How To Play Beautiful Chords – piano lessons (Pianote)
Hey everyone. How do you take a few simple triads and turn them into something more beautiful? We all know how to play basic major and minor chords, but you listen to some piano music out there and it just sounds so beautiful and so colorful and amazing and how do we make our chord progressions sound just as amazing? Here's a few tips to get your playing sounding as beautiful as the pros.
I'm gonna show you a quick little chord progression here. I'm just gonna demo in basic major triads. We're gonna use a couple chord inversions, but we're just using basic three note triads. Then I'm gonna show you some ways to spice it up. The first progression here that we're gonna look at, just eight bars, and I'll play it now here.
Alright, so our first chord is (piano music) just basic C major, then up to F, back down to C, back up to F, up a step to G, then up to A minor, and then to F, and then to C. So, that is a simple enough chord progression. There's nothing wrong with it, it just sounds a little bit dull. Something that I like to do that instantly makes chord progressions sound more emotional is turn these basic triads into seventh chords.
So, taking this C major chord (piano music) in the first bar, we're gonna get rid of the root note in the right hand. Our left hand is gonna handle the root notes. We're just gonna play the third and the fifth, and then we're gonna play a major seventh, so we're gonna play this B, and now we have a major seven chord.
Then with that F triad that we had, we're gonna play this as a major seven chord as well. So, we're gonna voice it like this. We have our root in the bass, and then we have our F, we have A and C. That's our basic F major triad, but because we're not worrying about the root note in the right hand, we're just gonna play E.
Now we have an F major seven chord, and we can pop back and forth between those two chords. So, here's our C major seven to F major seven. Then to C major seven again, and then we get the the G chord. This time we're gonna play a G seven chord. So we're gonna move our left hand up to play the root note, G, and then we're gonna play D, F, and B to make a dominant seven chord sound.
So, taking it from the top here, we have C major seven, F major seven, C major seven, F major seven, up to G seven, and then we have this A minor chord coming up. We're gonna play an A minor seven. So, we're gonna play A in the left hand, and we're gonna make E, G, and C in the right hand. This is actually just a C major triad in the right hand, but the A minor note comes from the left hand here.
So we have that G seven, up to an A minor seven, and then we had an F major seven. So we have E, A, and C, and then we have C major to finish it all off. So, I'll play this progression one more time, all the way through and you can listen and practice along. So, C major seven, F major seven, C major seven, F major seven, up to G seven, up to A minor seven, and then F major seven, then to C.
So that already sounds a lot more lyrical and expressive than just the basic triads and all we did was take that same chord progression and make seventh chords out of those chords that we're using. The next tiff I'm gonna show you is actually a really cool one. It's using the major/minor relationship that all chords have.
So, we're gonna actually go back and play the exact same chord progression and movement that we did in the very first example when we were just back with the triads. But this time, instead of playing the major root notes in the left hand, we're actually gonna play the relative minor notes. So, for instance, our first bar which was originally just four counts of a C triad, now we're gonna play an A in the bass.
It's gonna sound a lot more majestic, I think. So we have A minor seven, this forms an A minor seven chord 'cause we have our A, and then we have our C major triad up top here. C, E, G, and then A in the bottom. So we're gonna go from an A minor seven, and then we're gonna play a D minor seven. How we're gonna do that is we're gonna play an F major triad in the right hand, just like before.
But, this time instead of going to F in the left hand, we're gonna go to D. So we have a sound like this, A minor seven, to D minor seven, back to A minor, up to D minor seven, and then we're gonna play an E minor seven. So, we're gonna play a G major triad just like before, in the right hand. But now, our left hand is playing E.
and then we have, I just put another A minor seven up here, then we have D minor seven, and then we end on A minor seven. So I'll play that all in one fluid motion again here. (piano music) Here comes E minor seven, A minor seven, D minor seven, back to A minor seven. So those are just a couple really easy ways that I still use to take any simple chord progression and give it a bit more character and life.
I'll play the whole thing through one more time so you can listen to some of the changes and when you're practicing at home, never be afraid to combine some chord progressions and combine some strange other different chord ideas and see what you can come up with all on your own. Thanks for watching.
If you have any thing else that you wanna learn about the piano, check us out at Pianote.com. Thanks guys.
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