 Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to take a really simple chord progression, something you would have played very often on the piano and try and use simple concepts, not too much of fancy music theory and just make the chord progression sound very sophisticated, a lot more professional. So as you play songs, as you play music in different genres, maybe one of these techniques would resonate along with the usual tried and tested triads. So first off, let's go through the basics. I'm going to give you a chord progression, explain it to you on the G major scale. Then we look at the normal way in which it is played by a pianist and then we'll try and take it to 5 different variations or 5 different techniques which are really easy. All you need to do is I guess get your keyboards out, play along with me, also get a notebook so you can write it down as the lesson goes forward. And you can also consider getting my notes, each variation is put out there and it will be waiting for you on Patreon, you can find the link in the description. Being a member on Patreon will also be a great support for our channel, so do consider going to patreon.com and you will have other offerings, you can do workshops, you can do other tiers which are available there, so give it a check and see how that goes. Let's get started. So I'm taking G major scale, one sharp F sharp and the chords are going to be G major, E minor, A minor, D major for this entire lesson. So our job is just to make this more sophisticated, G major, G B D, E minor, E G B, A minor, A C E, D major, D F sharp A and obviously you could play these chords with inversions to make them easier on the fingers, G major, G B D, E minor, I'm playing G B E, just moving the pinky to E, then A minor coming back to normal, A C E and then you could do D major as F sharp A D or A D F sharp. So inversions are always there and let's look at the available chords of G major. You have G major which is one major, A minor which is two minor, B minor which is three minor, C major which is four major, D major which is the five major, E minor which is the six minor, F sharp diminished which is the seven diminished back to G. You could also form seventh chords, one major seventh, two minor seventh, B minor seventh which is the three minor seventh, all seventh chords are four notes in amount, C major seventh, D dominant seventh which has the minor seventh up top and a major chord here, E minor seventh, F sharp minor seventh flat five also known as a half diminished chord and you end with G major seventh. So that's just the basic palette of chords and the basic theory of the G major scale which has one sharp namely F sharp. What is the chord progression again? It's a one, six, two, five. G major, E minor, K minor, D major. It's quite popular so I figured we'll use this and then make it a lot more sophisticated. The first technique I have for you is called spread chords or spread voicing or open voicing. So you take the triads namely G major, E minor, A minor, D major, write them down in a circle. So I do G, B, D clockwise, E, G, B clockwise, A, C, E clockwise, D, F sharp, A clockwise but don't count the notes clockwise. Count the notes counterclockwise. So instead of putting an arrow that way, you're going to put it against the clock. So G, B, D won't be seen that way. Instead it'll be seen as G, D, B. So you're going to do G, D, B at the top end. A bit tough to play with one hand. Some people can, I struggle a bit with some of the, with a lot of the chords. So it's very tough to play together at least. You can arpeggiate it but you can use two hands for this lesson. In fact, even on stage at a gig, you could play the chords with two hands like this and you still have room to play a melody line which we can look at in a later lesson. Okay, and I have done spread voicing in a series on YouTube. We've put it together in a playlist. So do check it out. It's in the description. So coming back to the progression. So you take G major, instead of looking at it as G, B, D, which is a bit timid or very mellow kind of a sound, you can play it as G, D, B. What I like about it is it sounds good in every point of the keyboard. You play it super high. It doesn't sound squeaky. It sounds very peaceful, very beautiful on the top end. You can go all the way top. Okay, because the notes are very clear and because they are clear, you can even play them down below, way down in the bass clef. There we go. So let's try and do this with all the chords. It's written down for you as well. So G, D, B, not G, B, D. It's an instant way to play chords in the left hand because this is a horrible muddy kind of sound. So you could go G, D, B, you open up the chord. If you can't reach, just play it with one of the fingers like the thumb in the right hand and then E minor would be E, B, G. Again, E, G, B, not counted clock, counter clock. So E minor, G major, E minor. Now what do we have? A minor. Instead of playing A, C, E, I do A, E, high C. Then you do D major. So G major, E minor, A minor, D major. It opens up the hand also to be a lot freer. You can make patterns. You can play a lot deeper. Also use the top note to make it more melodic. Float it a bit or play it higher. As single hits these chords sound a lot better, I think, then it sounds too happy or too normal or annoying sometimes. These chords will hold their ground just by hitting them. You don't even have to play a rhythm. You don't have to break them up, just hit. It's also a rather new sound. Very few piano players use this. So even in actual mainstream songs, you find playing like that. So it's a good way to give people a refreshing sound and it'll make your music also stand out a bit more, make it a lot more unique. So that's about spread chords. Let's now move on to option number two. The second way to make chords a lot more exciting, which is what we call as slash chords. So with a slash chord, we define it as a chord like a G major chord with a base note, which is not the root of the chord. So in other words, you play G without the true root of the chord, which is G. This is the usual way we all play G major, but slash chords will access notes which are part of the chord, at least in this demonstration. You have other more fancier slash chords as well. But what are the other notes of the G major chord? You have B, you have D. So decide where you want to play it, maybe a bit higher. So this will be called G major, vanilla G major. You can play G major with a B. Completely changes or transforms the sound. It's a lot more tense, a lot more spicy. Definitely doesn't sound as resolved as that. Very powerful concept changing the base note of the chord. So this is G major normal, G major with the slash. It just lifts the chord. Whichever inversion you play in the right hand, it won't matter. The sound will still be very tense because you're changing the root in the left hand. So what can you do with this exercise? You can take the same chords, G major, E minus, A minor, D major. Again, G major, E minor, A minor, D major. But play each of those chords with different slashes. So I'm doing G major with B, E minor with G, A minor with C, D with F sharp, F sharp, B in the bass over G major, E minor with G. You may not like that, but I'm just giving you the options. A minor with C in the bass, D with F sharp in the bass. And remember earlier we learned spread voicing. So why not combine spread with slashing and go something like this. I'm spreading out the triad but starting with the B. Remember you still count the chord, counter the clock. B bass, E minor with a G bass, A minor with a C bass, D major with an F sharp bass. Let's play that again. You can also kind of adjust the chords real time. You can play D major normal and then go with D over F sharp which goes back to G. So I just did an overkill of slash chords. You don't have to use slashes for all the four, but you get the idea. I practice it and see how you can combine slash chords with spread chords or slash with normal. And once you get that feel going, spread the chords out. It'll sound beautiful. Trust me. Okay, moving forward. This is a nice technique, I think to start off for the left hand, you go root fifth and then a fifth with respect to the fifth. So that'll be G, D and you go D's fifth, another fifth, what I call as a stack of fifths. That's a fifth and another fifth. So it ends up being a ninth chord or a ninth voicing. Very sophisticated. G, D, A. Do the same thing for E, E, B. What is B's perfect fifth? F sharp. And A is fifth E. What is E's further fifth? B and then D with its E. So this is where I would have heard it first, I think. Every breath you take. Guitar players do this a lot. What musicians do, especially guitar players, they'll then take the stack and then add in the third, the top third, which is also making it spread or play around with the octave. Maybe the octave, the ninth, which is that fifth stack and the third, which could be minor third if it's a minor chord, major third if it's a major chord. You get a lot of interesting stuff like. It's also a nice piano or complement technique, if you can. So start with 1, 5 and then the 9 on top. Let's take the chord progression we have for this lesson. Sounds great in the right hand as well. Great for an intro of a song. So it ultimately starts with the fifth and then extends it to the octave, what I told you now, the extended stacked up fifth and then you can do the third major if it's major chord, third minor if it's a minor chord. Personally, I do this a lot in the left hand, but you get the idea. You can do it with both hands. So you could do the ninth stacked. Ninth is essentially above the octave. So this is called eight because it's the octave 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. And just to tell ourselves that it's a note above the octave, we call it nine. But if you compare that, it's actually the second degree of the scale. It's also perfect fifth from the first perfect fifth. Hence, I call this stacking diatonic fifth. So all the chords again keeping it very simple. Let's go back to our chord progression. G major, E minor, A minor, D major. Just doing that is a nice intro, I think. It's also very different. So a nice sophisticated sound and it takes you away from that usual triad kind of sound, which is nice, but you don't have to use it all the time. So I'm now going to move on to a four note technique, which is our fourth strategy of making chords more interesting. This is taking seventh chords, but giving you a voicing, which I think will be very easy. You don't need to know jazz music and you don't need to know fancy piano technique to get this done because two notes of the seventh chord are going to be played in the left hand. The other two are going to be played in the right hand. I have a chart for you, which you can see in our notes. It's also there on Patreon. That'll help you learn it better. You play the same fifth, which we learned earlier. So what are my stacks of fifths? G, D, E, B, A, E, D, A. So G, D. And what is its upper third? B. We've learned all of the spread stuff. So what do you do in your right hand? Now first plot out all these chords. It's going to be G major seventh, E minor seventh second chord, A minor seventh third chord, D dominant seventh fourth chord. Because we are trying to play seventh chords, seventh chords have four notes in them. G major seventh, E minor seventh, A minor seventh and D dominant. So a good way to play this, also a clean way to play this would be one five in the left hand and play either a seven three in the right hand or a three seven in your right hand depends on what you like. I like both actually. So this could be a nice way to play G major. E minor seventh rather because you're playing the minor third and the minor seventh. A minor seventh, D dominant seventh. And what I like about the right hand in this technique is you can either do a three seven voicing or you can do a seven three voicing. Both have a nice vibe, quite different also, but the same chord. So this is a three seven voicing will still have a one five in the left hand with a three seven in the right hand. What I do here, I'm doing a three seven still or I could do a seven three voicing and then A minor with a three seven voicing. Please note that the three and the seven of a minor seventh chord are minor thirds and minor sevenths, three seven voicing or you can do seven three or three seven and then I love this voicing for a dominant, which is three and seven flat or you could do if you want to go deeper. You can do seven flat and three. Let's put it all together without me talking too much. E minor seventh A minor seventh, D dominant, two notes in the left and two notes in the right hand. A minor seventh, a lot more sophisticated I think. So it's an inspiring way to play chords. Why I say that is it can motivate your melody as well. One reason being, yes, there's a fourth note involved in the in the game. And the other thing is the chords are voiced, the notes of the chords are jumbled or ordered differently and they are spread out. So you can make out each note very clearly and that will motivate you to hopefully come up with a melody or improvise something. So I have one more strategy for you to make chords very sophisticated. These are what we call as quartile chords or the voicing technique could be called as quartile voicing. Let's get cracking with that. So with quartile chords, this is how they are formed. First of all on the G major scale. Okay, they sound a bit kind of, they sound a bit different than what you would normally hear mainstream because the intervals used to form them are not thirds. They are fourths, they're not even fifths. So you have thirds used for triads, you have fifths sometimes, which we saw already in the lesson used. Quartile chords are very different because they are built using fourths. There are three types of quartile chords. So I'm going to run you through them. These three types of quartile chords can also come diatonically from the scale or you can learn them as a separate formula. So the first basic quartile chord, I'm going to show you all of them with respect to G. Okay, to build a quartile chord, the normal quartile shape would be root, perfect fourth and from the perfect fourth, another perfect fourth. So essentially it's one, four, seven flat in terms of intervals. That's the vibe. There are some other quartiles as well, two more in fact. So what is this chord again? It's root, perfect fourth and major seventh. We call this as a G quartile plus chord or a Q plus chord. How do we build it again? Root, perfect fourth, major seventh, perfect fourth of G major would be C, major seventh would be F sharp. In fact, the first quartile chord in the G major scale would be this one. Could also call this an Ionian chord because it's a very Ionian representation, Ionian mode. And the other quartile chord you'll learn would be what we call as the sharp four quartile chord. So to build that root, sharp four also known as the augmented fourth and then the major seven. Very exotic sound. You'd use this very rarely but it's there. It's a nice shape, adds a lot of tension and bring out a bit of the Lydian vibe because of the sharp four. So you have normal quartiles which I'm going to use a lot of in this lecture. Then you have the quartile plus which brings you that major seventh with a perfect four here and then you have sharp four Q. It's a bit exotic in nature. So these are all your quartile chords. So how do you use them with an existing triad based chord progression? You have G major, E minor, A minor, D. So the way I go about it is you play G, E, A, D and quartile chords will help if the duration of the the chord itself is longer. So let's take maybe four counts per chord as opposed to two which could also happen. So four beats per chord. And now you explore the first, we've put it there in a map. So you'll have G, Q plus, A, Q, B, Q, then C sharp four Q, D quartile, E quartile and F sharp quartile. When I say quartile, I just mean perfect fourths. When I say quartile, I just mean perfect fourths. It's the other ones which are the on the exotic side. So doing the G major scale again in quartiles, then A, D, G, B, E, A, C, F sharp, E, D, G, C, E, A, D, F sharp, E, G, C, F sharp down. So if you're on a G major chord, maybe you could play G major like this, you could go, you could essentially access any of the seven quartiles which you feel works well with that root. So G does A quartile work, sounds normal because it has the G, but that sounds very, very interesting. What if you want to do C, the sharp four quartile chord, maybe D, G, C is more normal. I love E, A, D, F sharp, B, E options are endless. Well, not endless. There's seven options. So in other words, what I'm trying to say is for every major chord, since you're on the G major scale, you can test out all the seven quartiles with the root G. So you could see what you like or use many like over the duration of the G major chord you could do. The whole band is playing G major at this current moment, but you are fooling around with so many other shapes. Then you go to E. I like this E minor. Let's put it together. G major, E minor, the sharp four, G minor, then D, D, all over the same old chord progression which you're given. What I like about quartiles is you have so many more variations. It's not just you don't have to commit to one. You can change it during the gig, during the chord. You can have one for the recording, one for the performance and so on and so forth. So that's about quartile chords. So in this lesson, we've taken a standard chord progression, G, E, A, D, pop stuff and looked at five ways to make it a lot more sophisticated with very simple techniques using just the knowledge of your major scale, a few intervals here and there within the scale and one or two concepts along the way. Hope you guys found the lesson useful. If you did, please let us know about it in the comments. Give the video a like. Do consider getting our handwritten notes on Patreon. It'll help our channel go a great way. And if you haven't already, don't forget to hit that subscribe button and turn on the bell icon for regular notifications. Thanks a ton for watching the video. Cheers. Catch you in the next one.