Playing from the G position
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Now let's compare the C position chords with those on the G position on the staff. Thanks to the gaps lining up, you can see that so do the corresponding staff lines: blue line from the C position and the red line from the G position. As a result, the noteheads are the same relative to those lines, and therefore so are the available chord types (though not on the same actual notes of course).
Let's start off with a test. What's the difference between these two keyboard sequences? 2nd question. What are these two sequences?
You have to look carefully to see that the only difference is the partial black key at the beginning of the bottom set. This little clue tells you that this sequence must be the white key sequence G through D, the G position, while without that partial black key, the top set must be C through G, the C position.
Otherwise, all the keys look the same and have the same interval counts between the white keys (see the quiz solution figure below). Also note that the black key "gaps" in the middle of both positions line up.
So what's the good news here? Well, you already have a leg up on this task. Because hopefully by now you are pretty confident playing all the chords on the staff in the C position. So with the top line as a reference, the playing of the chords in the G position is the same! Now again they're not the same notes, but finger-wise they're in the same relative positions. And they look the same on the keyboard. For example, to play those perfect 5th chords (interval 7) with your right hand, you would play the lowest note with your thumb and the highest note with your pinky in both cases (C-G and G-B with 3 white keys in between).
The quiz solution to the test above showing the C position on top and the G position on the bottom. The interval counts between the notes in each are the same. Bottom line: given a starting position, the corresponding chords are played with the same fingers (with a given hand, left or right).
Now take these staves to the keyboard and play both C and G position chords until they're firmly in your mind. They're also on the Downloads page. You will eventually find that it's possible to go directly from notes on the staff to fingers on the keys without having to intermediately translate to note names.
Numbers in between staves are the chord interval counts.
Spoiler alert. There are more chords to learn that are not included in the groups above for the C and G positions. These are the ones that cross the G-A boundary. But since these are not needed for now to play the tunes in the lessons up to now, and for awhile in this course, we'll delay that discussion.
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