7th chords Can Add a “Blues Sound” To Your Piano Playing

Our video today covers adding 7th chords to most any song.

Click on this link to watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4bNhgchNU8&feature=youtu.be

Good morning, this is Duane and we’ve been doing a series called How To Color On The Piano Without Crayons and we’ve been talking lately about improvising using chords and I use the tune Blue Moon just as kind of a model but what I’m demonstrating applies to all songs. The four chords that are in Blue Moon, playing in the key of C, one chord, the six chord, the two chord, and the five chord. Here’s the progression. We have the C chord, the A minor chord, the D minor chord, and the G seventh chord and we’ve been just improvising on those four chords and we said that we can start out with a single finger and just make up another melody to the same tune.

The tune goes, you know the tune of Blue Moon. Use the same rhythm as the tune but use different notes like so. We also talked about you can use thirds and you can use sixths and so on. We also talked about using blue notes. By sliding off some black keys we could use grace notes that way and then we talked about block chords, using block chords. Today I’d like to talk about adding a bluesy sound to it and we add a bluesy sound by simply adding 7th chords. On C I like to voice it kind of like that, hit a low C and then I play E, A, B flat, and D. There’s the seventh, but I also put the sixth and the ninth in it. It sounds like this.

I’m using the same four chords, C, A minor, D minor, and G but I’m voicing them differently. The C chord I’m voicing like that, the A seventh chord I’m voicing like this I think, instead of minor I use a major chord, major seventh and then on D I used a major chord and then on G I used a major chord. They’re all major in the sequence. Let me just improvise a little bit. Here are those four chords. Round and round and they’re all made of sevenths. Just an idea of how you can add a bluesy sound to any song just by adding seventh and voicing it a little different, with some color tones, primarily seventh but it doesn’t hurt if you add a sixth or a ninth or a flat sometimes, you get a lot of variety that way.

If you enjoy this kind of thing, come on over to PlayPiano.com and sign up for our entire video series. You’ll get a new one most everyday and over the course of time you can learn quite a bit. 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

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