Piano Tutorial: How to play Hello (Adele)

Piano Tutorial: Learn to play Adele’s Hello on the piano in 20 minutes

Hello? It’s me. Hi, Adele. Yeah, it’s Brett from pianoAHA. What can I do for you? Yes, I do know your song “Hello”. It is a little long, yeah. Yeah, there are hundreds of chord changes, but there are only four different chords right? (Actually there’s one more.) Nothing, nothing. I see. So if I’ve understood you correctly, you’re wondering if there wouldn’t be a way of somehow looking at the music so that we could find some patterns and some structures, thereby making it much easier to remember so you wouldn’t have to think from chord to chord to chord to chord over a couple of pages and 5 to 6 minutes while you are wanting to accompany yourself singing. I understand. Let’s give it a try.     >>>

So we have the chords to Adele’s song “Hello” here in front of us. We see many, many, many, many chords: F minors and E flats and A flats and D Flats all over the place here. And we have an intro and a verse. What else do we have? We have a pre-chorus and a chorus and a verse and we have a bridge here. Our question will not be whether we couldn’t just sit down and play this through many times and remember it, but how we could somehow compact all this information into a small enough area that we could fit it into our brains; so that we could remember this entire piece within the next 10 minutes or so. So let that be our goal.

The first thing that we could do would be to write out all of these chords without the repetitions. So I’ve written here an “I” for the “introduction” and the “verse”, the “pre-chorus” – which is just something that happens before the “chorus” – and the “chorus” and the “bridge”. So we see that each one of these – with only one exception here – has four chords in it, and every single one of these parts of the song starts with F minor. So that’s one thing less that we have to memorize. Since every part starts with F minor, let’s – starting now – not even talk about F minor anymore, and we’ll just concern ourselves with this and see how we can remember it.

So we’ll start here with the introduction. So I’ll play that: We have A flat, E flat, D flat. Now the first thing that I notice about that is I have an A flat that goes down to the E flat and it goes down to the D flat. So all three of these chords – again, aside from the F Minor (we’re not concerned about the F minor since it’s always there) – they just go straight down. So I could abbreviate this entire line just with an arrow going down.

Now you might say: “Well, yeah but you could just as well play the A flat and then go up to the E flat and then go up somewhere way up to the top of the piano and play this D flat.” And you’re right: I could, but I’m going to confine myself to this part of the piano here where I’m always going to play the A flat here and always the E flat here and always the D flat here. So this is going to be my area where I’m going to learn this song. And this idea is going to allow us to simplify this piece immeasurably because if you look closely at all of these chords here, you’ll notice: there are only three: D flat, E flat, and A flat. And so if we confine ourselves to this area, all we have to do is remember where the chords go up or where they go down.

And I might add that for these three chords, there is one characteristic that all three of them have in common: that is, each one of them has a white key in the middle and two black keys on the outside. And if you’re ever wondering which white key you should play, if there’s an option, you always take the upper one.

So let’s continue and look at the verse. Again – aside from the F minor – we have A flat, E flat, D flat: the same thing – it also goes down. If we look at the pre-chorus: What do we have there? F minor – which we don’t need to talk about – and then E flat, D flat. It also just goes down. What’s missing here? The only thing missing – and we see that the D flat is the same chord that we had before as the last chord; the E flat is the same chord that we had before as the second-to-last chord; the only thing that you might think is that we might have an A flat chord here somewhere that’s just missing, right? Otherwise it would be the same as the verse. So we can also just symbolize that as being a downward arrow and maybe we’ll just make some sign up at the top there just to mean that there’s an exception at the top, which means we leave out that that first chord, that A flat. In other words the pre-chorus would be – instead of F minor, A flat, E flat, D flat– it’s just F minor (we leave out the A flat), E flat, D flat.

So we’ll move on to the chorus – actually let’s skip to the bridge because I see a nice pattern there. Again, we ignore the F minor and we play D flat, E flat, A flat. Those chords just go up, so we could signify that with an upward arrow.

Now we’ll look at the chorus. Again – we will ignore that F minor. What do we do? We start at the bottom, we leap up to the top, and we end up basically in the middle, right? So we could simplify that and look at it like this. How about that?

So now we have a small symbol for each one of these parts. But now you could ask yourself the question: How do I know that, for example, the bridge is the one that goes up and the verse is the one that goes down? Well, there are some nice little coincidences here.

If we look at the “I” for “Introduction” and the “V” for “Verse” and we combine these two symbols together – in other words, we combine this “I” with this “V” – what do we get? Wow, we get a downward arrow. That’s perfect! So all we have to do is remember that trick and we’ve already got the introduction and the verse. No more work to be done there.

So now we can think about the bridge. How would we remember that the bridge goes up? Well, if you think about what a “bridge” is in real life, a “bridge” is something that goes up over something – like over a river, or over a street, or something. So the “bridge” goes up and over. It just goes up.

The chorus – if you look at the “C” for “Chorus” and you look at the symbol that we’ve made here – it’s almost the same. So the chords start down low, they go up top, and they come back down and end in the middle. So that’s how you can remember that the chorus sounds like this: starting down, we jump up and end in the middle – because that’s what a “C” basically looks like with a little arrow on the end.

So the only thing remaining now is the pre-chorus. And the pre-chorus – as we said before – is almost the same thing as the verse – right? (except it’s just missing a chord). So we could just extend that and make it a downward arrow and then we have basically the same symbol that we had before with a little exception at the beginning: We have an arrow that has something at the top which to us signifies that the first chord – this A flat (I’m calling it the first chord, right? because the F minor we’re not thinking about) – is not there.

So now we have a way of remembering not only what the chords are in each one of these lines but which part that is, right? So we know that the bridge is the one that goes up and the verse is the one that goes down etc.

What we also need to know is how many times each one of these chord progressions gets repeated. So, for example, let’s start with the introduction. This song begins this way: “Hello, it’s me”. We heard this introduction just once, right? We just heard these chords one time and then the song began. So we will write a “1” here since those chords only have to be played once.

But what about all of these other parts: about the verse and the pre-chorus and the chorus and the bridge? How often do the chords get repeated? Let’s just say that the normal case would be that everything gets stated four times. So, in other words, the verse would be – that’s one time through, that’s two, that’s three, that’s four. Ok, so that is the verse right there: actually having to play those four chords four times through to have played the verse one time.

So if the normal case is four, well then there must be some exceptions, right? Otherwise I wouldn’t be saying we’ll just expect there to always be four, and that is indeed the case. The chorus – and you can remember this because the chorus is probably the most famous part of this song – the chorus gets repeated twice as often. So that’s an eight. And, again, you can remember that since that’s the catchy part of the song – that’s the part that everyone is going to have in their ear after they hear this song, so let’s say, well, that’s the reason why we can remember that that gets repeated eight times instead of four times. And the pre-chorus is just something that comes before the chorus, right? No big thing, so it would make sense to play that one half as much, right? So for one of the things we repeated it twice as much and for the other one we played it half as much. And, again, the introduction is just once because the song begins after a very short introduction – so that’s not hard to remember.

Ok, so now that we have all of these parts, we just need to talk about two small exceptions. We said that the bridge itself gets repeated – or the chords to it – get repeated four times. There’s one exception: that on the fourth time through, this last chord does not get played. In other words, the bridge is (bridge is played) and now the last time is going to be different. That’s all. So the last time the last chord is left off.

And in the pre-chorus, we also have an exception. We actually throw in another chord there: a C minor. I’m going to write that in with a “1”. So the very first time the pre-chorus chords are only played twice and the first time we insert a chord in there and then the second time it’s just as I have written. In other words, the pre-chorus sounds like this.

A good way of remembering this exception would be that we have two chords – so the E-flat and the D-flat – that each have a white key in the middle and we’re inserting a chord – the C minor chord – with a black key in the middle, right between them. So we have white in the middle, black in the middle, white in the middle. That’s all. Now you have the entire piece as far as the parts go.

So the next thing we would need to do is to have a blank piece of paper – how about I just write that on the other side of this piece of paper – where we write out the order of the actual pieces of parts in the piece. So let’s say this: Let’s say that the piece were like this:

• Introduction
• Verse
• Pre-chorus
• Chorus
• Introduction
• Verse
• Pre-chorus
• Chorus
• Introduction

So in other words, we just have the same thing twice and then we end with the introduction. That would be a very, very simple way of remembering this piece. In order that this piece is somewhat more interesting and not just some boring pattern, Adele makes a couple – again two – exceptions. She repeats the verse at the beginning, and at the end she puts in a bridge and a chorus. And you can remember this first exception by being a way of raising the tension before we finally get to the chorus – the part that everyone knows – so she puts in an extra verse at the beginning, and at the end, the chorus is so nice we want to hear it again. But if you just keep playing the chorus over and over again then it gets a bit boring, so she invented a part between the two – between a repetition of these choruses, right? So instead of having two “C”s she just put a bridge in the middle as a bit of a contrast. And the nice thing that you can see here is that on the second place there’s an exception, and on the second from the end there’s an exception, so that might be another way of remembering that.

So the only two things that we haven’t talked about up until now are just the rhythm and then the voicings (the way that we will play these chords). So let’s talk about that.

The rhythm – if you’re familiar with this notation – just looks like this for the piece and that goes basically throughout the entire piece, so that sounds like this. If you’re not familiar with that notation, then you can remember it this way: I’m going to say “Hi, Adele! Hello, how are you?”. In other words, like this: “Hi, Adele! Hello, how are you? Hi, Adele! Hello, how are you?” Wherever there’s a greeting – that is, wherever I say “Hi” or “Hello” – I’m playing the next chord. So “Hi, Adele! Hello, how are you? Hi, Adele! Hello, how are you?” That might be one way to remember that particular rhythm.

And there are only two small exceptions in the piece to this rhythm. I’ll leave it to you to know exactly how to play those since you’re going to be familiar with the piece if you are wanting to learn it, but I can tell you where they are. One of them is in the bridge where this A flat chord is left off. There will obviously have to be an exception since there’s one chord too little, and in the second repetition of the chords in the pre-chorus (plays end of pre-chorus) sounds like that, which is also a bit of an exception but the details to that I’ll leave to you, since you know the song yourself.

And for the last thing we’ll talk about the actual way that we will play these chords, right? And up until now we’ve been playing them this way. For example, I’ll play the introduction. That might not be the fullest way to play them. We could play them an octave lower, which certainly sounds fuller but might sound a little muddy. So a nice way of playing this song is to do the following: We will indeed play them an octave lower, but we’ll take the middle note – the third here – and we will raise it up an octave. That gives a really nice sound. The next chord would be A flat. We’ll take this third up an octave higher. The next chord would be an E flat, we’ll take that one up top. And the next one would be a D flat chord. So that sounds like this. And if you do that same sort of thinking throughout all the different parts, it will always sound quite nice.

So did you get all that? Good! Any questions? Right, the ending! That’s right: We didn’t talk about that, did we? Right. Guess what chord comes at the end? That’s exactly right: the same chord that came at the beginning and at the beginning of every single section of the song: F minor. That’s right. So just get through the entire song and then play F minor and you’re done. Right, some practice tips! Okay, I’ll give you three tips.

First one: Take a pen and paper and just try to write out the form of the song, so the “IVPC” etc. with the exceptions. And then try to write out each section, as well. So try to write out the chords to the bridge and to the chorus, etc. Right.

So the second tip I would give you is to sit down at the piano and disregard the tempo and the rhythm and just see if you can play through each section very quickly to see if you’ve understood it. For example, if you wanted to play through the introduction, you would play (plays). And if you wanted to try the pre-chorus for example (plays). Right, yeah, that’s just to make sure that you’re seeing each part as a whole and not thinking from chord to chord. Right.

So as a third tip but I would say just have the music playing in the background and see if you can play along, even if just with one hand.

Sounds like a plan. Yeah, you can call anytime. Until then. Me, too. Okay. Happy ahas. Me, too, Adele. Bye bye.