 Hi guys this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music and in this lesson we are going to cover the topic of extended harmony or chord extensions or chord colors if you will basically taking a major chord or a minor chord as a base and then building on from there for example a major seventh voicing a minor seventh voicing an augmented voicing and we'll see how far this goes from there and if you haven't already do consider subscribing to our youtube channel and also do check out our patreon page for a lot of my handwritten notes notation midi files and a lot of this stuff which will be regularly updated let's now get started so for today's lesson i'm going to take an f chord an f major or an f minor and the same objective can be sort of handled with any triad there are 12 major triads 12 minor triads right so if i'm taking an f major chord first observe how i'm playing it i'm playing it in what's called as a spread voicing wherein you take the middle note the third and play it up to the top register of the chord a very orchestral way to play a chord or a very bass way if you will if you think about it the piano's left hand has to be played keeping what a bass player would do or what a cellist would do we have to respect and acknowledge those instruments which have been around for countless generations doing awesome stuff and what they generally do is to voice their chord tones this way not that way that's a very piano way right which i'm not suggesting you do in the left hand and we've done quite a few videos on left hand chord voicings and left hand chord patterns you should check it out in the description so you go this is your default way of playing f major now f major is called as a triad a triad basically has three notes the root the third and the fifth if we have to go beyond that we have to consider doing something like a major seventh sound which is the root the major third the perfect fifth and the major seventh now if we do that in our bass you hear the muddiness right it doesn't sound so clear so good technique to form the major seventh chord would be root then don't play the perfect fifth play the third and then find the major seventh of the chord which is e f g ab flat c d e major seventh is the seventh of the major scale you need to kind of remember these things so you get a very nice colorful major seventh voicing there okay you can also go back to the f major chord it's the colorful one right so now that we've looked at the major seventh chord let's see how we can form the next major chord extension which is the dominant seventh chord so to do that you take the major chord f major in spread position that'll be f c a and for a dominant seventh sound we use the minor seventh interval so that'll be root major third a perfect fifth c the dominant seventh e flat which gives you that sort of unstable or like an anticipation tonality now if I play all the four notes together as you can hear it sounds very muddy so let's figure out how we can voice it in the left hand again this will be a default major and what did we do for the major seventh we took the major chord replaced the fifth and moved it to a major seventh for the dominant seventh chord you pretty much do almost the same thing major shape replace the fifth and now play the flat seven with with respect to f the flat seven is e flat okay major and that's your f dominant seventh it's a very very important chord especially if you're playing genres like blues music you're going to pretty much use this you know all the time to do your comping in the left hand and again as always you need to get acquainted with all the other dominant sevens as well so actually speaking a great way to practice your chords would be to do them in fourths fifths with along with the root so what I mean by that is if you have the f scale you find the tonic major which is f major and then practice the major seventh e f dominant and then you move up a fourth which is b flat do that one's major b flat major seventh get acquainted with the dominant because you're going to use b flat and the f very very well together in a song because they are inevitably part of the same music that's your b flat and then you'd want to also learn the c chord c major c major seven you see how amazing that sounds I'm playing it really deep normally you will never be able to play chords in this register but you sort of opened up your left hand for a lot of opportunities all you need to do is keep in mind that your hands are going to be stretched out a bit more however if you cannot stretch out your hand use the pedal remove your finger from that c and drift it so that you can stretch out to the e with pedal this is if you can stretch but then you can still use the pedal because the pedal adds additional harmonics to your sound right so now that we've learned the dominant seventh chord let's try out a few other options you have the major and that's your major sixth another incredible sound that's your major six just take the five and move it up you need the d you can also get an augmented flavor by doing a sharp five so where's my five c and you do a sharp five right so major sixth dominant seventh major seventh and back to the vanilla major chord let's recap this is your f major f augmented f major sixth f dominant seventh f major seventh let's try and build this with a couple more chords i'm going to try and build it with c c major c augmented c major sixth c dominant c major seventh so all of these are extensions of the major chord now if you need to do extensions of the minor chord it's pretty much going to be very similar to what we just learned the only difference will be the top note will not be a major 10 which is a it will be the minor 10 which is a flat so how do we color this up again we start with analyzing what's in the middle which is now the fifth that's your default minor sound and now if you go to the dominant seventh or the minor seventh here you get immediately an f minor seventh sound you also get a minor major seventh which is a bit rare i'm going to stick with a minor seventh i love this sound this is a minor sixth there you have it you have james bond right there you could actually play around with just the middle note even if you don't know the names of these chords just decide whether you want a major tonality or a minor tonality and then explore what's in between you'll be very surprised with what you create i hope so that's basically how you add extended harmony in your left hand on the piano so you start off with a 10th interval minor 10th major 10th and then explore what's middle start with the vanilla note which is perfect fifth even for a minor chord and then move forward and this is a great way to play all those jazz extensions the 7s the 9s the whatever else you can even embellish it further with 13s sharp 11s and also get into a very modal context as well and again this really frees up your right hand to do a lot of improvisation over this technique so i hope you guys found the lesson useful again this is Jason here from Nathaniel don't forget to like the video share the video with all your musician friends leave us a comment if you'd like to learn something else in the future and subscribe to our youtube channel turn on the bell and i will see you in the next one cheers