3 Secrets To Play Chords That ACTUALLY Sound Good

you go to find the chord changes to one of your favorite songs and you see this and your first thought is okay well how do I play that because while you could just approach it the obvious way of playing it exactly what it says and not much else there's going to come a point in which you just don't really feel musically fulfilled they ask you how you are you just have to say that you're fine and this comes from a really great question from Nathan over on my circle community and so I wanted to make this video to talk about how we come up with chords to play on the piano and if you're wondering how you can get access to the circle Community where you can ask questions hang out with fellow students and interact with me well membership with that Community is exclusive to course members and you can get access to the entire course library for the most insane deal that we have ever run on the Cornell Music Academy it's our Black Friday deal but it is only available for the remainder of today there are just a few hours left to grab this year's Black Friday bundle it's over a $700 value for just 99 bucks and it's a great way to support the channel so I really appreciate it let's keep going let's talk about this because this is one of the most interesting subjects I think when it comes to piano playing and it's so unique to piano playing and certainly it extends to guitar and other chord instruments but on the piano we have this linear visual representation of music it's why it's one of the most advantageous instruments to learn how to play and really what we're asking is how do we take a set of chord changes and turn it into an actual something that sounds like a song and not just stuck with these root position chords right that's a great place to start but you may find yourself wanting a little more expressive ability than [Music] that we're going to break this down into three primary steps the first is all about chord voicing which is essentially spreading out the notes that are available to us the second part will be about adding notes to these chords and then the third part will be about adding Rhythm to these chords so let's start with that first part if we have a C major chord how can we just reposition these notes that were already given in a way that makes it sound a little nicer a little more full a little more open right because at the end of the day each one of these notes c e and G well there's a bunch of those all around the piano so let's start by just reorganizing them let's take our C and we'll put it down here for example and then maybe let's take our G and put it here and then how about we take the e but we'll throw it up an octave already this sound is much more full and Rich than just our root position chord but it's the exact same notes but you can hear how it takes on a different feel altogether this is why voicing the chord and choosing how to arrange the notes within a chord is so helpful because we can take something that would would have sounded boring and who knows we could try this we could we could do that too sure it's much much wider but it has an interesting sound and it's completely different than that and it's completely different than that but they're all ways to voice those same exact three notes without adding any notes without taking away any notes we're simply repositioning them somewhere on the piano this is the first step towards taking any chord that you might come across and trying to make it a little more interesting by rearranging the notes in a way that gives it a fuller totally new voice altogether well what if we don't think that that's even quite good enough well we can actually start to add notes now that can come in one of two ways we can either add more notes of the same that we've already had and here's what I mean we have a c an E and A G well we could simply rearrange them like we did in the first section or we can rearrange them and just add more and then we can create all kinds of sounds just by adding more of the notes that we are already playing in the chord we can give it a much Fuller much more Rich sound and we can control where the focus of the chord is so if we want something like that to ring out we can set our chord up to highlight that right or if we want maybe that note we can highlight that one as well all by choosing how many of each note we want to play which is also somewhat dependent on our hands and then where we want to position those notes within the chord now the second way that we can add notes is by actually adding notes that are outside of those first three given notes so instead of playing more C's more E's or more G's we can start adding notes to it now this is going to depend on the song that you're playing and where the chord falls in the song that you're playing but often times you're actually going to see some type of designation if you if you're going to add a fourth note or even more it might tell you right off the bat what those should be and those are seventh chords that's usually the first place we go to when we continue this pattern of stacking this shape these thirds we just add another one and that's how we get our seventh chord so this would be a great way to introduce an additional color into your chord and we can do all of the same things that we were doing before to now these groups of notes we can voice it however we want and it doesn't even stop there we can continue to add notes depending on how they sound and what the chord is supposed to sound like what if I added that note that sounds great why don't we add that note as well well now we're starting to really build this chord out and how am I choosing what to actually play here well it's the same exact principles that we discussed in the beginning where we simply take the notes that we've chosen to go with and we arrange them in different ways depending on what we want the chord to sound like and over time you'll develop your own habits and your own preferred methods of voicing different chords and you'll eventually just kind of like learn them so that you can go back back to them and pull them out anytime you need them now you may have noticed something really interesting about what I just played we added these first four notes but then we also added that note and then we also added that note well what is this getting awfully close to it's getting really close to just being all the notes in a scale right and so this introduces the next way that we can choose how we decide what notes to add add to a chord and that is based on the scale that is appropriate for the chord in whatever particular position it happens to lie in the song now the answer to this question might be a little bit more complicated so we're not going to dive super into this topic that'll be probably for another video but the idea is that eventually I can just think about a bank of notes that make up a scale and I can pull all of my notes that I want to add to a chord from that bank now for this particular chord that we've been building on C major I'm really only missing one note to complete this scale I have six notes and we know that the c major scale is seven notes and then we repeat the first one right so all I have to do is add one note to complete that scale and that would be if I'm using C major would be F all right so let's try see what happens if we play a C major chord with all these notes from the from the major scale and and and from this point you can see I can just kind of start playing groups groups of them now the only thing that I don't like about this is that weirdly I don't actually think that note fits very well why do I know that because I'm just using my ear to think about what what I kind of want to hear and that note just isn't really it right right so I'm going to say well what if I changed it right well if I move it down well that's just that's just that I already have that note okay well if I move it up ooh that's really interesting now I can tell you all day long that that is actually going to create the C lydian scale but the great part about this approach is that it doesn't really matter what the scale is it's just a question of whether or not the notes that you're choosing fit within the context of the chord and more importantly within the context of the song So now we've successfully taken something as simple as this and we've gone well we can just spread this out and then we said well we can just repeat start adding more notes from it and then we can start adding different notes from it and then we realize that we're just about playing a scale anyways why don't we just complete the scale and now we know that we have this group of notes that we can utilize to create any voicing we want for this particular C major chord and that brings us to the final piece of the puzzle which is once you have a choice a selection of notes that you want to play how do we now introduce maybe a little bit of Rhythm because you definitely don't want to just be stuck playing static chords everywhere you play anything it's just that's not really how we play music and so adding that rhythmic component can really take your chord voice Ing and make them start to feel like songs and to do that it's pretty simple we just kind of break up the voicing that we're playing now that wasn't really in in any particular Rhythm or anything but if it if it were all I'm doing is playing those notes from the note bank that I specified and I'm breaking them up and adding a little bit of Rhythm to them and it now it it just all all of a sudden it just sounds like an accompaniment it sounds like you could sing over top of it or you could play stuff play A Melody of a song in your right hand this is how we build out these choices what we're choosing to play when we see something as simple as just a regular major chord now in not all circumstances Will adding this particular Bank of notes work for C specifically because maybe the context of the song dictates uh a harmonic space where like this just wouldn't really work so you always have to defer to the context of the song the chords that come before it and after it to determine if the notes you choose might actually sound okay cuz it's not always straightforward but the important thing to remember is that you can easily go from something as simple as this to something as beautiful as that in just a couple of simple steps it's not even really heavily Theory based I mean all we did was start adding a couple notes and then we went oh wait that's a scale isn't it and then before you know it we just have a note bank that we're building all kinds of things from now there's one final component to this that I want to make sure we talk about here because it is I think one of the most useful things when you're developing your own chord voicings that you're going to use in music for years and years and years because when I play something [Music] like when I'm playing those chord voicings I'm not always thinking about the scales that are associated with them these are things that I've developed and plugged into my repertoire into my vocabulary that I'm able to pull out at a moment's notice pretty much anywhere I see different chord structures and one of the ways that I was able to make these a lot easier to think about for me let's go back to our C major voicing there are some things that are cool to notice about chords that can help you build out much more sophisticated chords way easier here's a really simple example when we look at the notes of C lydian which is what this scale is and that's how we derive this note bank that we're going to use there are some interesting things we can see happening first of all we have our root position four note chord here well let's look at the notes that we added to fill this scale out we added a d we added an A and then we were going to add the F but we said that didn't really sound that great so we changed it to an F this is where it gets really cool because take away that c chord on the bottom what are we left with look at that that's just a D major chord right and so we have C major 7 with this D major on top of it and for some reason for me when you start thinking about it this way it's like oh I can think about so many chords as a composite or a chord stack of other chords and this this to me has made things very very easy to see in a lot of areas because I could think about all day long I could say this chord bear with me for a second this chord is a B flat 7 flat 9 sharp 11 13 I could think that all day long sure but you know it's a lot easier for me just saying well it's it's like a B flat dominant and then I'm just going to take like a a g major sound and maybe I'll add the S like G6 there's a G6 chord to in my mind and I just dump that G6 chord over the B flat and I get that and it's the same thing as this big elaborate name of a chord with all these alterations to it but for me in my brain it's just like it's kind of just simpler to think about it as two things stacked on top of each other so that may not be simpler for you it may not be your preferred approach and that's totally fine this is totally all about finding what works best for you and determining those things that you can utilize at a moment moment's notice to figure out how you want to voice a chord no matter where or when you encounter it in a song but it can be really helpful to understand some of these small tips and tricks that can help you build chords faster and escape the bounds of feeling like all you can play is just a regular root position voicing and hey don't forget there are just hours left to use that link in the description down below to grab this year's Black Friday bundle it's my entire course Library it's over a $700 value available for just 99 bucks and once again this is how we support the channel here so if you enjoy this content and you'd like to consider supporting us that support is appreciated more than you know and let me know your questions about chord voicings in the comments below and other topics that you'd like to see me cover that are a little more music theory Focus because I love digging into this stuff as you can tell and I would love to do more of it so that's it that's going to be all for today thank you so much for watching this video and we'll see you in the next [Music] one [Music] w

Channel: Charles Cornell

Views: 124,242

Keywords: Charles, Charles Cornell, Charles Cornell Studios, Studios, Cornell, Piano, Piano Covers, Piano guy, piano lesson, music theory, chords, chord voicings, piano theory, jazz piano, jazz lesson, jazz theory

Id: czgQT6XQ__0

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 29 2023