 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. Here to show you how, you can just take a single chord, maybe F major which we'll consider for this particular lesson and try to colour it up in a bunch of ways without annoying your bandmates and also embellishing your music for your arrangement or your orchestration. This is not just a piano technique, you can do this on any instrument, can even do it in a software if you are a music producer, arranger or programmer or some of these people call it. The whole intention of this lesson is you are stuck on just a tonic chord, you are just stuck on this F major chord and especially in folk music and even Indian classical music. A lot of the music from my part of the world seems to have an incredible a laap and some beautiful vocals but then you can't really or you are scared to do more than just the tonic chord which is let's say Saga Pa or maybe Saga Pa if it's minor, Sama Pa if there is some kind of a suspension in there. You know, so you are kind of scared to move beyond the root chord, your fellow musicians start staring at you and also in a band context if you are doing a song with just you know an F just a chord running like that, everyone in your band plays the same thing the same way, you want to kind of go a bit beyond that. So hopefully this lesson will help you overcome these sort of challenges. So before we get started it will be awesome if you could consider heading over to our Patreon you will get my handwritten notes for this lesson as well as other lessons of the past and the future and we have a subscribe button on our YouTube channel as all the channels do. So if you are watching the video and you liked it do consider hitting the subscribe button give the video a like leave us a comment and you can also hit that bell icon to give you notifications which will buzz you whenever a new video from our channel reaches you. Okay, let's get cracking. So I have five ways in which you can make a singular chord a lot more exciting a lot more interesting so it's only at the time of you playing that one chord or maybe in the highly unlikely event you just have one chord in your entire song and you might fall asleep if you play that one chord. So this will wake you up and probably wake up people around you. So five plus one bonus tip so stay tuned till the very end there are gonna be totally six the bonus tip will be a lot of fun. If you have the bass as F major which is F A C can play it as A C F C F A whichever inversion you play it's still a very vanilla basic sounding F major sound. So while you play your chord pattern the first technique will revolve around the bigger picture F major chord is part of the F major scale F major has F G A B flat C D E F. The first mission you would have is to write down all your thirds now third is where you skip one and play one I would recommend that you write down the scale in a circle like how I've written it in my notes. So F major in thirds once you've written it down you could start with a home base which is this tonic chord which is just F major and as you journey forward throughout your song without compromising the rhythm you just bring in a couple of these thirds. So if you have a melody going on like maybe Melody is a very droning kind of melody right? This is also what we call as ostinato, ostinato bass because if you see the only thing which stays or remains is the F and the other stuff is my thirds which is making the harmonic movement a lot more dynamic it's creating a nice journey and I guess supporting the melody and serving whatever the singer is doing best because if the singer floats around a melody like I like that third but maybe you don't want to do you don't want to go to a forceful C major there everyone stares at you and scolds you so you're staying on F while the rest of your band is still on that kind of droning F major chord the bass player still playing F so what you could do float around with your thirds okay and this has a lot of applications in genres if you take maybe blues or rock and roll you you have thirds all the way of course with a little bit of swing oh yeah so instead of just playing the F major chord like that giving you this iconic rememberable bluesy phrase or rock and roll phrase if you played a bit faster or more straight okay and you do this probably in a lot of rock and roll songs with a 12 bar blues progression for more on blues you should definitely check out our blues playlist which goes from a very stepwise way all the way from the basics how to count it how to sing it how to form the chords and then the idiomatic patterns which will help your left hand and the right hand at least get get started so moving on to another austinato way to make one chord more interesting this is what we call as cadences in classical music so the two cadences I want you to be aware of are the four going to one which is the plagal cadence and the other would be the five going to one which is the authentic cadence so if you build the four going to one in the F major scale that'll be B flat four steps for diatonic steps and to make it austinato you don't change your left hand just do a plagal embellishment as I could probably call it again the bass is just sticking on F Elton John likes this plagal a lot so many of your favorite songs can even kind of do a minor plagal where the four is a minor chord then comes back and this can kind of take you into a modal study where you keep the F austinato and maybe just play a G major immediately you get a very lydian texture that's your lydian fourth sharp four so to think of if you're Raga let's say you're playing in a Hindustani or a Carnatic context if your Raga has the sharp four then this might be a very colorful chord maybe your default chord to play instead of your run-of-the-mill major chord so you could also look at maybe developing a a Phrygian sound with a sharp two major chord Lydian I already told you major second can get a minor sound by playing a minor third major chord get this very augmented sound playing a major over F you can explore so for this lecture let's stick with play girl tonic keeping the bass austinato not moving it at all what a party for the bass player of your band just plain F that's your base that's your C E G B flat F F major can also do a very beautiful authentic play girl back to tonic maybe compose a song like that so cadence is on the austinato line and moving on to the third way you can make a simple triad more colorful you have this concept in folk music especially instruments like the banjo mandolin and the guitar in general which play a lot of the folk tunes out there you'll have this occurrence of the root and the fifth in the songs very very common notes and what they tend to do maybe because of the design of the instruments especially the banjo which I've observed first hand since I play a little bit of that instrument you keep all of your diatonic chords played but played with the root and the fifth or the root or fifth no matter what so you go you can get a phrase like so that's a B flat major chord over F but if you look at what my thumb is doing I'm just kind of extending it a bit to allow me to play two for the price of one finger which we had six fingers you don't unfortunately similarly if you take you get these sort of sounds because I'm telling myself I just need maybe a third combo you could actually start with spread thirds you could do the same thirds which have been written down in the notes but in a in a spread way so instead of doing F A you're doing A F A F B flat G C A D B flat E C F D G E A F and stacked up with all of this would be either the root or the fifth now in this easy the fifth is already there so what can I add for color you get this very cascading very close cluttered up sound which sounds on its own like you're composing for the movie scream or jaws or something but you play it together with the other notes and then change it around I played a little tune in the beginning it's actually a riff of mine you can check it out in the description we leave you a link so slow that that down being a nice melody going using the same concept this can also support your vocalist very well or a dynamic motion to the chord so the folk technique here is just keep the root and the fifth in all your movements in all your harmonic ingredients or tools which you might use so the fourth way to take a chord and make it a bit more interesting is just a simple concept think of the chord as a melody chord melody so what does that mean a simple way to perhaps do that would be take this F major chord and think of maybe grace notes just slide your middle finger down you know pick a note and you get a nice melodic tool there because it it provides something catchy for the listener's year or slide it from the G or maybe so within your pattern so maybe I can start let's say I currently I'm playing the F major chord in this way four hits four quarter notes so maybe I can play just at the one give the one a bit of emphasis and then a little trill at the end and slowly if you if you want to kind of make your presence felt take that chord and maybe make that into a little riff just wandering just one note of the chord this is where inversions matter if you take the first inversion your highest note will will be very prominent for the year I can get this sort of a lick if I start with the second inversion if the singer gets a bit annoyed with you playing this during the vocal line you can go back to vocals but then request your singer could I please play this as an intro and the singer will say wow that'll be nice then the singer will say do it at the interlude also after my first chorus because I need a breather so so try to take that chord and think what melody can you put on that chord which doesn't invade the actual melody of your song by just floating around one note here and there maybe the upper note of the chord so inverting the chord becomes quite important so you could use grace note slides little slides here and there I'm sure that was what Mark Noffler was thinking when he played what it is a lot of Bruce Hansby songs from a piano perspective you should definitely check him out mandolin rain to name a few anything by Elton Johnny always colors up the chord Nora Jones some great pianist who can forget Freddie Mercury all of these singer song writers seem to have the best ways to color up their chords and from a modern day perspective you should definitely listen to Jacob Collier I don't even want to try and play what he does to embellish his chords he uses all sorts of technology which I think is very very exciting and is cutting edge because very few musicians even know of that stuff so maybe we should do an explainer video of one of the Jacob Collier songs very soon do leave us a note in the comments if you're interested right so the last way to color a simple chord is to just think of it not as a triad but as either an ad chord or an extended chord or as a suspended chord so I'll explain each of these very quickly but we have a detailed video which you should check check out on the difference between ad versus sus versus extensions okay so an ad chord is where you keep the major but you add a note obviously not what you've already played adding the same 10 or the 3 you're adding a 2 and call this as an F major ad 2 or F major ad 9 some people call it that's an F major ad 4 or 11 4 is 11 9 is 2 or F major at 6 we don't really say F major at 6 we just say F major 6 maybe F major ad sharp 5 it's a beautiful augmented color these are all your ads and if you add the 7th it's not called us ad code it's just called a 7th chord so that's F dominant 7th you have an F major 7th okay you could also play a major 7th and then add a 9th to that that would now start becoming a extension that'll be F major 9th will be an F major 9th sharp 11 very Lydian sound okay you could also do better voicings like this nice colorful 6 9 voicing as we call it 6 9 with a lot of room and a lot of gap it's not cluttered it's not you can really hear that flavor that harmonic flavor so basically in a nutshell what I'm trying to say is take a chord find all its ads at 9 at 11 major 6th or ad 6 sharp 5 if you want that vibe the 7th and then of course the extensions which come along with a 7th chord watch my video for ad extensions which give you in great detail I've also done an exclusive video on how to creatively use suspended chords so you should check that out and just to give you a hint of what that is about it's to just again instead of taking a boring F major chord you're saying I'll suspend it and then major suspend to and then back to major suspension major and then make that a bit more rhythmic like a lot of songs do you have a lot of songs which use suspended chords to help you remember oh what is this song going on you know so fool around with ad chords suspensions and extensions so I have one more final bonus way in which you can color up your chords so do stay tuned and before we get to that it'll be awesome if you could consider subscribing to our channel hit that bell icon for regular notifications we have a patreon page where you can head over and subscribe different tires are there to get different perks from our school and if you feel that the content seems to have just hit you you don't know how you found this video through the gods of YouTube so to speak if you want something more curated more structured very structured all the way from ground zero you would consider heading over to Nathaniel school.com and head over to our members only videos we have courses on piano ear training music theory staff notation and if you'd like to come over to our institute in any of our Bangalore centers or if you want to take up classes virtually or online again there's a form in the description or you can head over to our website let's now move on to the final way to color up your triad so if you take an F major chord again which I'm getting very bored with in this lesson so far another way to make it more exciting would be using quartal voicing and maybe even quintal voicing this can be very useful if you're playing very raga based or a la based improvised Hindustani or Carnatic classical music because you really don't know what the singer is going to do next and sometimes in a raga you should not play certain intervals you can't look at a seven note scale you may have to be on a pentatonic scale or a very customized scale where it kind of changes the thirds may change the sevenths may change as they go ascending or descending so a good strategy would be to work out your quartal chords and if you see my notes the triads are basically in thirds one three five while the quartals you may have thought about it already is why why do i need thirds to build chords why can't i do fourths to build chords which is very very legitimate so i can take the F major chord and instead of going F A C i can do F B flat D which highlights the scale for sure it offers a lot more color and it works well over that triad as well so if your other bandmates are playing that well and good but the way i like to use quartals in songs is to use them rhythmically and keep changing them so maybe G quartal which will be G C F you don't want to do F B flat F B flat E that's your F major quartal G C F now E D G A D G B flat E A you don't want to do B that's not part of F major right C F B flat then you go D G C then you do E A D and then finally you come back to the F quartal and it's interesting to know that there are three kinds of quartal chords there's your perfect four perfect four combo which is one four seven flat if you write it down intervalically you can also do a quartal like this we call this as F Q plus or quartal plus chord with which has a major seventh up top and a perfect fourth in the middle and you can also do this kind of quartal which is a lydian quartal you can also call this as F sharp 4 q F sharp 4 q i have a detailed video on just these quartal and even quintal chords you should check out a video we leave for you in the description so along with quartals you can even do quintals so quintals are very nice especially for the left hand makes it very less muddy i would say so quintal quint means uh five of something so in fact just playing the F major scale with fifth sounds quite beautiful F C G D A flat that's a bit weird so maybe that's F major scale played in fifths that sounds quite beautiful as opposed to maybe all the notes cascaded together which i think sounds very muddy you could also cascade in fourths so as you spread out your notes it becomes a lot less muddy thirds also can be muddy you know if you play them very low so this is where i would recommend quintal voicings quintals can be used also with the octave with the the 10th interval which is above the octave and so on so you can use quartals and quintal voicings to make a single chord very exciting and even if you want to kind of change it around you can do so rhythmically see that there's a lot of movement harmonically it's almost creating a little melody on its own uh you just have to be aware and watch out that it doesn't combat too much or clash with the existing source melody of the song so in a nutshell we've looked at six ways to make a simple chord a lot more interesting just one chord F major we've taken throughout the lesson first off we looked at floating thirds second off we looked at cadences plagal authentic and a few modal ones then we looked at just anchoring the root and fifth pivoting it it's a very good folk technique then we looked at making a riff with a chord or making the chord a melody trying to bring out a melody and the fifth one was to extend it or do add chords or to do suspensions to the existing chord and last but not least our bonus tip if you will was to look at quartal and quintal voicings hope you found the lesson useful thanks a ton for watching have fun