Kumbaya On Piano – Many Ways To Play It

Good morning, this is Duane. Today I’d like to talk about what knowing a few extra chords can do for your piano playing – like Kumbaya on piano. Let’s say that you wanted to play a simple song. There are a lot of songs that are just made out of three or four chords, as you know.

Let’s say you’re playing “Kumbaya”. This is just an example, it could be anything. This can be played with just three chords. The three chords I used are the primary chords, 1, 4, and 5-7th, C, F and G7th, and I’m using the closing inversion just to make it easy for my left hand.

By knowing some extra chords, you can do wonders with this song. For example, There I took, instead of using the F chord, I used a G7th chord but I put a color tune in it, put a 6th, and then I flatted the 6th, and then playing a C chord but it’s a 9th and a Major 7th. E minor 7th chord, A7th, D7th, you see by just knowing, I just used maybe four more chords there and I created a much much fuller sound.

Now, if you also know some techniques such as arpeggios…there, all I’m doing is arpeggiating the chords. That’s a C chord broken up, F chord broken up, E minor chord broken up, D minor chord broken up, and so on.

Now if I put chords in the right hand, though, that makes it fuller, doesn’t it? In other words, instead of just a single note or just a triad, I put it other notes like 6ths, 9ths, 7ths, and so on, and then I echoed it.

Now, what do you do, how do you get from here to there? How do you get from this point to the point where I was just playing? Well, you learn extra chords. You learn more chords and then you learn some techniques, some arranging techniques. Between those two, you can turn a simple song like that into a much more complex kind of piece.

If you’re interested in that kind of thing, then come on over to playpiano.com and sign up for our free newsletter because it has lots of free instruction about chords and even a little bit about chord styles. If you’re really serious, of course, there’s a lot of courses online including mine but there’s others too, that teach you how to arrange songs and so on.

I wish I had known this when I was just getting started. I didn’t really know that the key to playing more fuller piano was to learn more chords and then to learn some techniques, some styles such as arpeggios and block chords and so on. I didn’t know that, but once you know that you can begin the process of enlarging your songs and making them sound much fuller.

Okay, that’s it for today and we’ll see you tomorrow with another little tip like this. Bye-bye for now.

Hi, this is Duane, and I’d like to take you over on a little tour through playpiano.com. This is the best place you can go to find a ton of piano material. If you’re an adult who wants to teach himself to play piano, maybe you took piano lessons as a kid like so many of us did, and then you got away from it because of career and family and so on, and you want to get back to it. You want to bone up on things. This is a great place to go and I’ll show you why in just a minute, so stick with me, okay?

Come over to playpiano.com. That’s all there is to it, just playpiano.com, and you’ll see this, daily piano tips. The first thing you should do is you should fill out your name and email there because you get free piano tips every day, video tips. They are powerful tips about all kinds of things related to chords and arranging and improvising and so on.

On this page itself, you can see some samples of those tips. This is a video called “How to play the same song a dozen different ways.” Here’s a bunch more down here, embedding chord substitutions in the blues, five easy ways to make your piano playing improve right away, piano player’s toolbox of cool techniques, how to create a flowing river of sound, seven ways to make fatter chords. You get a big fat sound if you know what that means.

Here is improvising your own peaceful song. If you like New Age music, that’s great stuff. A simple two-chord groove you can create out of just two chords, and seven different ways to play the same song, and there’s all kinds of other things here. If you want to write key signatures and how they work, if you want to know about fingering, time signatures how they work, etc., etc.

Now, in addition to that, just take a look at these, I’ll click on this and we’ll go to free piano videos. Here’s a whole bunch, I think there may be 300 right here, if you want to know how to play “Joy to the World” using piano chord styles or “Silent Night” or the three chords you absolutely have to know.

Let me just toggle down and see how many there are. It goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Yeah, there’s 300 different videos right there that you can get to right there if you want to know what all that stuff is.

If that’s not enough, you could come over to my YouTube channel and find a whole bunch more. Look at this. This is my YouTube channel. I’ll just toggle down a little bit, there’s all kinds of free…these are all free stuff. As you can see, we have 5 million views and 25,000 subscribers so far.

Let’s go back here to playpiano.com though. Oh yeah, everyday I write a different piano blog, usually a new article. For example, how many styles can you use to play one song like “Satin Doll”? If you want the latest blog, just click that and it’ll go over to, this is the one I did just yesterday, combining left hand piano techniques.

I misspelled combining…combing. Okay. There’s a zillion articles in here and written out as well as in video form. Look at the archives. My goodness, I started, this is January 15, and I started back in, I think it was ’08, yeah, no, it was November ’06. You’ve got hundreds and hundreds of articles and videos and materials on that blog so be sure and sign up for that.

Oh my goodness, I could take you to so many…here’s my Facebook page. You can go over there and be sure and…I’ve got over 4,000 likes. Be sure and sign up to be my friend here if you’re on Facebook because there’s tons of stuff there you can get.

I could take you to my Pinterest page and all kinds of places but I don’t want to bore you. I just want you to know that playpiano.com is a central place for you to find out anything you need to know about chords, okay? These are all free.

In addition to that, if you want to go further, then I sell courses and that’s how I make my living. These are full-blown courses. They’re not 10-minute videos. These are 2-hour videos for the most part with books and so on and so forth. There’s a crash course, 52-week crash course, 52 separate lessons. There’s a course on runs and fills and chord progressions. Anyway, you can go on over to the catalog and read up about those.

There’s an eBook called “Free Piano Stuff” and it’s got hundreds of things like that in there as well. Just remember that, playpiano.com. That’s the central place you want to go to learn all about piano playing, and be sure to sign up for the free, I call it a newsletter but it’s video tips you get everyday so you can learn.

By the way, this is for adults. It’s not for kids. Kids need a live teacher, but if you’re a self-motivated adult and you want to bone up or learn from scratch, and you don’t have time for lessons like most adults who don’t. They don’t have time, they got a career and a family and so. They don’t have time for lessons and to practice an hour everyday and so on, so this is a perfect answer for that.

Okay, thanks for being with me. Bye-bye for now.

***For lots more good stuff on piano playing come on over to my website at https://www.playpiano.com and sign up for our free piano tips – “Exciting Piano Chords & Sizzling Chord Progressions!”

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

YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBUDjx8_Yoc&feature=youtu.be