound much better with I chords. With a V7 chord, it kind of makes it a more dissonant sound. So we're going to go with a I chord for measure two as well. Pause the video if you need some time to draw this in your own music. Now, let's take a look at measure three. We have: Now let's try another I chord. Now if I stay on a I chord there, how does that sound? Let's try with a V7 chord now. Aha! I like that so much better. It so happens that when you're on a RE often that sounds best the V7 chord. They just belong well together. The symbol for a V7 is we use a Roman numeral V. The Romans like to put those lines above and under their numerals, and then we use a regular number 7. Don't ask me why, but in music that's just the way we do it. Okay, so the Roman numeral V7, and you draw it like this: Okay, because the V7 has, remember, this DO steps down to TI, and the MI steps up to FA and SO which are just a step apart so it's hard to fit them stacked so we draw them side-by-side like that. That's the V7 chord. Now, on your own I'd like you to pause the video, and see if you can figure out the rest of these chords. Just like I was showing you here. You're going to try to play it and just see which one sounds best. Like here in this measure you can try it with a I chord: or try it with the V7 chord: Try both, see which sounds best. Remember to write it in pencil and then I'll show you what I came up with. So, pause the video, see what you can figure out for chords, then press play to go on. So, here are the chords that I came up with. We have a I chord: I chord: V7: I chord: I chord: I chord: V7: I: Now, yours might not match that exactly, maybe you thought something else sounded good. Remember, there's not always one right or wrong answer, but in general again because RE's generally sound best with the V7 chord, these measures that started on RE that's why I chose the V7 there. and these other measures generally are starting on a MI, and MI sounds better with the I chord. Alright, so again If you came up with something slightly different that's okay too, but if you want to do what would be considered the standard, or the most typical way to do t ...