Stuck Playing Boring Chords? Watch This Video

how do you start from here and build it into something that sounds more like this [Music] one of the things i get asked a lot when it comes to playing chords on the piano and improvisation is how do you know what ways to voice different chords on the piano especially if you don't have a huge understanding of music theory maybe you're feeling very limited to just the root positions of different types of chords and you're just not sure do i need to find all of these different voicings from a book what do i need to know in order to start creating interesting sounds on my own and you may think well that's all a theory thing i need to learn more music theory before i understand how to actually piece chords together and like with everything else music theory obviously can help however you don't need to know any of it in order to start creating chords that are really beautiful and can help you start feeling like you're able to escape just playing root position chords for everything to demonstrate i'd like to introduce you to our main editor on the channel jake jake has been working on piano for a little while now and he's made some really great progress and while as you can see he's crushing it in terms of developing technique and starting to find his way around the instrument the one thing that jake hasn't done really any of is understanding a lot of music theory so in this video we're gonna work with him through this process of creating chords from scratch without knowing any theory at all so that you can see how you might be able to apply some of these ideas and create chords for yourself that might sound a little more interesting than what you've been playing here's how it's gonna work jake's gonna play as grouping of notes and we're gonna work with it until it sounds really good and then we're gonna go backwards and define what it is and the purpose of this is to really show the kinds of beautiful things that you can create even without coming from that music theory background first things first i want you to hear this thing that jake put together this was kind of the first way that he actually did this without even realizing it and then came to me and was like hey what is this so go ahead and play that grouping of chords yeah i really love the way that sounds and one of the things that stuck out to me initially about it was like it sounds like an actual chord progression that makes harmonic sense it sounds like it's going somewhere we're gonna start from scratch here's what we're gonna do you're literally just going to play some notes go ahead take both hands as many notes as you want best way to do it is don't think about it just put your hands down would you change anything about it or do you like the way it sounds i like it i like it too so when we look at what jake is playing here we can actually see that there's a couple of shapes that are already predefined and from that we can make an assumption about what is this chord what is it actually doing now we didn't need to make any adjustments here because he just put his hands down and it sounded like that that's pretty good we're gonna leave that the way it is so the first thing i want you to do is i want you to isolate the left hand so go play play exactly what you just did in the left hand what's that so i'm guessing it's some sort of like just a g major maybe well play it play it again play it again does that sound major or minor i guess this sounds more minor it's minor a little bit darker right so it's just a g minor triad in the left hand and in the right hand we have something completely different so go ahead and play that play those notes okay so we have a c d and f now there are a bunch of different ways that you could define this but i'll tell you what my brain immediately goes to my brain immediately goes to a first inversion f major six chord so what would normally start on f a c d it's just a triad and we add that six in and then we're gonna invert it up one time so we have first inversion f6 over g minor now when we combine all with when we could see this doesn't mean anything to jake because he has yet to kind of jump into this but what this is illustrating is like this is really valuable stuff that he's playing but he didn't need to know all of this to get here it's like a g minor 11 sound if we took this and converted it all so that it was just stacked thirds how we typically build voicings we would have g b flat d and then we have an f way up at the top if we drop that down we have an f a c and then the d is a repeated note because we already have it down here that is purely just a g minor 11 chord very very simple chord and then you can look at it as two shapes stacked on top of each other but really all it is is a g minor 11. that's a really really useful chord you might use it as maybe a two chord in like a two five one it has a lot of uses but it's not just a root position g minor 11. it's not just those stacked thirds like we would have seen if we were trying to think about it from a theory perspective if jake went and learned about g minor seven chords and then said well you can also put the ninth and the 11th on top of that he might voice it naturally just as that stacked third shape would that sound nice of course it would sound nice but what sounds a lot nicer is breaking that up and creating these unique divisions and these unique spacings of the notes in that chord so that we have a whole new shape if you really liked that chord you could figure out i want to play that same thing and just move it around and learn it in different keys and then eventually you'd have a really nice piece of a voicing that you could put into your own vocabulary and use forever that's how we do this that's how we build these interesting voicings without necessarily having to just use root position voicings and sound boring and all that stuff we can create really complex harmonies and really complex interesting voicings of chords without even having to think about it from a theory perspective let's do another one go ahead and just think some interesting contortions of your fingers and just play something crunchy [Music] you're getting lucky today okay play it again let it sit there one more time this is an extremely vague cord meaning it could have a whole bunch of different applications i could find a way to call this a g minor i could find a way to call this an e flat chord i could find a way to call this a c minor chord i could find a way to call this a b flat chord first things first i want to look at this left hand so in jake's left hand he's playing a d an e flat and a g so immediately we start thinking about all the different applications of that that could be a 2 minor 3 5 of a c minor chord it could be a 7 1 3 of an e flat major 7 chord it could be a 3 4 6 of a b flat chord which would be kind of like an interesting combination of a sus sound but also major it can be used in a bunch of different ways but let's look at the right hand to help maybe provide some context for maybe the most likely applications of what this chord kind of sounds like in your right hand okay so we have is it just those three oh there's not oh okay so i thought you were playing a d above there but that's okay because there's a d down here so it's just a repeated note oh wow okay this is this is really interesting so leave the left hand out for a second play the right we're going to compose in real time ready i want you to think real slow and just play the right hand look at that how sick is that that's cool [Music] keep going keep going [Music] that really helps to illustrate how this particular combination of notes could be used in so many different ways we're not really clearly defining what the chord is i mean there's just so many different things that we could do with it just play the right hand again okay let that sit there that has its own context that has its own implication play it again our ear is sort of establishing a home base for what that feels like now play it again but add the left hand now it takes on a completely different life it sounds like a completely different chord that is saying something completely different here's what i'm feeling ready we're you're going to play the right hand first ready go ahead keep going ready left now what changes right because in the right hand we have f a b flat so it's kind of if we're calling this a b flat chord it's giving us b flat major seven essentially when i hear that right hand okay i'm sort of hearing that as that major seventh chord right so it kind of feels like that's me now the only thing that changes when we introduce the new sound okay so we added the e flat that is the thing that i think fundamentally changes the way that this feels naturally to our ear i think now that we've add that e flat because if we just didn't add the e flat check this out so if you uh leave the e flat out and just play the d and the g with the right hand that's totally different isn't it yeah right yeah so once we add that e flat back in go and play the whole thing now it has a totally different context to it drop it out again that kind of feels like it could be a lot of different things it feels like it could be a d minor of some kind could feels like it could be a g minor of some kind the cool part about all of this is that none of this is set in stone and this is what's so much fun about this process there's all these different ways that we can define this there's all these different you know harmonic contexts that could exist here that could tell us a lot about the functionality of this chord none of it is set in stone because we could start over again and i could change these root notes and make it sound like something completely different so for example play the right hand again okay ready watch this we're gonna play it again one two ready [Music] check that out totally different now now yeah look at that one when you play voicings that are vague like this by nature you have so many options and you have so many different ways that you can define what's actually going on within the overall harmonic context okay let's do one more and i want to get super weird don't think about it at all and just drop them on the piano go ahead [Music] wait hold it though hold it though play it again okay that's a bizarre sound this is a really fun practice that you can do because what you can literally start with is just take your hands and put them on the piano and you're going to create something that very likely is going to sound dissonant and disjointed and it's going to sound really bizarre like this does play it again that is very strange that's not exactly pleasing to the ear maybe in context you could create some way that it would be pleasing to the ear now we have a couple of options here we can sit here and we can try to define what this chord might be or we can do what the next step of the process is which is start to make slight tweaks and adjustments until you like the sound play the left hand by itself all right does that feel like a like a really settled chord no no it feels it feels odd right and that's because it's a diminished chord okay so you're playing b diminished in your left hand right and so what we can do to start with just start tweaking notes i mean pick any note in that chord and move it by a half step whoa yeah that just changed it right yeah okay so now we are settled so we have b minor now we could leave that there we could go back to our original and do something weird with it we could move any of the other ones but because this one really seems to settle well as b minor we're gonna start there okay so we've adjusted our left hand now our goal is play the right hand with it so we've got some work to do if we want to slightly adjust this to make it sound cool right we don't need to approach this from any theory we can just start shifting notes pick a note in your right hand and just change it see what happens that's definitely settled now you had dropped your high note you had a g in there right in your fifth finger go ahead and play that okay so it's not horrible but but it also kind of unsettles the chord a little bit so can we move that anywhere to make it sound normal that's kind of neat yeah that's kind of neat yeah that could work you could stop here and you could say i like the way this chord sounds i'm gonna you know i'm gonna figure out what it is what we said we'd define we're playing just a b minor in our left hand that's just a b minor triad with uh the repeated root okay and then in our right hand we have the seventh the flat seventh so that makes b minor seven but then we also have our ninth which is c we repeat our third which is down here right so theoretically you could drop that out right and then we play our fifth again which theoretically you could drop that out as well because it's a repeated note but then you added this g sharp so let's try something interesting here let's do no repeated notes so you're going to play your a you're going to play your c sharp and you're going to play your g sharp and you're going to leave out the two middle ones because they're already down here play that listen to the spacing on that chord yeah how nice is that right because we're not crap we're not overcrowding it it's not a cluster in this case we're not trying to create a cluster voicing cluster would just be a bunch of notes really close together so in this case we've created a really nice voicing of b minor seven we do repeat our root here in the left hand so why don't we just get rid of that that's pretty nice but i do see a lot of space in between the two hands which is not a problem you might also consider like how might you change this voicing to spread it out even more one way that you could do it is you could take your third your d here and move it up an octave so you would play b and then stretch out a lot and play your f sharp and then reach up with your thumb you may not be able to play with one hand you might have to kind of roll it listen to that [Music] that's kind of cool isn't that beautiful yeah that's a beautiful chord right there how did we arrive there well we simply started with we just kind of played a chord and then eventually we shifted around until we liked the sound and at that point you can go backwards and define what it is and then you can say well if we were going to play this chord that we just created would we want to shift this voicing around at all what we've done is we've created a really beautiful voicing of b minor seven that's nice and spread out it's got a lot of space and we did it purely without approaching it from a theory first standpoint so jay could literally take this practice and go sit in his apartment on his piano and literally just like play different shapes and adjust them until he likes the sound and he may not have the theory background just yet to go back and define what everything is but he definitely can play that thing that you came up with on your own play that again that is a gorgeous sequence and you know what we're not even gonna sit here and define it because it almost doesn't even matter don't let a lack of understanding of music theory stop you from creating and composing on your own and finding things on the piano or on your instrument that sound good to you the important part is the exploration and what you're going to discover as you try to change all these notes around to create something that sticks out to your ear if you are feeling stuck on root position voicings and boring chords or you've been playing the same things over and over this is a great practice to help you break out of that and start to experience far more advanced far more lush voicings without even having to worry about their definitions from a music theory perspective so be sure to show jake some love in the comments below he's been working really hard at getting his stuff together and that's it that's gonna be all for this video thank you to jake for for being a part of it and be sure to check out the link down in the description below if you want to learn more about playing this instrument our intro to piano course is based entirely on starting you from scratch not having played before and not understanding any theory to finding your way around this instrument and understanding some basic concepts it's available for 30 off right now using code music theory 30. there's a link down in the description below that's the best way you can support the channel and i really appreciate it so thank you and thank you for watching this video we will see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Charles Cornell

Views: 153,986

Keywords: Charles, Charles Cornell, Charles Cornell Studios, Studios, Cornell, Piano, Piano Covers, Piano guy, music theory, piano lesson

Id: KiDsFQ1BhHo

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 06 2022