Can You Use Piano Chord Triplets In Your Piano Songs? Here’s How:

Good morning. A good way to fill up the empty places in your songs is to take the chord that you’re playing at that moment and break it up, break the chord up in fillers, triplet fillers. There’s other ways to break up chords of course, but are a nice change. Let’s first define what triplets are. They are three notes in the place of one beat. For example, as I count one, two, three, four, if I take one of those beats and put three notes in the space of one, I have this trip-e-let, trip-e-let, trip-e-let, see that? Three notes are taking the place of one in this spot. One, two, three, four, one-pe-let, two-pe-let, three-pe-let, four-pe-let. I like to break up the work triplet into three syllables.

Of course, it doesn’t have three syllables, but I like to break it up into three syllables just for the sake of helping people understand how to count those triplets. Triplets, by the way are like when you’ve got a rock in your tire and it clicks every time it revolves. Say you have three rocks in the tires and they’re a third of the way around, 33-1/3 way around. You have a rock here, a rock here, and a rock here. Every time your tire revolves once, you hear three clicks. That’s what a triplet is, trip-e-let, trip-e-let, one-pe-let, two-pe-let, three-pe-let, four-pe-let, like that. Whatever the chord is, you can take the chord and break it up in triplets and you can do it going up the keyboard or going down the keyboard.

Let me take it very slowly, maybe on, I’ll play Moon River. One trip-e-let, trip-e-let, one, two, and three, and one trip-e-let, three-pe-let, one, two, three. On the section beat, I broke up that triplet, didn’t I? I broke up that chord in triplets. There’s different places to break it up. Usually I wouldn’t break it up that soon. I would wait till a break in the song, when there’s a pause. Typically songs have phrases, so in Moon River, Moon river wider than a mile or when you get through saying mile, then that would be a place to insert a fill of some sort. By the way, some chords are made out of four notes, aren’t they? Like a seventh chord. There’s A 7th. How would you break that up in triplets since there’s four notes?

You just pick any three of the notes, it doesn’t matter which three. You could take those three or those three. You could arpeggiate it as you go up from then. Let’s take the D minor chord. If I broke that up in a triplet, I’d play one-pe-let, two-pe-let, three-pe-let. I’m playing the same three notes in each octave, one-pe-let, and then I tuck my thumb under and play the next D, F, A, and play the next D, F, A. However, I could do it this way, D, F, A, and then invert the chord and play F, A, D, A, D, F. You see I’m turning the chord up sdie down. I’m playing inversions like that. Let me do it slowly, one-pe-let, two-pe-let, three-pe-let, four-pe-let, you see that? Or you can come down, one, two-pe-let, three-pe-let, four-pe-let. Any combination. There’s no right or wrong about that.

It’s just that you’re filling up the empty spaces, so however you want to do that is your choice. You don’t have to do what I do naturally. In fact, you shouldn’t do what I do because you need to learn on your own, but fill in those empty spaces sometimes with triplets. You don’t always want to use triplets. For example, sometimes I just want to use a regular chord, I mean a regular run. I just played that fill up the keyboard. There’s a triplet, one, trip-e-let, trip-e-let. One, trip-e-let, trip-e-let. Trip-e-let, trip-e-let, one, two, and three and one, trip-e-let, trip-e-let, one, two, and three. I’m doing this way too much just for the sake of showing you how it works, but you’d never use it that much in a song, but that’s one option.

Triplets are one option you have for breaking up chords for fillers in a song and again, it doesn’t matter what the chord is, you can go straight up or you can go straight down or you can arpeggiate it by breaking up the chord in inversions or any combination thereof. I guess that’s all I need to say about that, so I hope that helps and we’ll see you tomorrow with another piano tip. If you enjoy these little piano tips, come on over to playpiano.com and sign up for our free piano tips. WE have tips like this most every day, so come on over and sign up for it, playpiano.com. Also, if you’re not already subscribed to my blog, be sure and do that. You can go to www.playpiano.com/wordpress and that’s my daily and blog and you’ll see a lot of these videos on my blog plus the transcription, the words written out of the text of the video, so you can follow it that way as well. In any case, thanks for being with me see you tomorrow. Bye, bye for now.

Here is the YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn2Oce8aGd8&feature=youtu.be
________________________________________________________________________________________________