 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson we are basically going to look at the simplest chords we know, which are the major chord and the minor chord. And look at how we can play them in sophisticated ways, in ways which you would associate with professional piano players like Elton John, Nora Jones or even where a piano could try and emulate some great guitar players like John Mayer or BB King or Eric Clapton. So there are a lot of things we do on this instrument being a very binary instrument. Why I say binary instrument is because unlike other instruments the only option we have when you approach a chord or when you approach a note is to play it and play it maybe softer, little louder, that's pretty much it. While a guitar player or a violin player or even a vocalist has the opportunity to you know, mangle the note or change the note, glide it, hammer on, pull offs as some of you may know if you are a guitar player or you can slide through an instrument. If you slide through a fretless instrument it gives you even more possibilities. Piano has none of that. If you just look at the piano, if you say synthesizer then yes, or if you say the modern day like rolly keyboards then you have all the possibilities as we know it. So in this lesson we are just going to look at you know if you were to play a chord like C major you can play it, well what are the different ways you can first play the chord. What we are taught is C major, C E G, E G C that's the other C major and G C E right. Now a guitar player will look at that and think man the piano must be so simple because there are so many shapes on the guitar, one might argue maybe at least 25 to 30 ways of playing the major chord on the guitar just with the triad without any kind of color. So it's time you know if you are a piano player and you have just started playing major minor chords you are okay with them, it's time to maybe move to the next level or if you are an intermediate or an advanced player I guess it is time to maybe look at how the pros play. So a lot of these approaches are also how I approach the chords sometimes in my playing and it gives me very good results to a point that I could literally start with the chord progression not think of a melody and somehow with these variations or these styles of approaching the chord hits I am able to just either get inspired to compose a melody or the melody is in the chord in any case right. So these are just five quick approaches which I am going to show you, I am not going to show you with a specific chord and so on and so forth, there may not be a lot of notes in this lesson as we normally have but it's just the way my fingers are moving across the chord. So let's get cracking and if you haven't already do hit the subscribe button and turn on the bell icon for notifications it will help our channel grow and it will also help you get updates whenever a new lesson comes your way. So let's just approach a C minor chord. The first style of playing it is just out of what a guitar player would do with a chord you know just by the nature of the guitar you cannot possibly play a chord like that with all the strings being played exactly together unless you have like a lot of fingers to play all the six strings or you've developed a robot which can do it. So on the keyboard your options are limited right so what you could do to emulate the guitar is just imagine how the guitar player will go down the six strings instead of sounding like thang it's going to sound more like thang like so he's playing through all the strings so what was once this could end up being that so you need to make sure that your landing point which is the last part of the chord or last note of the chord in this case the G at the top end is exactly on your beat of the bar or downbeat so you can start the downbeat with the flam notes it'll have to be there it has to land there so one two three four you see that one one one so that exact point of that beat I'm trying to latch on now you don't want to attempt this technique if it doesn't sound good all of these techniques you need to like work towards it such that it actually sounds good which is why one of the best ways of learning music is to also listen to music you know so you have a goal to look look forward to it's like you're learning a sport like tennis and all of us will idolize Roger Federer so it's something like that you need to have an artist so just watching a YouTube lesson or reading sheet music doesn't give you these embellishments on the piano so the flamenco I call it the flamenco technique because it's very similar to like what a guitar player would do right so you go like that so there are two ways of building it up you start first of all with your only the right hand so if I take two chords C minor and F major right this I think is very guitar like the advantage of the keyboard is you can bring in some melody while you hit the chord now what is my left hand doing the left hand could also kind of add to the flam now some keyboard players would do everything like I think that's a bit too much you could probably just stick with the root and the fifth with your bass just that and that sort of to me sounds like a flamenco guitar it sort of also reminds me of a harp player you know they just have their fingers on the chord it's a two-handed instrument and you just sort of flow with that technique right so well you may also think of these as really fast arpeggios but I wouldn't look at it that way we'll just call this as you know emulating other instruments so listen to you know great flamenco guitar players listen to classical guitar players listen to harpists and listen to pianists who also adopt this technique so that's the flamenco technique technique number one let's move on to the next one so that was all about the flamenco approach which we have for chord playing and let's move on now to the next one the next one is what I call as the hammer-on approach or the country approach you know very common in country music or americana music or folk music where you're kind of it's again very guitar inspired a lot of you have asked me you know please teach us how to follow a guitar so this lesson is definitely for you you know and the piano is that kind of an instrument it's it's always an instrument where you learn from other players you learn from singers you learn from saxophonists you learn from harmonica players bass players you know so it's one of the rare instruments which doesn't have its own identity or approach in that sense like it's a very binary instrument as I mentioned earlier so it's important to learn from other instrumentalists and again like I said earlier listen to more music so if you have okay let's go to major so now if I have D major so this is how you can approach a hammer-on technique to play the D major chord instead of going like vanilla D major you go that way so I'm only sliding one note that's E to F sharp so so a okay so if you do amazing grace if you do like any song you can actually play this technique for all the chords you know okay now you can also adopt this as I'm calling the hammer-on approach for inversions of chords so if you're playing let's just take D major like this you'll do the hammer like like that or so your goal is by the time you finish well what some musicians will call as a grace note by the time you finish the grace you've landed on a D major chord just like any other musician right now this is something which is very very piano friendly it's not something which you will expect to do on other instruments on a guitar probably that's that's the general goal on a guitar you hammer-on and then you latch on to just two notes eventually but on a piano well you can latch on to four notes you know you know so you can literally use all your five fingers on the keyboard to and still incorporate that grace note or the hammer-on technique so there we go so practice this well D major with the hammer and then inversion it's the same notes it's E sliding to F sharp you want to get to the third of the chord and then the last one will be inversion ADF sharp and so to practice this better maybe you could slow it down and then right you can even use it in a melodic context you have to decide your melody so in the melodic context your melody needs to be on top of the chord or an inversion of the chord which highlights the melodic note so right so if you take let's say happy birthday there we go you see that's everywhere of course all of these are just you know embellishments to chords it doesn't mean that you have to use all of them one up one approach is just minimize it learn it for a good number of chords and then you know do and when you practice go for the overkill approach where you try it with everything and then when you actually go for a recording or you know a performance you can then say okay I can do this quite well so I'll just use it wherever I'm needed to use it maybe just to embellish certain parts you have the flamenco you have this country hammer-on approach maybe you could just try out a lick like this you know what did I do D major a major that's D a G major D major simple major chords so to dress it up with these sort of embellishments so let's break that out it's just chords but it doesn't sound like someone just going and just playing the chord hits right it feels as though you're a melodic and a harmonic instrument and a rhythmic instrument all at once right so this is another great way to embellish chords which I found very useful for playing genres like country bluegrass Celtic music and sometimes even rock music like so you listen to guitar players again John mayors a great example Mark Knopfler is probably the best example so you should listen to other musicians not just piano players okay guys so moving on to the next technique this is what I call as the double grace note approach okay so it works great for some chords it doesn't work for all of them so I'm just specifically showing you a chord which I end up doing it a lot of times for and sometimes I think I overdo it but it's nice for certain chords I feel and that's another amazing thing about the piano every chord is feels different on your fingers you know every inversion also feels different so it's kind of different from a guitar because a guitar is very shape driven once you learn a specific shape you apply that shape to a to a multitude of chords while on the piano an E flat major shape even if you learn all the three is going to feel very very different than some other you know major chord even though they sound the same function the same they do not feel the same on the instrument so if you take E flat major in what is this inversion the first inversion G B flat E flat and this is the technique okay now you could approach this as you could also end it without the B flat you know can just do like really emphasizes that hit the strong hit then get back to the chord when I do it with maybe a simpler chord like C major right I guess this is used a lot in gospel music also country what I like to do sometimes is okay instead of I could do and of course you can combine like this double grace note approach with the hammer approach with the flamenco approach which we've learned so far so that's your third way to embellish a simple major or a minor chord start with triads and then you can even move to the other more complicated chords right so let's move on to the next way to embellish our triads right so the next approach is what you could look at in a lot of the popular music out there especially music which may not even have the piano it could have been composed with some kind of a synthesizer you know you know like various songs are these days it may not even have the piano but I'm just giving you a pop approach at least the last ten decades of music what people have been doing to dress up major and minor chords on the piano keyboard so the first thing you find is in a lot of these EDM songs they spread out the chord so instead of doing E flat major like this they would go so instead of E flat G B flat it'll be E flat B flat G right which actually reminds us of the old days of Bach maybe you know stuff like the the cello suite and all of that stuff so it's weird that it's actually there in like EDM dance music you know so they'll go something like you'll find this in a lot of songs right I hope this video doesn't get taken down if this is some existing song hopefully not but anyway so you take like your E flat major chord and you play it instead of that G in the middle play there so stuff like this nice thing about spread voicings on the keyboard is you can even play them down below just hold it there you know people sing stuff you know so that's well it's still a triad isn't it it's still F major F A C but the notes are wider apart so this really really helps to well just change the way you play your chord so just because I said it's a pop pattern doesn't mean you can't use it for your own music here and there right so a couple more pop things which people do like you'll find musicians or keyboard players just playing a fifth chord in the right hand or a power chord as guitarists like to call it and in the left hand they just play notes in the scale and that's the song that's it right there another very popular approach so just take I guess it's inspired from the guitar because guitar players like a lot of their chords with like an open G or an open E at the top end so maybe it sort of got influenced by their right or maybe in a more rock context right so you could use it for rock stuff so what is that technique fifth chord in the right hand play anything in the key which or scale which you're trying to do in the left hand so that's another very common pop thing and another pop thing which I find well this is not modern pop this has been popped through the ages is people will take like an A major chord right and play and add a couple of notes so instead of all the gliding stuff we learned earlier you just take a major and choose a note which you'd like to combine it with to just make it a bit more richer we call this as cluster chord so you go it also allows that a major to last longer you can go like someone can just sing an a la per just improvise freely and if you layer this with a pad or something yeah it sounds even better and do the same maybe for B minor so B minor with a C sharp being the second can also do stuff like E major with the A as the added for some of you may think oh isn't this a suspended chord not really if it was a suspended chord you won't have a third this has a third and a fourth so these are your pop patterns which you would find let's just recap those pop patterns you have spread voicing you have fifth chord a boy chord voicing techniques and lastly you have these cluster chords right so let's move on I have one more approach to make chords a lot more you know sophisticated and exciting right so this approach is basically what I call as plagal chords okay plagal chords are derived from the plagal cadence of which we have enough and more YouTube videos explaining the concept including how the plagal cadence and the circle of fifths work together so that's so that's a theory background lesson so do check out all our stuff on plagal cadences anyway so what you do here I'm using plagal cadences more a plagal chords rather just as passing chords so if I take the A major chord you tell yourself what is its fourth so a great ways circle of fifths one neighbor down and you will get yourself the D chord okay so don't play D as D major full D major do D major with an A base because in the chord chart which you are practicing the chord says a major but and you're like I want to make it more colorful so what do I do I want to do something because a major is lasting for a while you know yes we have the other approaches which I've already taught you something really cool would be while you're playing a like your guitar players just playing a or the bass players just playing a but what you are doing you're giving the song color you're also inspiring the vocalist if you're trying to compose so what did I do there I'm essentially playing a D major chord with an A base also what people would call as a D slash A okay and as I mentioned it on the topics of slash chords we have quite a few lessons as well so do check out our lessons on slash chords plagal cadences basically subscribe and hit the bell you will get information of all these videos as they keep coming your way quite regularly okay so you go A okay so if you take any kind of a song let's say going to E ask yourself what is ease forth ease forth is a major maybe D that's a very Elton John thing to do see what Elton Elton John is done there is he's left the key of a major he's looked at then he comes back to the root so plagal cadences are amazing but in this context just with an A in the bottom you're just droning or peddling it with that A in the base so in theory your guitar player or especially your bass players not going to think oh this guy changed his chord he's still on a major he's just doing some color and if you do a major going to some other D what is the other D D minor this becomes something which I personally find very interesting so so if you find your vocalist singing the F instead of the normal F sharp especially with a lot of Indian music lot of Hindustani and Carnatic Raga Raga bass songs you know people like that F instead of F sharp even in Celtic music so you go it's almost like a new chord now right anyway so that's basically about the plagal cadence so let's summarize we've looked at five ways to make simple major and minor chords a lot more sophisticated the first thing we looked at was our flamenco approach then we looked at the country piano the hammer on approach then we looked at the gospel the double-grace thing don't overdo it then what else did we look at we looked at the pop approach where we took the spread chord options very pop and electronic music is right then we looked at the cluster chords you just add the two or the four and then you looked at the fifth chord approaches so just wander off in your left hand very good for rock as well rock music as well and lastly we looked at that plagal passing chord technique where in the chord chart you don't really write oh the chord has changed to something rather you play your chord if it's long enough you just add it you know wherever you need minor if you like plagal just means go up a fourth and come back to the bottom right guys so this is what we have for this lesson five ways to make chords a lot more sophisticated do try it out in your music do see if it can work for existing songs do see if it can work for some compositions which you may be working on and all the best with this approach and again this is Jason from Nathaniel School of Music don't forget to hit the like the bell subscribe and you can also consider following us on patreon where a lot of new things are going on there so head over to patreon as well if you can and if you're a complete beginner or if you are just starting off and you're finding some of our lessons a bit more advanced maybe you'd want to go through our foundation piano course which is pretty much going to start from the absolute basics where are the notes and how do you get your two hands actually working together with finger exercises and some chord chord work theory year training and so on so there are links to all of this stuff so I will see you guys in next video cheers thanks for watching