 Hi guys this is Jason here from the Nathaniel School of Music and in this lesson we are going to look at what I am calling this video as five chord hacks which you may not have found or observed in traditional piano books or you know YouTube videos, conventional stuff. So these are things which I do very often on the piano and a lot of students have always asked me you know what makes your playing different than my playing and what are these little things which you do which kind of add spice and flavor and make the music a lot more professional right and I feel that all these techniques are simple very but very efficient and very professional so anyone could use them. So let's get started. Technique number one is a technique which I call as finger swapping right. So while playing chords if you just take a simple flow of maybe the chords of the C major scale that's C major, D minor, E minor, F major, G major, A minor and B diminished. Now if you hear it sonically there is a little bit of a gap isn't it? Why is there a gap? The gap is there because I have to sort of jump to the next chord especially when two chords don't have any notes in common example C major and D minor right. You have to sort of take your fingers off and move. Now one way to counter this is to use chord inversions but there are a lot of instances where you may need to like climb up and you may need to just jump up randomly to serve more melodic things or to serve a different kind of voicing perhaps. So let's explore this with a series of chords so I can just show you how this whole finger swapping thing works. So if I play something like see what's happening there now in a normal world there's a kind of a jump between each chord right so I try to avoid that. So just check this out C major, G major is normal but now I want to go to A minor so I did C major, G major. Now A minor I don't have any more free fingers right. My pinky is taken up by this G major's B so I have to now jump it and move here. So instead of doing that you'd kind of swap out the old fingers and put in some new fingers which allows you to certainly play the next chord more easily. So the whole idea about finger swapping is how do you make the next chord easy right. This doesn't matter where you are it kind of gives you that freedom to traverse this way or that way in the piano to serve whatever chord you're going to play next. So if you do C major I have some fingers for G so I play that but now I swap them out to go to A minor and that allows me to play with my pinky and yes one finger may have to jump but the whole idea of finger swapping is at least two out of the three notes of the triad should sort of linger on or should sustain onward to the next chord to make the chord playing a lot smoother. So what I would do is C major, swap now I want to go there. I was here I want to go there and play F major because I like that note right. So I think it sounds quite smooth and it may not look so great. The whole idea is it's about what it sounds like at the end of the day. So you may not have found this technique used a lot because what happens is the piano players tend to use the sustain pedal or you have tons of reverb to kind of compensate for all this but there are two things which sort of happened to me while growing up as a kid. One is the piano which we used to play in the house the upright piano did not have a working sustain pedal it didn't nothing worked so whenever I pressed it something went wrong with the piano and then we had to call the tuner and I also used to observe my mom and granddad in the church playing the pipe organ and with their style of playing especially playing these hymns they would move around really smoothly and I would quietly see them swapping out fingers but then that's not what you teach in a piano class right. Sounds quite smooth I guess right and then of course the left hand follows if you ask me that actually sounds very choral and very melodic as well. Normally when we play chords well we either play them using the block positions you kind of fight that by playing inversions right. If you haven't already do watch my entire series on chord inversions which would help you really navigate through chords but once you know your chords now your chord inversions when you play them together and when you're in the heat of the moment there's always a need to kind of break out of convention to break out of the standard technique which you're taught you know shift smoothly between chords but what if the melody demands it like in this example you see all these quick swapping stuff keep happening right so this is what I want you guys to keep at the back of your mind when you play the piano slowly but surely it may come into your weaponry right and I hope it does and I hope it makes sense right guys so the next rather unconventional technique which I use on the piano while playing chords is what I call as chord flams okay flams are derived from the snare drum of the drummer where they do that very often instead of hitting the snare as th they hit it as thra right so you get that additional hit right you also hear it a lot in marching band with snare drums there so and you hear it a lot with guitars right a guitar conceptually is a six string instrument and the musician sort of slides his or her hand down the six strings so inevitably he's not playing all the six strings exactly together there's a kind of there's obviously a small delay between the notes and on the piano when we play chords let's say E minor like this we tend to want to play them together right that's generally what's taught and if you're a electronic music producer of you use softwares you'll see that those midi bars are like exactly aligned now I think that's not cool and I don't think that's the greatest way to play chords especially when you listen to guitars drums and all these very natural instruments which flam so well right I guess that's where the term Fleming co-guitar came into being possibly right guys so let's get started with this whole chord Fleming business so you go E minor and B E G that is and I practice playing it like this your ears are going to be the best judge right you've obviously heard music played before so you don't want it to be like you don't want to forget the two notes of the chord or you don't want to like slip you know it shouldn't sound awkward then you obviously have to go back to normal boring block hits right so the whole idea is get this to kind of be part of your weaponry just it should be a normal way of playing chords as opposed to that which I think tends to sound a lot more forceful a lot more robot robotic and not so natural compared to this for some reason this feels a lot more human and this is generally how you'll find me playing cards whether it's a triad or whether it's a bigger chord right and what's nice about Fleming once you practice with one hand you can sort of practice with both hands like the left hand leading towards the right hand something like this right but the idea the whole idea is not to hear a million notes and you don't have to do it all the time either like for example you know I tend to do it very often then maybe more often than I probably should but you get the idea I hope this is called a squad Fleming which could be like a very default way to play chords to kind of make it a lot more human if you ask me right guys so moving onward to technique number three which I find very very useful to think of while playing my chords is what do each of the fingers do you have your thumb index middle ring and pinky I'm sure you know that by now but anyway so the first challenge which I found a lot of students playing chords is they don't like playing chords starting on a black note right so there's a simple hack for that it's just common sense your thumb is a small finger so when you move all your other hands inside to play a chord like let's say D flat major or C sharp major which is C sharp FA flat or D flat FA flat so you go normally if you have to play this chord it's a bit tricky right but what I would suggest you to do is just keep your hand always pointing straight don't turn your hand that also you know de-angles your body so always keep your hand straight and if you have to which you most definitely will when you're playing black chords or chords starting on a black note you can angle your thumb moving in so the thumb just moves in it's a very stretchy finger so go in there and play deep I found a lot of people continue to want to play you know away from the black note there's no harm in going inside right and my hand my fingers are quite big and thick so to speak so I'm not having that much of a problem playing it so can do D flat this way you can do E flat A flat F sharp some minors the whole ideas the thumb goes in and another the issue with the top fingers I found with students is the ring finger and the pinky so what I like to do is since the pinky is a smaller finger reserve it for the last note of a chord if that last note is a white color note and reserve the ring finger for the last note of a chord if the last note is a black color note for obvious reasons so if you take let's say a D major chord in this inversion ADF sharp this has F sharp at the top I would most definitely want to play it with these fingers thumb index and the ring finger for the F sharp and then if I want to go to G after that my pinky is waiting there for it it's also great when you're playing in versions generally when you play chords all your five fingers need to be activated so that's something I would highly recommend some instances may also demand the index finger to replace the thumb while playing a black color chord or a chord starting on a black note like if you do a major like this let's say you don't have the time to play it like that you can always use your index but try to use your index generally at the edge of the black key not here otherwise there's a kind of an imbalance created and also due to physics it's going to be very tough to play a white key there because it's suspended there so you will have to push a lot more down and your fingers will start hurting so generally you could play a chord starting on a black note like this or if you are doing it with your thumb starting angle the thumb move all the way in keep your hands straight and then what did I say about the ring and the pinky usage the last note is black ring finger the last note is white pinky finger now what do I do about the middle finger well I leave that to you that's it's the middle finger it can go anywhere right so play around with this and hope that that tip made some kind of sense right guys so moving onward to technique number four it's basically about a tool we all have on the piano we can plug it into a digital one a MIDI controller or even a real piano where it's already there right it's been there with the piano from the beginning of time the pedal right so whenever a lot of us play the piano especially when you're learning from more experienced players or when you see more experienced players then figure out oh that guy seems to sound a bit better than me why he's playing the same thing right the secret is pretty much in this pedal so what happens with the pedal is if I just play a chord and lift it it's the end of the sound but if I hold the pedal voila it just goes on and on and on right so that's basically the sustain pedal so what you'd like to do when you're playing pet the pedal is try to explore a few things on the piano maybe you could play the same chord in different positions maybe lower higher and as you can see my pedal is held down right and whenever you're changing you don't want to keep it pressed and then change isn't it you don't want to do sounds really really annoying so what you'd rather do there is play before you play the next chord lift and then bring it back back three lift and bring back lift and bring back just before you hit the chord don't let both the noise is superimposed lift there we go and coming back so essentially you could practice the pedal at basically all of your chord changing points now there are many uses of the sustain pedal I've actually made a full video on this which we'll put in the description so do check it out if you feel that your sustained pedal skills are not so good right guys so the final technique which I'd like to share in this tutorial is what I call as ghosts right now the ghosts are essentially soft notes which are there again very very inspired by drummers over the years so what you do is you play a chord progression or even one chord in in a traditional way something like this I'm playing a D major chord I'm holding the D in my bass now what happens here is yet I would like to start creating some movement or some more rhythmic interest so what you're hearing now is what I call the ghost you see this thumb it's barely hitting the key sometimes you don't even hear it maybe I forget to play it but it's that human thing you know which just always lingers on on the eighth note so if you're playing quarter notes or if you're playing on the pulse 2 3 4 you don't have anything inside the pulse to kind of make the music more interesting to go inside the beat so that's what I likely do with this finger it's usually the thumbs of both my hands and I start always with my left hand thumb or I try to get the ghost with the left hand thumb playing probably the octave the safest note in the left hand so you go there we go so if I make it a little louder you may not like this right now it's sounding very forceful so I go very soft practice that so I get that eighth note feel very subtle eighth note feel so you could ghost those eight notes right or I could do ghost triplets one triplet one triplet tuck tuck tuck tuck tuck tuck tuck tuck tuck tuck you get that three feel right but it's quite subtle so that's the whole idea with ghosts or ghosting or the ghost technique on the piano so I guess all these five techniques which I have shared with you guys today maybe things which you'll enjoy which you may have wondered oh is it important you know but truthfully it's generally what most piano players do myself included but sometimes we just forget to observe it you know it probably just evolves over years of playing the piano and I thought I'll make this lesson to kind of fast-track this whole you know growth or this whole journey for you as a possibly a younger or a less experienced player watching this video right so let's recap guys all the techniques you first have finger swapping where you just kind of look a little bit more ugly on the piano with your hands but why so that sounds awesome so essentially when you have to skip big leaps of chords you could swap out fingers and see how that particular thing goes right so with finger swapping then we also looked at chord flams great for ballads just like a guitar player playing flamingo so then we have the whole finger duties if you will what you play in the lower parts of the chord what you play in the higher register of the chord how use the thumb moving in and how use the ring in the pinky ring for the black note and pinky for the white note then we looked at the mysterious sustain pedal which you rarely see in lessons you'll always find the guys hand some notation books and some fancy app showing you the notes but then you don't see the pedal so I thought I'll mention that a lot of the lessons you find a lot of the players you hear are all using this sustain pedal which is physically a part of the piano it's just built into the mechanics so learn that pick yours pick up one if you can and get cracking and last but not least I talked about this idea of playing ghost notes which kind of make your chord playing a lot more moving right also keeps you bang on the time generally your timing gets a lot better for some reason when you play goes right hope you guys found the lesson useful as always this is Jason here from the Nathaniel School of Music if you like the lesson please share the video subscribe to our channel leave us a comment for something you'd like to learn in the future and keep rocking Cheers