What Do You Do With Them After You Learn Piano Chords?

Today our video is about ways to manipulate them after you learn piano chords.

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

Good morning. This is Duane. We’ve been doing a series on how to color on the piano without crayons. Various ways to add interest and color to our piano playing. Today I’d like to ask you a question, what can you do with one chord, what can you do with just the G7 chord? I’m going to pick G7 but it really applies to any chord. The fingering will be different and so on, but let’s look at the things you can do with the G7 chord.

First of all you can just play it like that, can’t you. G B D F, that’s obvious. You can play it, you can turn it upside down in first inversion, you can play the second inversion, you can play it in third inversion, and then of course you can play it in different octaves, can’t you. Just go up the keyboard higher and higher. And of course you can play it in the right hand as well as in the left hand. Either, or. For example you could play it the right hand without playing it on the left hand. The left hand could just play a G root, for example. Okay.

What else could you do with it? Well, you could break it up. You could take 3 notes, and then 1. Say, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1. Okay. Or you could play 2, 1, 2. Let’s do a straddle here, we could do a straddle. A straddle is where you leave one note out. So you play 2 of the 4 notes and then 2 of the 4 notes. Like so.

You could also run it up the keyboard – a piano run - couldn’t you, or back down. I’m just taking the 4 notes to the chord, I’m playing in a second inversion, and I’m playing D, F, G, B and then tucking my thumb under D, the same 4 notes D, F, G, B. Same 4 notes and then I can come back down the way I went up. Oops.

Then I could hesitate. I don’t have to go straight up, I could go … alternating between those 2 octaves. Okay. I could add a color tone to it, couldn’t I. I could play a third inversion like so, but add a ninth to is, so I got this sound. I could slide off a black key and give it a little bluesy sound. I can do that with the … I can do sort of the … If I want a bluesy sound.

I can do a twang if I want a western sound. There I’m turning around the note. A twang is where you do it quickly. Let me do it in G7, or G. But a turn is like where you do that slowly. Or.

Those are all varieties of the G7 chord. I’m just dealing with one chord, right? G7. I added a color tone, I just add one color tone. There’s other color tones you could add and so on. Just to give you an idea of what you can do with one single chord and you have almost an infinite number of chords to do that it. If you can do that to G7, you can do something E flat in seventh like that, can’t you. You could do it to A minor seventh. Same idea. Okay.

Get good at finding ways to manipulate chords, in other words, color without crayons, on the piano.

If you enjoy this series come on over to playpiano.com and sign up for a series. It’s free of course, I hope to see you there. 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

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