Ballad-style pop piano: improvising on broken chords in a simple progression

okay so in my last tutorial a couple of weeks ago I was talking about four chords that you can use to play hundreds and hundreds of different songs and the tutorial was pretty popular and I got talking about pop piano type styles with with various people and off the back of that I'm putting together a set of little little studies little exercises one or two people suggested this idea so I'm scoring up some some pop piano studies and I'm going to put together a little book and hopefully get out fairly soon I've been looking for another sort of book project to work on and since the cocktail piano book so I thought that sounds like quite a good one so watch this space that's going to be available hopefully before Christmas if I if I pull my finger out and get it done but today I thought what we do is take another those little four chord sequences like we did last time and look at another way that you can explore it in a kind of pop piano a kind of ballads e pop piano style if you like and again this is one of those tutorials for people who are kind of new to the channel or kind of new to this kind of piano playing so I am going to take things a little bit from the basics as it were and so you know if you're a bit more familiar with harmony and music theory that kind of thing you might press skip a couple of minutes while I just go over how the chord to work and so on what we're basically going to look at today though I've guessed from what I was playing at the start is a minor key chord sequence it's a very simple chord sequence again four chords which we're going to repeat on a loop and just a very straightforward let me just play it through to you it's D minor b-flat C that's the chords of D minor B flat and C okay so D minor is DF by B flat B flat F is FA CE C is C okay all in the key of D minor now as I said in the last tutorial it's worth having a look at it if you haven't seen it I'll include a link the great thing about the piano is that you can take those chords and play them in hundreds you know hundreds and hundreds of different ways really so yes that's D minor so is that and that that and that yeah there are loads of different voicings and inversions that you can play those different chords in okay so that's the kind of underlying fundamental as I say if you're and a little bit unsure about that do have a look look at the last tutorial what we're going to do today is to work on a kind of and a poppy baladi style improvisation using that little loop but this week rather than and rather than using the techniques we were looking at in the last tutorial we're going to use broken chords that's where you take a cordon and literally break it into its constituent parts playing one note or maybe two notes at a time so instead of D minor B flat see I'm going to break those chords up okay do you see and that's doing in a very very basic quite we will move on from that in a second but do you see how breaking up the cord immediately creates interest and movement and rhythm so instead of just doing that yeah breaking it up like that look at the things I'm using there and I'm using one two and three if you've got smaller hands you can easily use one three and five if you're new to the piano that's the that's probably the configuration of fingers you're going to be more comfortable with that so again look what I did there taking those chords D minor B flat C we just broke up the chord you we're really so fundamental and pop piano technique really I'm gonna fundamental technique in all kinds of and all kinds of piano playing now just playing the chords in those positions is kind of dull and it's also kind of hard work because we're jumping around to move our hands a lot it will make a lot more sense to play the chords in a set of inversions that were more tightly locked together okay let me give you an example okay you see how I did that let me play the basic chord they're still the same D minor B flat and C but notice how I've chosen chord shapes they're voicings inversions that are more closely intertwined with each others are having to jump around the movements are making actually fairly minimal which helps the progression flow much more naturally D minor B flat C I'm not having to move my hand very much I could of course if I wanted to I could be could be much more dramatic and go up and down the piano keyboard but you can create really really sort of beautiful effects by keeping those chords really closely locked together so I have a go at that it doesn't particularly matter what order you play the notes in just play through that set of inversions it's broken court notice also in the left I'm not always playing the note that the Nate the note that the chord is named after in the left yeah often I am doing especially at the start give that D minor chord its identity and for the b-flat but the egg is over a if we were naming the chord we would say it was F over a tuba would be written F slash a and then C over G and that gives me and much more natural descending baseline yeah let me just play that through again so you can see it adventurous towards the end there have a go at that just something to look out for is make sure that if possible you're keeping the notes in the broken cord nice and even so what we don't want to hear is too much stress for example on the first note if you're after that particular effect you could but by-and-large try to keep it nice and even something else I'm doing is using a bit of sustain pedal to stick it together if I didn't use a sustain pedal it would sound much more kind of sparse and bear which again isn't a bad effect in itself but it's not usually what you're going to be after using sustain though is dead easy just pedal on each cord when you change the cord just lift the pedal off and put it down again okay it's just a very simple movement with your foot over here me doing it as I'm doing the boy way there okay so just have a go at that little pattern and see where it takes you the next question is obviously what can you do with it well once you're confident with that feel free to extend because you can play for each of those broken chords any note that turns up in the chord let me give you a demonstration of the kind of thing you might do starting with the original pattern first you okay I was kind of pushing pushing the boats out towards the end there but I didn't go beyond the notes of the chords basically every single note I played there I think was from the core of big minor B flat F or C yeah so I was only ever playing those notes even when I was going really crazy you yeah all the notes I just played there were these x-rays okay so I wasn't after wasn't having to think really hard about you know on my would which know do I play next it was always a D and F of an a chord of b-flat every single one of those notes was b-flat so with a simple chord sequence using broken chord you can do because I'm quite really quite dramatic things but start simple okay make sure you know the chords make sure you're comfortable with the chords start with the simple baton like this if we start to go crazy and as ever as I always say it's a question of sitting down and practicing and putting in the time and thinking about and experimenting so that it's really it really kind of becomes second nature

Channel: Bill Hilton

Views: 206,321

Keywords: piano, piano chords, pop piano, piano ballad, Chord Progression, Pop Music (Musical Genre), Keyboard, piano improvisation, piano lesson, piano tutorial, easy piano tutorial, easy piano lesson, easy piano chords, minor chord, minor chord progression, arpeggios

Id: VrDYoE7tRL8

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2015