 Hi, guys. This is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, I'm going to talk to you about the importance of playing a triad with an extra note. So by default, a triad has three notes, right? Root, third and fifth. I don't know why I took D flat for this example. You could take anything for that matter. You could take D major, C major, maybe an E minor. So all triads have root, third and fifth. So what I'm proposing in this lesson is you take, let's say, a D flat major chord and instead of playing it as D flat, F, A flat or a C major chord and instead of playing it as C, E, G, you're adding the top octave to the chord. Now, you may be wondering what is the value of doing this? It's not really adding a new sound, right? You're not making it like a major seventh, you know, or a lydian. You're not really changing the tonality of the chord. It's still the same emotion. So that's pretty much what this lesson is about, to encourage you to, at some points in life when you play the piano, try to not play chords like that, play it like that with that additional note. So either you're looking at this as a triad like this and then you take the top note down and add it there or you play a triad like this and then take the bottom note and then add it there. Again, you may be wondering why can't I just play it like this and that's the whole point of this lesson. And I'm going to give you five ways of using this technique, five ways of playing a triad with one extra note and I think all the five ways we have for you are going to be quite musical. They do have musical applications. It's not just to, you know, make something sound bigger or fuller or anything. It's actually going to help you play specific kinds of music. So get your keyboards out and let's get cracking with the lesson. Before we do, there's a subscribe button somewhere there. Hit it if you haven't already. And there's a bell icon where you'll get notifications for all of our lessons whenever we drop new content. So hit that bell. And if you'd like to explore the channel further, you could head over to our playlist. There are a lot of categories on hand independence, arpeggios, learning songs, of course. You can also go to our website, which can help you learn all this stuff in a lot more organized way. And there's always Patreon, which can give you all of the supplementary material for a lot of my lessons, including notation, MIDI files, my handwritten notes, and so on and so forth. Let's get cracking, guys. So the first thing I'd like to talk about when using a three-note chord and when you add one more note is the topic of line cliches, as we call it. Now, a line cliche basically means you could start with something static, like the major chord. In this lesson, I'm taking the D-flat major chord for our study. So with a line cliche, what you could do, you can do stuff like this. Look at my pinky now. It's on the D-flat. So by playing a triad now with this extra octave, otherwise it would have been this. Adding that extra octave gives you the possibility to create a very interesting chord movement around the same tonal center, which is D-flat. So you go something like just wandering around the octave, major seventh, dominant seventh, right? You know, so many songs like this. You can use it also for suspensions like... Sus two, major sus four, major sus two. Let's do this on a few chords which you may not get that scared about. Let's take C major, for instance. Let's do this on C minor, for instance. Now, what did I do there? I'm now messing with the middle note of the chord. Earlier we messed with the top note for the top line cliche. That sort of stuff. Now if you take the middle note, what is my middle finger on now? G, right? So let's get some James Bond going into the picture. And this would really open out your playing and be very much more possible only when you start playing triads like this and not like that. Because then your fingering tends to go all over the place and it gets a bit disorganized. So anyway, you can do a movement of a semitone or a tone or a down-up, you know, one step at a time. With any note of this chord. So if you take the minor third... Now move the middle finger. Make a melodic movement out of it. Don't just plonk the chord. You can make a melody out of it. You can also use this as an anchor. Keep the right hand pivoted and then move some bass as well. That's what this piano is very capable of doing. You have the right hand. There's a lot of stuff going on there. There's still one more hand waiting. So that's a really nice use for playing a triad with that additional note. It gives you that possibility of exploring one of these voices and just moving them down or up. What we call as a line cliche, you can call it whatever you want really. You're just messing around with one note of the chord, which I think will sound a lot nicer when you play the chord with four notes. In this case, C minor. So another reason why I would recommend you to play chords like this with a kind of a fuller sound with that additional note is if you're trying to play some melodic movement with arpeggios. So let's say an F major chord. Just stuff like that. It serves as the starting point to kind of build a tune. And a lot of piano melodies are played like this. All these songs are out there. There's so many of them to be a bit careful when I'm playing them. I don't want the video to be taken down or something. But anyway, so I'm taking like an F sharp minor chord. So if you arpeggiate your chord in such a way that it's an irregular pattern, not something like that, that, that, that. That doesn't sound very much like a melody. It's not going to go anywhere. So what you do instead would be... A nice style to start off which is actually this Thresio phrase which is ta-kitta, ta-kitta, ta-kitta, ta-kitta, ta-kitta, ta-kitta. Maybe and so on. Stuff like that have this whole Thresio movement. So an arpeggio melody is nothing but an arpeggio which is rather irregular. So you could go one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. And immediately if you move fingers like the pinky and the ring which are on top, you're going to immediately get a melody. It won't just be... Obviously that's not a melody. Nothing's moving. So what people do? I really think this video may be taken down with all of this stuff I'm playing. It all sounds familiar. I just don't have a clue what I'm doing. Moving on, hopefully you found part two useful. Why you need to play triads with four of them rather than the three of them as the word suggests triad three. We're trying to add that four to add more options on the piano. Moving on. Yeah, so if you're like me and if you like to play a lot of fast stuff on the piano, what guitarist I like call a shredding, you know, you can do that really well on the piano, especially when you have that extra note. So if you take a D minor chord and just go... Let's say here. You want to play it like super fast and show off, for example. Now that sounds nice, but it can sound a lot nicer and strangely enough, a lot easier on your wrist and your forearms if you add one note. That's a weird thing to say, right? You're adding a finger. It's supposed to be tougher, but trust me, it's going to be easier to do some of that shredding. So if you take D minor now like this and now roll with it. Let's say a one, two, three triplets like this and speed that up. Get some nice speed. Of course, you need to control this. Now, you may be arguing this is going to burn my hand or probably fry an egg from where you're standing if there is an egg next to you, but you don't... Yes, your hand will get heated up while playing this stuff, but you can make it easy for yourself by understanding that when you're playing fast, you want to use your whole arm. So what students tend to do is as they keep playing, they will slouch the wrist. The wrist will keep dropping and if you look at it logically, when the wrist drops, it's going to put more pain on the forearm muscles, the triceps, the shoulder, and eventually even your back. So what you want to always do is play it with a light and a floating wrist. So you go... See, even though I'm playing this fast, my wrist is actually doing a dance here. See, it's just going down, up, down, up, down, up. Pretty much that. And that's the secret to playing this sort of stuff for a long, long while. Yes, your hand will eventually burn up, but this is the idea. Whenever you get more and more pain, push your wrist even more inside. So all that will do is it will push it, push the stress to this part of the hand and then move it outward, you know, and so on and so forth. Also while playing fast, also remember that the bigger muscles of your upper body, like your back and your shoulder, are also very important while playing the piano. So you need to activate your back, your core muscles, and also your shoulder. Your shoulder... I see a lot of people dropping the shoulder and what this is going to do, it will put all the weight on the weak muscles of the piano. So if your shoulder is active, sort of like you're carrying a bag, you know, you have engaged the shoulder, your back, you will be able to support the weaker muscles better. So while I like playing these triads with that extra note, is it gives me that shredding possibility, those quick arpeggios where you can compete with the more chaotic people like the guitar player in the band. Okay, moving on to the next point. Right, so a very important requirement why you need to play the triads with that additional note is when you're playing music on a six by eight time signature or a 12 eight or triplets as we call it, you know. Now if you played it without the extra note, it'll sound like this. Sounds nice. But it'll sound a lot more, you know, six eight always in a gig, at least when I play gigs or watch gigs, whenever the band plays a song on six eight the audience is expected to sway, you know, and sometimes you just do it as a natural response, otherwise the singer will have to force you to do it. Now the good thing about six eight when you toggle it like this with the root and the octave on top is it gives you that swing sensation because the pitch is actually swing. So you go, it's nice when you're accompanying. Another nice strategy instead of just going up and down like this you can even go you can break up your chord, you can do three, three, the upper three. So whenever you're playing any song on a six eight triplet feel or 12 by eight, do consider playing triads in this spread version. So we have one more style before I sign off another important reason why you would play chords in the spread way. It's what I call as anchor notes and anchor notes or pivoting notes are notes which will not change throughout the duration of the chord. Now if you anchor the whole chord and play the chord for a long, long time then the chord will end up being boring for the listener. Listener will not find any harmonic movement in the chord. The harmony will feel very static even though the time is moving. Harmony will feel static in the harmony axis. So what you want to do is check this out. You have, let's say a D major chord. This is not chord dependent. This entire lesson assumes that it could be any chord of any chord progression. So if you take a simple vanilla D major and play it like that and then you anchor the top note. Let's say you anchor just the D and keep this as your base. You can do things like thirds. You can do D with F sharp, E with G, F sharp with A, G with B, A with C sharp and you just keep that D anchoring. I find this very useful especially playing folk music because folk music is trying to emulate raw organic instruments like the mandolin or the banjo. Those are very reminiscent of folk music or the vina or the sitar from India. So if you keep all these instruments in mind the root and the fifth or the sa and the pa end up being very consistent or pivoted or anchored throughout. So this strategy will allow you to play a lot of the fusion and the folk music out there. So the strategy in a nutshell would be get your voicing to be 135 with that additional octave and explore maybe thirds. Thirds sound really nice. You see what Billy Joel did right there. So it's not like your left hand needs to sleep. Your left hand can also complement the right hand in due time. Right guys, so I hope you found the lesson useful. This was just a lesson to share with you how you can take a triad. Add that extra note which a lot of people tend to take for granted. Why bother adding that octave? It's the same note D plus D is D. It's like red plus red is red. But there's a huge huge application on the piano as you just observed with all these five pointers. So go through it in detail. Study it well. Practice it hard. And do leave us a comment if you have any doubts and also what you thought about the lesson. Again, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. Do give the video a like, a share. Subscribe if you haven't already. Head over to Patreon for all our handwritten notes which supplement the exercises quite well. And I will catch you in the next one. Cheers.