 this is Jason here from Nathaniel and in this lesson let's look at how we can make a left hand chord playing a lot more richer, a lot more unique sounding and to give it a very dense texture, adding a lot more color and flavor to your music and more importantly which a lot of piano players face the issue quite often is we get away from that usual muddy sound which is played in our left hand right for example if I play an F major chord this may not be a great way to play an F major it's not a very clean way because the frequencies are clashing with each other they are very close to each other in the lower registers of the piano so what we end up normally doing on the keyboard to play chords professionally is we take the chord to the right hand because naturally our right hand is in and around middle C and anything here will always work well with the music we play so naturally you don't want to play too many chords in the left hand voiced as chords because it's going to clash with the other musicians naturally to compensate for that a piano player would play the chords here in the right this is F major and play the root note in the left hand that's F so this is a nice sound the challenge with this approach is that the chords occupy everything you're going to do in the right hand in other words you can't really play a melody while playing the harmony and the bass note so we need to develop a way to play the full chord the whole chord in just the left hand and then it frees up space for our right hand to do stuff the first thing I'd like you to learn is the 10th interval which is important for both the major and the minor chord which we use very often let's find the 10th interval together so I'm building it with respect to F now the 10th interval is very simple it's nothing but a third played one octave higher so if I take my F the normal third would be a but since it's played in the left hand creates a very muddy conflicting environment so I will prefer to play the a up there so in order to play these 10th intervals your hands may need to be a bit wide in order to deal with that but there are a lot of ways you could get around that one way is with the sustain pedal you could play the root leave your hand and then play the 10th let's do that again root so I've left my hand and I've played the 10th there but some of you who have wider hands probably even wider than mine I don't consider my hand width to be that wide to begin with so you could play like this you could actually play them together so if you have wider hands played together if you are not able to get this stretch hold down your pedal the sustain pedal sound lingers and then you go there to play the 10th let's do that together that's your 10th interval and then you also have a minor 10th which is the minor third and where does the minor chord happen in a minor chord so what will be the minor third with respect to F a flat again muddy there so we played higher again it's quite a stretch so if you can't stretch use the pedal and jump right so pedal becomes a very important feature for your piano playing so if you don't have a pedal you might want to consider getting one right now we've got the root and we've got the minor third or we got the major third now we need to fit in the middle note what is the middle note the remaining note of the chord right what is the remaining note now the fifth so we have the root the third or the 10th and the middle note will be the fifth which is C so I have to play C here I can use my middle finger to play C or I can use my index finger to play C and there you have it you have a very crystal clear and rich sounding texture of the F major chord right and it doesn't clash in fact it's so rich sounding that right now it sounds good even without the right hand you can just use this as an accompaniment technique and chill out with your right hand for a bit or maybe focus on a melody line which you could sing I'm playing it right now in an arpeggio so you could consider just going up and down with the with the set of notes I like that low note middle note high note back to the middle note or do it in sixes you've heard the Bach cello suite which uses this exact voicing right so you go maybe a minor let's go back to the other arpeggio pattern if you ask me this is full enough right yes you could add variety in the right hand but now if you think about it you set the platform for a melodic objective in the right hand so your right hand can now exclusively focus on the melody line and this lesson is not really about the right hand right I've done a lot of other videos which you could watch which focus on melody playing and melody building but for this lesson we are just going to deal with the left hand so get this voicing going really well let's recap root fifth and the higher 10th or the higher third F major F minor and we also call this as spread voicing so a great way to actually form this with another chord or with any chord in general is write down the chord the triad in a circle F A C and normally when we build piano chords as we call it we take it as F A C A C F and C F A these are our piano inversions for each triad each triad has three inversions in your left hand however you could write the same equation in a circle but you could move in the counterclockwise direction as you're counting the notes so what what was once F A C in the right hand which would be a clockwise movement will now be F C A in the left hand and that's your deep voicing or the spread voicing very rich sound so actually you'll even have the inversions right so let's try and conclude this lesson with a nice sounding chord progression for you guys to practice so we are in the key of F major F major 1 major 6 minor very common movement 2 minor 5 major which is the dominant going back to the tonic let's do that again F major D minor next D minor G minor and we end on C major let's do that again D minor G minor C major back to and now you can actually play out a melody so try to practice improvising over a melody over this chord progression the chord progression is 1 6 2 5 which we are trying to play in spread voicing and there are two patterns you could consider playing in your left hand simple eighth notes 1 and 2 and 1 and 2 and 3 and then we can even do in sixes 2 and 3 and or in a 3 by 4 environment 1 and 2 and 3 and 1 I like this as well if you're unfamiliar with the right hand if it's taking you some time focus on maybe singing while you navigate through the left hand challenge right so you could do something like so let's recap the lesson everyone we've looked at spread voicing which is a very clean way of playing chords in the left hand adding also a dimension of richness and warmth and uniqueness and colorfulness and all these other fancy adjectives to the sound so all you do is take the root don't play the third inside the fifth play the third outside the fifth so the voicing ordering will be one perfect fifth major third played up which is the 10th or else minor 10th or the minor third played up in the instance of the minor chord so practice it on a few other chords maybe C major C G E minor and the trick to do this and achieve that continuity between the sound if you will will be to use the sustain pedal you can afford to leave your finger but hold the pedal but the challenge here is you need to lift it and then get to the next chord you can't keep holding it otherwise it's going to sound very muddy right guys so again this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music if you found the lesson useful please like the video subscribe and share it with all your musician friends and also leave us a comment if you'd like to learn anything in particular cheers