A Review Of 9th Piano Chords

Did you realize that there are two different types of 9th piano chords?

Here is the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egQntoQUUzw&feature=youtu.be

Good morning, this is Duane, and we’ve been reviewing basic chords. We started out with major chords and then reviewed minor chords, diminished chords, augmented chords, 6th chords, 7th chords. Today I’d like to review 9th chords. Now a 9th chord obviously involves the 9th note of the scale, so it’s one above the octave. Obviously, this is a C 9th chord but what a lot of people don’t understand is it usually includes the dominant 7th. If it doesn’t, if the composer wants that sort of thing, he calls it a Maj 7th or add 9. Sometimes you see C major 7th (add 9). There’s no universal agreement on chord symbols by the way, so different musicians call them different things. In other words, it’s not written in stone but most of the time when it says C9, it means the dominant 7th along with the 9th. Most of the time C major 9th means put in a major 7th. It doesn’t refer to the 9th, the 9th is major in any case, but it’s the 7th that’s major.

Now because it’s a 5-note chord, you have to use 2 hands to play it. You’d play some of the notes in the right hand and some of the notes in the left hand, or you could go like this. You could play the chord in second inversion and add the 7th and then the 9th like so. Then it doesn’t include the root, so you’d have to hit a low root first. I like to do this, play the C chord in open voicing arpeggio and then play that chord. See that. A 9th is the 9th note of the scale, and it includes a dominant 7th, whereas, a major 9th includes a major 7th along with the 9th, of course. Now there’s others, like there’s a flat 9th and so on, but we’ll take that up when we take altered chords. That’s it for today, just a review of 9th chords. We’ll see you tomorrow with another little chord review, and then we’ll get back to our series on actually playing songs and so on. We’ll see you then. If you haven’t signed up for a free newsletter, be sure and do that. Come on over to playpiano.com and sign up for all the series. Hope to see you there. Bye-bye for now.

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Here’s a great little book on chords and chord progressions on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Piano-Chords-Chord-Progressions-Exciting-ebook/dp/B0076OUGDE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404158669&sr=1-1&keywords=piano+chords+duane+shinn

Here is the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egQntoQUUzw&feature=youtu.be

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