How to Play the D Major Scale on Piano

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Part of the video series: How to Play Piano Melodies in D

Summary: Learn some great tips on how to play the scale on the piano in the key of D major with expert instruction from a professional jazz composer in this free video clip on music theory and piano techniques.

Views: 474 | Tags: chords, theory, piano, keys, scale, notes, major, minor, melodies, musical instruments


About the Expert

Ryan Larson Ryan Larson is a young jazz composer whose teaching technique focuses on the basics of music theory in all twelve keys. When applying his twelve-key technique... read more

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Video Transcript

How to Play the D Major Scale on Piano

Now, we're going to take a look at the D major scale and we're just going to show you the visual view of it so you'll see what we're actually going to be reading, the pattern. If you look at my fingers, D major has two sharps. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. So you have F sharp and G sharp. We number it from one to seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Notice I didn't say D, E, F sharp, G, A, B sharp, C sharp, D. We don't want to worry about that right now and by going through and learning your chords you'll really get that under you fingers as well, but we really want to get this pattern down. If we have a song that's like: five, six, five, four, three, six, seven, six, flat seven, five, six, or six, five, flat five, five, flat five, five, sharp five, five, one. So, we can really get the melody's down by just using this one through seven pattern. That's how you read the scale is actually these written notes are the actual notes written on the scale and the notes in between are notated with sharps and flats. We'll go through and explain this further in just a minute.

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