The 8 Levels Of Playing Chords On The Piano!

how you play chords in a song can be the thing that makes you sound like a professional pianist or like someone who is just starting out and if you can nail these eight levels of playing chords in a song then you can immediately transform your playing but what fun would it be to just copy me so I'm also going to explain why I'm playing what I'm playing how to best practice each level so that you can save yourself hours had you not watched this video and I'm going to give you examples with each level and a demonstration of all eight levels being used in a song at the end so let's get into it so level one is Triads in music there are 12 individual notes that we can use which on a piano is seven white notes and five black notes after those 12 notes the notes just repeat again they're just higher and lower versions of the same notes so here is a c and here is another C every song that you can think of uses something called a scale to narrow down these 12 notes to just seven and the easiest scale to learn first is the scale C major because the seven notes that that uses is just the white note so that's c d e f g a and B and then the scale just repeats again up and down the piano to form a Triad from this scale all we need to do is play every other note in the scale so a c Triad using a C scale would be the notes c e and G and we can actually use this pattern starting on every note in the scale so chord one using a C scale would be that c chord chord two would be a d chord chord three an E chord and so on all the way up the scale so because there are seven individual notes in a scale there are also seven ads that we can use and if you find a song that uses the scale of C major the chords that are in that song will be a form of one of these seven Triads so level one is to play these Triads in the left hand and play the melody in the right hand for whichever song you choose and the example I'm going to give you is the song Sorry by Justin Bieber and the actual chords that this song uses is an A flat Triad a c Triad and a B flat [Music] Triad [Music] okay on to level two which is inversions now when we play Triads we can spend a lot of time jumping around on the piano and that's because for one chord in a song you might have a c Triad and the next chord might be a g Triad so you have to jump to it now inversions are one of the biggest things that can change your playing from sounding like a beginner to someone who actually really knows what they're doing so if I play a C Triad which is the notes c e and G I can play this like this which is called a root position Triad because the C which is the name of the chord is at the bottom however if I take this C off and play another C on top of the chord instead then this is called a first inversion Triad because I'm playing the same notes but now I've just rearranged them from here I can actually do the same again so I can take the E off the bottom and put that on top and that would give me a second inversion Triad if I did exactly the same thing again and took the g off the bottom and put that on top I would essentially get back to a higher version of what I started with which is the notes c e and G in rout position but what is the actual point in inversions what's the point in rearranging the notes well the point is that we can do something called voice leading in order to make this sound much better to listen to so for example if I have a song that is playing the chord of C major and then playing the chord of G major instead of jumping to get to that G major chord I can find an inversion of the G major chord that is close to that c major chord so the notes in the G chord were G B and D but I can find a g a b and a d much closer to that c chord by just moving the bottom two notes down one this is much better voice leading and the reason we call it voice leading is because if you were to think of each of these notes in the chord as a voice if you had three people singing each of these notes you wouldn't want them to be jumping up and down to find notes that work in the next chord you'd want them to be moving by step or not moving at all so we can use inversions to mean that our chords don't have to move around so much and that sounds much better to listen to and it's also physically easier to play because you're not having to move too much so as the example for this I'm going to use the song greedy by tape McCrae now the scale that this song uses is the scale of F minor and the seven notes that make up that scale are f gsh a b c sh d and e and the Triads that it uses is d b f sharp an e now if I was to play these as regular Triads I would play them like [Music] this whereas playing them with inversions sounds like [Music] this okay on to level number three which is playing bass notes in the left hand and chord notes in the right hand so far the two levels that we have done have all been kind of in the middle of the piano you haven't got a lot of room to move out to different parts of the piano but if you want a song played on the piano to sound like well a song we need to start thinking of the parts that make up that song and the parts that make up a song usually are the drums a baseline some pianos guitars or synths that fill out the chord and the texture of the song and a melody and this is kind of what we want to replicate when we're playing songs on the piano so this means that we want to play much further down on the piano but if we're to play all three notes of a cord really far down on the piano it can sound quite muddy and close textured you can't really make out each of the individual notes if we play them all that low on the piano so instead we're just going to play the root note of the Triad so if we play a C major chord then we would play a C in the base and for a d Triad we'll play a D in the base now that's all well and good playing chords in the right hand and a bass note in the left hand if we only have chords and a bass note but what happens if you have a Melody as well how do you play chords and a melody in the right hand and this once again is a big factor between those that sound really professional on the piano and those that don't what we actually want to do is prioritize the melody but try and include some chord notes wherever it's possible to do that so for example if we take the song Crazy by Niles Barkley this song uses a c minor scale and the seven notes in A C minor scale are C D E flat F G A flat and B flat and the Triads that this song uses are a c Triad an E flat Triad an A flat Triad and a g Triad so firstly we could play the melody in the right hand and the bass notes in the left [Music] hand however that sounds very simplistic so firstly what we can do is try and add some of the chord notes it doesn't matter whether that's one chord note two chord notes or all three of the chord notes but we can add those notes when we play the left hand bass [Music] note and when you get more confident with that then you can start adding more chord notes with some of the melody notes as [Music] well okay on to level four and level four is playing octaves or fifths in the left hand now still even with chord notes in the right hand and a bass note in the left hand it can still sound quite sparse and thin textured and that's because there are still lots of gaps on the piano and if you want something to sound thicker textured then you've got to try and play play across the piano and the first way we can do that is by playing octaves in the left hand now an octave is just from one letter name to the next of the same letter name on the piano so a c to a c or a d to a d and the reason it's called an octave is because OCT means eight and it's actually eight notes in the scale Apart 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 eight playing octaves instead of single notes will add a bit more of a beefy texture and the song example I'm going to show you for this is the song Shallow by Lady gagar and Bradley Cooper now if we do what we did in the last step which is play bass notes with some chord notes in the right hand and the melody you would get something like [Music] this however if we play that same thing but this time add octaves in the left hand we get [Music] this and already that sounds SS much thicker but let's say you get bored of playing octaves or you want something else to play to make it sound just as thick but to keep it interesting well for this we can use fifths and if octave means eight then fifth means five so if we take a regular Triad like the c major Triad that we had the distance between the first key and the last key of that Triad is five notes in the scale so this is a fifth so in the left hand playing fifths is kind of like a halfway house between playing single base notes and playing the full chord which sounds really muddy because you're essentially playing the full chord just without the middle note and playing fifths in the left hand for this song would sound like [Music] this okay on to level five which is seventh chord so a regular Triad is notes one three and five in a scale from whichever note in that scale you're starting on and a seventh chord is just adding the note seven to that so you would get 1 3 5 and seven and once again we can play a seventh chord for every note in a scale so in a C major scale we could play a Triad with a seventh starting on Note One Note 2 Note 3 Note four note five note six and note 7even adding sevens to a chord gives it a bit more personality or a bit more spice regular Triads are great and they form the basis of literally every song that you're ever going to play but if you want to start adding uniqueness and personality to you're playing then adding sevens is a good way of doing that and the example I'm want to show you for this is the song Someone You Love by Lis Capaldi and the scale used for this song is an A flat scale which the notes A flat B flat c d flat E flat F and G and the Triads are an A flat Triad an E flat Triad an F Triad and a d flat Triad so playing this without sevens would sound like [Music] this hello however if I was to add a seventh chord to the last two of these chords it would sound like [Music] this it adds a little bit of character and flavor that may not be in the original song but can make your piano version more unique okay onto step number six which is adding extensions now in music an extension is any note you add to a Triad and some of the most popular extensions to add are 9ths and 11ths and we can work these out in exactly the same way that we worked out seventh chords if we take our original Triad this is Note 1 3 and five and we can count through the scale to get to note number nine or note number 11 so for a c Triad note number nine is a d and note number 11 is an f and just because it's called a 9th or an 11th doesn't mean that we have to play it nine notes away or 11 notes away in a c Triad we could play a d here and this would be a n nth or we could play an F here and this would be an 11th now as you can probably hear extensions make the sound much crunchier the notes are really Compact and close together so the chords sound like they're kind of clashing and although out of context they sound kind of horrible when you play them as part of a song it really does give it character and the example for this I'm going to use is as it was by Harry Styles so if I was to play this just as a normal song I would play it like this however if I was to play it by adding some ninths and 11ths in it would sound like [Music] this okay on to level number seven which is adding leftand patterns arpeggios and broken chord so far I've only really talked about what to play but once you understand that then you can start playing with how you play it and one of the biggest difference between someone who is really confident on the piano and someone who is less confident on the piano is your ability to experiment and play around with different patterns and there are countless chord patterns that you can use or makeup in order to make your playing sound really interesting but I'm going to give you five common cord arpeggio patterns that you can use now an arpeggio is just a chord where you play each of its individual notes rather than playing them all together so normally you play a chord like this but playing an arpeggio would be playing it like this and this in itself is actually our first chord pattern instead of playing a chord where you play all the notes together you can just go backwards and forwards from the bottom to the [Music] top and this is actually the exact pattern that's used in the song Someone Like You by [Music] Adele the second pattern that you can use is probably one of the most useful because you can literally apply this to any song that you want and that's playing both fits and octaves in the left hand and then separating the notes you can apply this to pretty much most songs but the song that I'm going to show you is blinding Lights by the [Music] weekend the third left hand pattern that you can use is playing the root note of a chord followed by the full chord an octave higher if we were to take the chord of C major for example that would be playing a bass note of a c followed by a c chord an octave higher this kind of deals with that problem where if you play a full chord too low down it sounds really muddy but you're also getting to play bass notes so it pads out the texture and you might see this pattern in songs such as as walking in the [Music] air the last two leftand patterns that I'm going to show you are probably the most popular and they also make a song sound really Advanced so they're really worth practicing and learning the first the two patterns is kind of an extension of one of the other patterns that we had where we played the fifth and the octave backwards and forwards this time we're going to add a note on top of that and that is going to be the middle note of the chord the one that's missing when we play just the fifth and the octave so for a C major chord the middle note would be an e if we were playing the fifth and the octave we would be playing c g c so now we're going to play that e but we're going to play that e at the top like this and then we can just keep going up and down like this and if I just play this pan up and down on its own it already sounds more [Music] [Music] advanced and the song that I'll show you for this is the song Can't Help Falling in [Music] Love [Music] and the last left hand pattern is kind of an extension of that same pattern so for a c chord which is the notes c e and G for the pattern that we've just used we had c g c e which is the same notes just spread further across the piano but what we can actually do is play cgc and put a third finger get over to play the E and then just carry on this means that we can play up and down the piano as much as we like and this is the pattern that is most frequently used whenever you see someone playing something by ear because it really does Pat out the texture on the piano and you can make something sound really big or really small just by how much of the piano that you use and the song example I'm going to show you for this is the song vampire by Olivia [Music] Rodrigo okay on to level number eight which is right hand patterns arpeggios and broken chords now the left hand is mostly what's going to Pat out the texture of the song especially when you have a Melody to play because in the right hand you're kind of stuck playing the melody along with some of the chord notes however what about moments in the song where there is no melody or what happens if you're just accompanying singing and you've got nothing going on in the right hand well not only can we use arpeggios and patterns in the left hand we can also use them in the right hand and even if we do have a Melody we can play these arpeggios and patterns in gaps in the melody and make it sound like you're an absolute pro at the piano and the first way we can do this is by using regular arpeggios now a regular arpeggio is just separating out the notes in a chord for a regular c chord we would have the notes c e and G but we can actually play this up and down the piano so we could go c e g c e g c e g c e g and you can play it up and down and much quicker and I can show you this using the song wonder wall by [Music] Oasis the second way we can use patterns in our right hand is to use something called broken chords and this is essentially where we play through each of the different inversions of a chord but arpeggiate them so with C major we'd have c e g and then e g c and then g c e and we can do this as a three note pattern like that or we can also do it as a four note pattern and repeat the bottom note at the top so c e g c e g c e g c e g c e g c and so on broken chords are used all the time in their own writing music and one of the most famous examples of this is the third movement of the Moonlight [Music] Sonata but we can also use these in much the same way as the arpeggios in order to add decoration or make it sound really flashy or technical on the piano and once again I'll show you using wonder [Music] wall and here's wonder wall with both arpeggios and broken [Music] cords so that is the eight levels of playing chords on the piano and here is the song Fix You by Coldplay using all eight [Music] levels [Music] so there you go that is the eight levels of playing chords on the piano if you want to see me reacting to my subscribers playing then head on through and I will see you you there

Channel: Matthew Cawood

Views: 244,212

Keywords: Piano chords, how to play chords on the piano, how to play chords, Matthew Cawood, playing chords on the piano, piano tutorial

Id: rhgt3lZ1RUU

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024