That’s just a little ballad-style improvisation
exercise that I’m going to teach you a bit later in this tutorial. I’m going to teach you it because I want
to use it to show you a really cool, but pretty straightforward little trick that you can
use to create kind of you know those rich and interesting chord sounds on the piano,
and those rich melodic sounds as well, even if you don’t know a ton of stuff about piano
chords or music theory. You’ll find this useful if you’re interested
in learning more about piano chords, or about improvisation, or songwriting, or if you just
like to kind of sit down like that at the piano and kind of noodle around and make a
cool sound. The basic technique that I’m going to talk
about works in any key with a huge number of chords and different chord progressions
and so on. But I’m going to demonstrate it with that
improvisation exercise, which is in the key of E flat major. It just uses five chords, which sounds a lot,
but they’re all dead simple, and we’re mostly going to be playing them, as you probably
saw, in the left hand. Let me just talk you through them. Here’s middle C. We’ve got E flat, F minor, G minor, A flat,
and every now and then we’re just going to be using a B flat, OK? That didn’t crop up when I was playing just
now, but every now and then we will use a B flat. So those chords, once again, are E flat, F
minor, G minor, A flat and the occasional B flat. Now the great thing about this exercise is
that there isn’t a set chord progression – you can take it very free and easy, and
you don’t have to worry much about where you are with which chord and that sort of
thing. For the purposes of demonstrating it, though,
what I’m mostly going to be doing is moving, as I was when I played earlier, from E flat
up to A flat using the two minor chords as stepping stones, like this – E flat, F minor,
G minor, A flat, then straight back down to E flat. Obviously we’ll be doing a bit slower than
that, but that is the basic idea. Every now and then when we feel like it, we
can just pop up to the B flat and come back down via the A flat to the E flat, the tonic,
the home chord of E flat major. You’ll see what exactly I mean when I demonstrate
the exercise in a second. Now in the right hand we’re just going to
be playing just one chord, E flat. Look at the inversion I’m using, the chord
shape, just there – rather than the root position, which is there, I’m starting on
this G – the one above middle C - and playing B flat and E flat and often I’ll be using
the G above as well, for a four-note chord. Now that’s still an E flat chord, exactly
the same notes as the basic E flat triad, but just in a different order. Now you might be saying – whoa, hold on
Bill, how does this work? We’re playing one chord in this hand against
different chords in the left hand – surely we’re going to get a clash, we’re going
to get a horrible mess? Well, as you heard at the beginning, no we’re
not, not necessarily. And that’s the, you know, the kind of secret
if you like that lies at the heart of this technique: we’re going to be using a single
chord, or rather playing around with the notes of a single chord in the right hand, while
changing chords in the left hand, yeah, and using the tension, the clash between those
chords to create a richer and a deeper musical effect. Let me show you what I mean by playing through
again. You’ll see that what I’m doing here is
improvising a bit using rhythm. I’ll do it in quite a simple way here, and
I’m playing no more notes than the ones that I’ve shown you in the chords – so
all the improvisation comes from playing around with the rhythm I use, and from breaking up
the chords, especially in the right hand, OK, in other words taking that basic E flat
major chord to pieces and playing around with its constituent notes. OK, here we go. So did you see what I was doing there? I was just using that E flat chord shape in
the right against those changing chords in the left to create some kind of, you know,
much richer and more complex sounds from those basic chords, as I say, just by kind of exploiting
the harmonic clash between the two hands, or the apparent harmonic clash between those
two hands. So when we started the exercise – you know,
let’s just dig into that – when we started the exercise both hands were playing an E
flat chord, but then we changed chords for our first chord change and suddenly we had
an F minor chord in the left against that E flat chord in the right. What we essentially did there was actually
create a more complex F minor chord. If you were writing a chord chart you could
write that in as F minor 11, which is what it basically is, yeah? Then we moved up to G minor in the left against
the E flat, which you could kind of write down as G minor with an added minor 6, or
even E flat major seven with a G in the bass, if you wanted to get kind of really exotic
– but you know there are a few ways you could notate it. Then the A flat, which I guess becomes an
A flat major nine, and then the Bb is, you know, B flat 6 with an added fourth… But it doesn’t matter if you don’t know
those chord names, at least for now – the important thing is that you can create the
sound. Sometimes you’ll look up chord progressions
for people’s songs on the internet and you know you’ll see like an F minor 11 chord
and think, “wow, what kind of music theory genius does it take to think up something
like that and include it in a song”? What in fact has probably happened is that
the songwriter has just been doing what we were doing there, noodling around on the piano
keyboard, going through this kind of process and suddenly hit on that chord and said “oh
yeah, that sounds cool! Now what is it called… oh yeah” – and this is where the music
theory knowledge comes in – “it’s F minor 11”. So it’s really, really handy to learn the
music theory to be able to write it down, and to kind of study it and develop it, but
the most important thing is to be able to create the sound in the first place. So the main idea that we’re playing around
with here is that we’re creating complexity from simplicity – we’re taking these really
quite basic underlying chords and sticking them together on the piano keyboard to see
how they sound. We’re not moving around loads we’re not
deep diving into very abstract theory, we’re just sticking to that simple E flat chord
shape in the right and changing in the left. This is a really important point about doing
stuff on the piano and about music in general – although, you know, an awful lot of musicianship
is hard and takes practice, you can do some really cool stuff, you can create some great
music using pretty basic ingredients – like I said, complexity from simplicity. I should say at this point by the way that
if you do want to dig deeper into this stuff, do please subscribe to my channel – right
now I’ve got kind of around 170, I think, piano tutorials on YouTube. Just hit one of the subscribe buttons maybe,
you may see one bottom right of the video or underneath the video, depending whether
you’re, you know, on desktop or mobile, and then YouTube will give you regular updates
on my stuff and recommendations on the tutorials that are best for you. I’ve got some great playlists and stuff
for beginners that you might be interested in. Let’s just try that improvisation again,
but this time let’s um, let’s make it a bit richer and more complex. What I’m going to do this time in the right
hand is move a little bit outside the chord every now and then. So rather than just using the notes of the
straight E flat chord, every now and then I’m going to drop in the note F, here, which
is part of the E flat major scale but it gives us a few options when it comes to offering
a little bit of interest and variety. I might also be a little bit more adventurous
in my left hand, too, yeah? Let’s just kind of play around and see what
comes out. I did a few interesting bits and pieces in the left
there – I think a couple of times I missed the middle note out of some of the triads,
yeah, to give them a kind of more open and ambiguous sound. And ah, I dropped in, I think, at one stage
the E flat on the F minor chord to suggest something more like an F minor 7 in the left. You know, just adding little bits of richness
and complexity. I think I, you know, I dropped down to the
E flat there, using my second over my thumb, all just kind of playing around, seeing how
it develops under my fingers. So take it away for yourself and play around
with it, go and sit at the piano and fiddle around with this stuff. Remember that you don’t really need to play
a rigid chord progression, yeah, don’t focus on the chord progression – just generally
move from the E flat to the A flat via those minor chords, and every now and then drop
in that little B flat and A flat descending, OK, if you want to – doesn’t matter if
you don’t. You can just stick to the basic chords. Or use a different chord progression altogether
– play around, see how you get on. You’ll probably find that this kind of clashing
chord technique works best when you use the diatonic chords of a key – in other words,
the chords that develop naturally from the scale of the key, OK – but don’t get too
hung up on rules. As I say, if you want to kind of understand
more of the theory, if all that talk of diatonic chords doesn’t make sense to you, go and
check out some of the other videos on my channel. When you’re figuring out stuff like this
on the piano it’s best to go from the practical to the theoretical rather than the other way
around. In other words, discover something new while
you’re actually live playing on the piano keyboard or maybe by copying or listening
to somebody else, then use the theory that you know to describe and understand and repeat
what you’ve done, rather than starting with the theory and saying ‘oh you know the theory
says I have to do this and then I have to do that, and oh dear it’s all so complicated”,
yeah? Always start on the piano. Just before you go and try it let me just
show you a couple of other things that I was doing there, just that will help you make
a nicer sound. First of all, I wasn’t worrying too much
about fingering – rather, I was using the sustain pedal to kind of stick things together
and get that smooth, legato sound. That’s the right pedal, and it, you know
it helped me sustain the notes. The safest advice when you’re using the
sustain pedal is to pedal on every chord change, OK? So play around with your piano to see how
it responds, but if you lift and then fairly quickly depress the pedal, in a smooth movement,
I’m exaggerating it there, just as your fingers land on the new chord, then that should
do the job. Secondly, and this is critical, I was making
in both of those improvisations, I was making a pretty big effort to be musical. Now that might sound kind of mad – of course
I was being musical, you know, I was playing the piano – but, as I’ve said in other
tutorials, as pianists musicality is something that we have to be careful not to lose sight
of. Because the piano makes the sound for us,
yeah, it’s very easy for us to get hung up on pressing the right keys at the right
time, and not actually listen to the sound we’re making. The point of music is to be expressive, to
convey a feeling, an emotion, so make sure you are being musical, you are doing that
when you play – vary the louds and softs, the intensity, the tempo, whatever. Give your music some meaning, whatever it
is you’re playing. So that’s about it. As I said, if you’re new to my stuff, do
please subscribe – and if you’ve enjoyed this I’ve got loads and loads of other tutorials
and playlists on chords and improvisation and suchlike that you will find useful. If you have a question, stick it in the comments
thread, underneath – I always do try to reply, though sometimes it takes a little
while. And finally, do also, I should say, check
out my books, How To Really Play The Piano, which if you can read a little piano music,
you don’t have to be great, but if you can you just have to be able to read a bittle
– a bittle? A little! Then it will get you started with chords and
improvisation and all that kind of stuff about pop chords and jazz chords and things that
you won’t have learned if you – probably won’t have learned if you had regular piano
lessons. Then there’s my new collection of piano
pieces, Seven Studies in Pop Piano, which is pretty much what it says, seven short pieces
of piano music, from easy to intermediate, designed to get you playing in pop piano styles
and ballad styles a little bit like the one we’ve been messing around at today - you
know, like kind of Ben Folds and Elton John and Regina Spektor and all of those guys. And each study comes with a bunch of notes
to explain the theory behind the practice, the harmony, how everything’s working. Click on the links immediately below the video
to find out about either book, or if you click the little info box to the top right hand
corner, yeah, that’ll take you to How To Really Play The Piano specifically. So there we go – there’s more stuff coming
up on the channel later this month, including the latest instalments in my piano for absolute
beginners series and my jazz piano for beginners series. I’ll see you soon.
