The 8 Levels Of Playing Chords On The Piano!

The way you play

chords

in a song can be what makes you sound like a professional pianist or someone just starting out and if you can achieve these eight

levels

of chord

playing

in a song then you can immediately transform your

playing

. touch, but what? It would be fun 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 you can save yourself hours if you hadn't watched this video and I'm going to give you examples with each level and a demo of the eight

levels

that are used in a song at the end, so let's get into it, level one is Triads in music, there are 12 individual notes that we can use, which on a

piano

is seven white notes. notes and five quarter notes after those 12 notes, the notes just repeat themselves again, they're just higher and lower versions of the same notes, so here's a C and here's another C.

Every song you can think of uses something called a scale to reduce these 12 notes to just seven and the easiest scale to learn first is the C major scale because the seven notes it uses are just the white note so it's c d e f g a y B and then the scale is simply repeated again up and down on the

piano

to form a Triad of this scale, all we have to do is play every other note in the scale, so a triad in c using a C scale would be the notes C and G and we can actually use this pattern starting on each note of the scale, so chord one using a C scale would be the C chord, chord two would be a D chord, a D chord.

E and so on until the end of the scale, so as there are seven individual notes in a scale, there are also seven A's that we can use and if you find a song that uses the C major scale the

chords

that are in that song will be a form 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 any song you want. 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 are an A-flat triad, a C triad and a B-flat triad, okay at level two, which now They are investments when we play.

With triads we can spend a lot of time jumping on the piano and that's because for one chord in a song you can have a C triad and the next chord can be a G triad, so you have to jump to it now, the Investments are one of the most important things. that can take your playing from sounding like a beginner to someone who 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 triad of root position because the C what is the name of the chord that is at the bottom, however, if I remove this C and play another C on top of the chord, then this is called first inversion triad because I am playing the same notes but now I just rearranged them from here, I can actually do the same thing again so I can remove the E from the bottom and put it on top and that would give me a second Inversion Triad if I did the exact same thing again and removed the g from the bottom lower and If we put that on top, it would basically go back to a higher version of what I started with, which is the ce and g notes in route position, but what's the real point of the inversions?

What's the point of rearranging notes well? The point is that we can do something called a voice guide to make this sound sound much better to hear, for example if I have a song that plays the C major chord and then I play the G major chord 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 and D, but I can find a G, B and D much closer to that C chord. c simply by moving the bottom two notes down.

First, this is a much better voice guide and the reason we call it a voice guide is because if you were to think of each of these chord notes as a voice, if you had three people singing each of these notes, you wouldn't want that they did it. be jumping up and down to find notes that work in the next chord, you'll want them to move step by step or not move at all so we can use inversions so our chords don't have to move as much and that sounds a lot better to listen to and it's also physically easier to play because you don't have to move around too much, so as an example for this, I'm going to use the song greedy by tape McCrae.

Now the scale this song uses is the F minor scale and the seven notes that make up that scale are f gsh a b c sh d and e and the triads it uses are db f sharp and e now if I had to play them like normal triads I would play them like this while I touch they with inversions sound like this, it's okay at level number three, which is playing bass notes in the left hand and chord notes in the right hand. So far, the two levels we've made have all been in the middle of the piano you have.

We don't have much room to move to different parts of the piano, but if we want a song played on the piano to sound good, we need to start thinking about the parts that make up that song and the parts that make up that song. A song is usually drums, a base, some pianos, guitars or synths that complete the chord and texture of the song and a melody, and this is what we want to replicate when we play songs on the piano, so this means that we want play much lower on the piano, but if we play the three notes of a string very low on the piano, it can sound quite muddy and close in texture, you can't distinguish each of the individual notes. if we play them that low on the piano then we will only play the root note of the triad, so if we play a C major chord we will play a C on the base and for a D triad we will play a D on the base, that It's all very well, 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 if you also have a melody, how do you play chords and a melody in the right hand and This, once again, is a big factor between those who sound really professional on the piano and those who don't, what we really want to do is prioritize the melody, but try to include some chord notes wherever possible. do that, for example, if we take the song Crazy by Niles Barkley, this song uses a C minor scale and the seven notes in the 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 and an E-flat triad an A-flat triad and a G triad, so first we could play the melody in the right hand and the bass notes in the left hand, however, that sounds very simplistic, so So first what we can do is try to add some of the notes of the chords that don't.

It doesn't matter if it's one chord note, two chord notes or all three chord notes, but we can add those notes when we play the left hand bass note and when you are more confident with that, then you can start adding more chord notes with some of the chord notes. the melody notes are also fine at level four and level four is playing octaves or fifths in the left hand, now even with chord notes in the right hand and a bass note in the left hand it can still sound pretty good sparse and thin in texture, and that's because there are still a lot of gaps in the piano and if you want something to sound thicker in texture then you have to try to play along the piano and the first way to do that is by playing octaves with your hand left now The octave is just from one letter name to the next of the same letter name on the piano so from c to c or d to d and the reason it's called octave is because OCT means eight and it's actually eight notes in the scale.

Aside 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 playing eight octaves instead of single notes will add a little more robust texture and the example song I'm going to show you is the song Shallow by Lady Gagar and Bradley Cooper now, if we do what we did . in the last step which is playing bass notes with some chord notes in the right hand and the melody you would get something like this, however if we play the same but this time we add octaves in the left hand we get this and it already sounds SS . much thicker but let's say you get bored of playing octaves or you want to play something else to make it sound just as thick but to keep it interesting we can use fifths and if octave means eight then fifth means five so if we take a normal tria like the triad in C major, the distance between the first and last key of that triad is five notes on the scale, so this is a fifth, so in the left hand playing fifths is like a halfway point between playing single low notes and playing the whole chord, which sounds very confusing because you're basically playing the whole chord without the middle note and playing fifths in the left hand for this song would sound like this, okay at level five, which is the chord seventh So a normal triad is notes one, three and five in a scale of whatever note in that scale you're starting on and a seventh chord is just adding note seven to that, so you'd get 1, 3, 5 and seven, and once again we can play a seventh chord for each 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 7, even adding sevens to a chord gives it a little.

More personality or a little more flavor. Regular triads are great and form the basis of literally every song you're going to play, but if you want to start adding uniqueness and personality to what you're playing, then adding sevens is a good way. of doing that and the example I want to show you for this is the song Something You Love by Lis Capaldi and the scale used for this song is an A flat scale in which the notes A 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 this.

Hi, however, if I were to add a 7th chord to the last two of these chords, it would sound like this. It adds a bit of character and flavor that may not be in the original song, but can make your piano version more unique. Well, move on to step number six, which is adding extensions now in music, an extension is any note that you add to a triad and some of the most popular extensions to add are ninths and elevenths and we can solve for them exactly the same way we work with 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 the 11th note is an f and the fact that it is called the ninth or eleventh does not mean that we have to play it nine notes or 11 notes away. in a C triad we could play a d here and this would be an nth or we could play an F here and this would be an 11 now as you can probably hear the extensions make the sound a lot crunchier the notes are really compact and together so the chords sound like they clash and although out of context they sound a bit horrible when you play them as part of a song, they really add character and the example I'm going to use for this is Harry's.

Styles, so if I were to play this as a normal song, I would play it like this; However, if you played it adding some ninths and 11s, it would sound like this, it's okay at level number seven, which is adding pattern and left arpeggios. and broken chord so far I've only talked about what to play, but once you understand that, you can start playing with the way you play it and one of the biggest differences between someone who has a lot of confidence on the piano and someone who has less trust. Confidence on the piano is your ability to experiment and play with different patterns and there are countless chord patterns that you can use or invent to make your playing sound really interesting, but I'll give you five common string arpeggio patterns that you can use now an arpeggio. it's just a chord where you play each of its individual notes instead of 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. chord pattern instead of playing a chord where you play all the notes together, you can go back and forth from the bottom to the top and this is actually the exact pattern used in the song Someone Like You by Adele, the second pattern that you can Its use is probably one of the most useful because you can literally apply this to any song you want and that is to play settings and octaves in the left hand and then separate the notes.

You can apply this to almost most songs, but the song I'm going to show you there are blinding lights for the weekend. The third left hand pattern you can use is to play the root note of a chord followed by the entire chord an octave higher if we were to take the C major chord, for example. it would be touching aC bass note followed by a C chord an octave higher. This type of solution solves that problem where if you play a whole chord too low, it sounds very muddy, but you also play bass notes, so it pads out. texture and you may see this pattern in songs like Walking in the air (the last two on the left) and the patterns I'm going to show you are probably the most popular and they also make a song sound very advanced, so they are really worth it.

Practicing and learning the first two patterns is kind of an extension of one of the other patterns we had where we played the fifth and the octave back and forth, this time we're going to add a note on top of that and that's going to be the middle note of the chord the one that is missing when we play only the fifth and the octave, so for a C major chord the middle note would be an E, if we played the fifth and the octave we would be playing c g c so now we are going to play that e but we're going to play that e at the top like this and then we can keep going up and down like this and if I play this pan up and down on its own it sounds more advanced and the song that I'm going to show you for this is the song Can't Help Falling in Love and the last pattern in the left hand is kind of an extension of that same pattern, so for a C chord which are the notes C and G for the pattern we just used, we had c g c e, which are the same notes that extend further across the piano, but what we can actually do is play cgc and put a third finger to play the E and then continue, this means we can play. raise and lower the piano as much as we want and this is the pattern that is most often used whenever you see someone playing something by ear because he really does it.

Pat the texture of the piano and you can make something sound very big or very small. Just because of the amount of piano you use and the example song that I'm going to show you, this is the song Vampire by Olivia Rodrigo, well, at level number eight, which are patterns of arpeggios and broken chords with the right hand, now the Left hand is mainly what is going to determine the texture of the song, especially when you have a melody to play because in the right hand you are stuck playing the melody along with some of the chord notes, however, what about the moments of the song where there is no melody or what if you are just accompanying the singing and you have nothing in your 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 have a melody, we can play these arpeggios and patterns in spaces in the melody and make it sound like you're an absolute pro at the piano and the first way we can do that is by using regular arpeggios, now a regular arpeggio is just pulling away.

To get the chord notes out for a normal C chord, we would have the notes C and G, but we can actually play this up and down on the piano so we can go ce g ce g ce g ce g and you can play it up up and down and much faster and I can show you This is using the song Wonder Wall by 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 each of the different inversions of a chord, but we arpeggiate them with C major. we would 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 this or we can also do it as a four note pattern and repeat the bottom note on top so that c e g c e g c e g c e g ce g c and so on the broken chords are used all the time in its own musical composition and one of the most famous examples of this is the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata, but we can also use them in the same way as arpeggios to add decoration or make it really sound. flashy or technical on the piano and once again I will show you using Wonder Wall and here is Wonder Wall with arpeggios and broken strings so that's the eight levels of playing chords on the piano and here is the song Fix You by Coldplay using all eight levels, so there you have it, it's the eight levels of playing chords on the piano, if you want to see me react when my subscribers play, go ahead and I'll see you there.