The Complete Piano Chord Masterclass - With Workbook!

1. About This Course: Hi, My name is Jacob Lam. I'm a musician and a music teacher. In this course, we're going to cover piano chords from beginning to end. This course is broken into seven sections. Will start with basic courts. What they are, how they work, and how we build them. By the end of this first section, you'll already be playing chord progressions. Then we'll learn about how chords fit together. And this will help us with song writing and even transposing. We'll jump into intermediate chords as our third section, where we'll learn unique shapes to start putting some dressing on the salad, so to speak. Then in our fourth section we'll do advanced chords. These are where we deal with really adult chords and how we break apart long looking courts. We'll talk about styled chords in Section five and go over blues, jazz, and rock courts. Then we'll talk about common chord progressions that you can use in your songwriting or playing with a band. Finally, in the end, we'll talk about finding chords to your favorite songs and how you can play with a band as the pianist. Now, these are all taken step by step. So if you've already got some chord knowledge, you can jump in at any point that you feel you need to. But you can also come in as a beginner, not even knowing anything about the piano. This course also comes with a free book. Each chapter of the book is one lesson in the course. So you can follow along and get good practice sessions with visuals as well. By the end of this course, you'll be able to play any chord progression that's put in front of you and have a basic understanding of how to play piano for different styles of music. 2. Half and Whole Steps: The first thing we need to understand here is half and whole-steps. Everything we cover in this course is going to relate two half-steps and whole-steps. That's how we'll be counting notes. Now, these are actually really simple. A half-step on the piano is the smallest amount that we can move up or down. Now, you'll notice on the piano we have white keys and we have black keys. Now, both of these are included when we deal with half-steps and whole-steps. So if I start from any note, I'm looking at a half-step, is going to be the next note up, including white or black keys, or the next note down. You'll notice that it doesn't matter if I'm moving to a black key or a white key. If I move up by one half step, I'm moving up to a black key, Fi, moving down by a half step from this note, I'm moving down to a white key. Sometimes people think of half-steps as the black keys. And to be sure, we need black keys to play many half-steps, but not all of the time. You'll see here we have two white keys right next to each other without a black key between them. And so these would be a half step apart. In the same way, if I'm starting from a black key, then I can move up to a white key and say that was a half-step. Or I could move down to a white key and say that was half-step. Now, a whole step is going to be two half-steps put together. E.g. if I start from that same key, well, now I'm going to skip over one of these notes. If I need to move up by a whole step, I'm going to count 12 half-steps. So now I've got a key in between. If I'm starting here and I want to move down by a whole step, I'm again going to count 12 half-steps. So I'm jumping from here down a whole step to this black key. You'll also notice a whole step could be me moving from a black key up, skipping one note to the next black key. So again, if I'm starting here and I want to move by half steps, I'm going to press every key on the piano, white and black. If I'm starting here and I want to move up by whole-steps, then I'm going to skip a key. Skip a key. Skip a key again, which now would be this one, since there's no black key between. Skip a key, skip a key, skip a key. Those are half-steps and whole-steps. 3. Names of the White Keys: Now this is a course on chords, but we're looking at basic chords. And one of the rudimentary things we need to know are the note names on the piano. So if you already know this, you can move forward to the next section. If you don't know this, we're going to quickly look at the notes on the white keys. And then in the next lesson we will look at the notes on the black keys. Here, on the white keys, we work with the letters of the alphabet from a through G. After G, we start back over at a and repeat that pattern. Now, this pattern carries over the entire piano. So even though it looks like there's many keys, it's the same notes repeated over and over and over. Each one of these sections is an octave. So I could move from one letter to the next letter up and say I'm jumping up an octave. Now, these letters work like this. The first note on the piano is an a, which makes sense. Then we can just count up the notes, like we're counting up the alphabet a, B, C, D, E, F, and G back to a. And the pattern repeats B, C, D E, F, G a, B, C, D E F G, a, B, C. One of the ways people remember where these notes and go is to aim with the black keys. You'll notice that they're in patterns 2.3. So something I like to do with students is have them relate the names of these notes to the black keys that are around them. E.g. in the middle of the piano, will start with these two black keys. Before these two black keys, we have a C note. In the middle of the two black keys we have a D, and then after the two black keys we have an E. Then we're on to a group of three black keys and the notes around them. At the beginning we have an F in the middle. On the left, we have a G. In the middle. On the right we have an a. And at the end of three black keys we have a b. Then our pattern or section repeats with a C. Again. These are the white keys of the piano. From a through G. Just put in blocks across the keys. 4. Sharps and Flats: Now we can take a look at the black keys on the keyboard as well. The black keys actually relate to the white keys. So e.g. here, if I have a C note, while the black key above it will be a type of C note. Now, there are two words we need to know here. That's a sharp and a flat. Sharp is when we take a note and we move it up to the right of the piano by a half-step. So if I have a C note and I move it up by a half-step, that would be a C sharp flat is when we take a note and we move it down a half step to the left of the piano. So I can start with maybe an a. And if I move it down by a half-step, that would be an a flat note. Now, one of the questions you may be asking is, well, doesn't that mean the black keys would share names? We could have a C Sharp, but that's the same note as a D flat. And the answer is absolutely. The difference is which direction we're coming at the Nope. From if I move my seat up by a half step, I won't call it a D flat, I'll call it a C sharp. The one other thing we want to notice is that there's not a black key between every set of notes. B doesn't have a sharp, and C doesn't have a flat. And in the same way, E doesn't have a sharp, and F does not have a flat. We have C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, G, and so on. 5. Major vs. Minor Sounds: Now just a quick video on some terminology. One of the things we need to understand our majors and minors. Now, majors here we can relate with a happy sound. Minor, we can relate with a sad or somber sound. Now as we learn chord shapes, we're going to see exactly what we change and what we do to make things major or minor. In this lesson, we just want to understand the sounds of each. As an example, here is a major sounding chord. It's got a happy sound to it. Here is a minor sounding chord. That's got a much more sad sound to it. Sometimes people confuse major and minor with higher and lower on the piano. And that's not quite what we're talking about. Again, in the future, we'll see exactly what makes something major and what makes something minor. It has to do with the distance between the notes. But we could have minor sounds higher on the piano. And we can have major sounds lower on the piano. As an example, I'll do major and minor side-by-side, higher up the keys and lower down on the keys. So lower down here is major. And here's minor. Now higher up, Here's major. And minor. 6. What Are Intervals?: We mentioned that major and minor sounds are caused by the space between notes. And that space between notes is called an interval. The interval between two notes. We could have a large interval or we could have a small interval. As an example intervals we can just count, we just need numbers. And if we can count to seven, we've got everything we need. E.g. I'm going to start from a note and it doesn't matter what note, but I'll start from a C. Now, I'm going to call intervals things like a second or third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh. If I want a second interval, I just have to start from my C and count 12. Now I'm at two, so those two notes together would be a second interval. If I want a third, I would count 123, play my first and my third. Well that's a third interval. So as you can imagine, we also have a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh. And then I'm playing the same note from a C to a C. 7. Major 3rd Intervals: For this course on intervals, we're going to focus in on thirds. Which means if I take a note and I want a third interval, I count 123, and I play my first note. And the note I just counted as three, that's a third interval. We're going to use these to build chords. But guess what? There are major intervals and there are minor intervals. And specifically for what we're doing, there is a major third and a minor third. Now, if there are major and minor third intervals, and we're using intervals to build our chords. Well, now we're starting to understand why chord sound major or minor. Let's take a look at a major third interval. And then we'll look at a minor third interval and how we turn these into chords. Now, a major third interval is going to be four half steps apart. Now what does that mean? It means we start from a note and we know how to find a third. But you'll notice between these, we've got four half-steps. We're starting here and we're counting one half-step, two half-steps, three-half steps, and four half-steps to make a major third interval. And that rule works from any single note on the piano. I could start from a black key, and I could count one-half step, two half-steps, three-half steps, and four half-steps. And that would be a major third interval. Again, as an example, let's try from a, B and count 1234 half-steps. And that's a major third interval. So you'll notice when we're counting thirds, It's not always from a white key to another white key. Sometimes it's a white key to black key as well. But as long as we're counting four half-steps will always be able to find a major third interval on the keys. 8. Minor 3rd Intervals: We also want to be able to find a minor third interval. Now, a minor third interval has more of a sad sound. And it's still a third. It's wider than a second interval. There's more space between the notes, but it's not quite as far as the major third interval we just talked about. Instead of four half-steps like our major, we're going to find a minor interval with three half-steps. So it's the same exact process just with a slightly different number. I'm going to start from the same note here, a C. And this time I'll count three half steps. I'll count 123. And I've got a minor third. This was my major third. Now I've got a minor third. You'll notice it's a half step closer. Again, we'll try this from a black key, and I'll count three half steps. There's one-half step, two half-steps, three-half steps. And I've got a minor third interval. 9. Interval Practice: Let's very quickly do some interval practice to make sure we understand these major and minor thirds. I'm going to start from an F on the piano, and I'm going to look for a major third interval. So to do this, we're going to count four half-steps, and I'll count 1234. And now I've got a major third interval starting from an F. Let's do the same thing. Maybe from a D. This time I want a minor third, so I'm going to count three half steps from my d. I'll count up 123. And I've got a minor third. What's really important that I want us to recognize is that major thirds can sometimes be from a white key to white key, or a white key to black key. Minor thirds can sometimes be from a white key to white key, or white key to black key. So don't think about these as white or black. Think about 3.4 half-steps. And wherever that lands, as long as we're following the rule is right. 10. What is a Chord?: Now that we know what half and whole-steps are and we understand what major and minor is. We've also seen those in practice with major intervals and minor intervals. It's time to talk about what a cord actually is. Now, you may see people play some crazy shapes on the piano, but really cords are just any three or more notes that were playing at the same time. See, a single note on the piano is a single note. Two notes on the piano would be an interval, like we just talked about. Three notes on the piano is a chord. And then as we add in more notes, we might make the chords more complicated, but it will always be a chord. Whether we're playing three notes or 33 notes, those will always be cords. So we have signal notes, we have intervals, and we have chords. 11. Building a Major Chord: Now that we know what a chord is, we want to learn how to construct courts. Now, just like we have major and minor intervals, we also have major and minor chords. Now, we're going to focus in this lesson on building a major chord. And we're going to build that major chord using the intervals. We know cords are made out of two intervals sharing a middle note. So we have an interval on the left, an interval on the right. And they're sharing whatever note is in the middle. E.g. a major chord is built off of a major interval that makes sense. Now, from the second note in that interval, we put a minor interval on top of it. So for a major chord, I've got a major interval which is four half steps apart. And then from this second note, I'm going to construct a minor interval, which is three half steps apart. Now I've got my three notes and a major chord. Let's try this from a different position. Maybe I want to take it from me. Now from this E, I want a major third interval. So that's four half-steps up. And then a minor third interval on top of that, starting from this second note, which is going to be right there. 12. Building Major with Steps: Another way that we can think about building chords is just with the half-steps from those intervals. So maybe when we're building a major chord, we can think about that as four half-steps. Then on top of that three half-steps. So I can start from a note and think about the second note in my chord as being four half-steps above. So that's 1234. And then starting from that note, now I'm looking for three half-steps above, so 123. And I've got a major chord shape with four half-steps and three-half steps. 13. Building a Minor Chord: Now a major chord is built off of a major interval with a minor one on top or four half-steps, with three-half steps on top. For a minor chord, we're flipping that order. So a minor chord is built off of a minor interval. Then on top of that, starting from that second note, we've got a major interval. Another way to think about it is the three-half steps on the bottom, four half steps on top. So here for my minor chord, I'm looking for a minor third interval. And from that note, a major third interval. Again, I could try this from maybe an E note. I'm looking for a minor third. And then from that note, I'm looking for a major third. And we're building sad minor courts. 14. Building Minor with Steps: Just like with the major chords. Another way we can think about this is with the half-steps. So starting from any note on the piano, I'm looking to build a chord. My second note will be three half steps above. So I'm counting 12.3 and I found my middle note. And then I'm looking to build four half-steps on top of that. So 123.4. And I've got my minor sounding chord. I can try from kind of a crazy note on the piano. Maybe I'll try from black key. And I want to build three half-steps and then four half-steps. So 123 to find my mental note, and 1234 to find my third note. And I've got a minor chord from any key on the piano. Again, as long as we're following the rule of 3.4, we're playing the right notes. 15. Basic Chord Practice: Let's pause right there. Before we move on to new information, let's practice what we just learned with a little bit of chord naming. E.g. let's see if we can find an F chord together. Well, for an F chord, we would start on an F note. Whatever chord we're looking for. We're going to start on that note. For an F chord will find an F note. And I know that that's at the beginning of three black keys. So I've got, and we'll see if we can make it a major chord. Now. A quick note. If we're naming just the chord, like F chord, it's going to be major. We assume a chord is major. By default. If we want to name a minor chord, then we specify F minor. We're looking for an F chord. So by default, that's major. Start on an F note. For major, I need a major third interval and a minor third interval on top of it. So I'm going to start with those four half steps, 1234. Then from that note, I'm looking for the three half-steps of a minor interval, so 123. And these are the three notes, F, a, and C for an F chord. Now, what if I wanted a D minor? Well, we'd start from a D note. Now to make it minor, we need the minor third interval, and on top of it the major third interval. So I'll start by counting the three-half steps of the minor interval 123. And then from that note, the four half-steps of the major interval, 123.4. Now I've got a D minor chord. Again. We've named this before, but you'll notice we're on all white keys here. When we did an F chord, we were also on all white keys. So again, major and minor, don't worry about white and black, just worry about the steps between the notes. F major, D minor. 16. What Are Root Notes?: Now that we've got basic chords down, we're going to look at something called root notes. Now, here we've got something specific to play both for our right hand and our left hand. Our right hand is going to manage the cord itself. So e.g. if I wanted to play a C chord, well, that's all going to be my right hand. Will grab the major interval and minor interval for a C chord. Now, the root of the chord is the first note of that chord. So when a C chord, our route would be a C and a G chord root would be a G and an F chord or it would be F. Big surprise. So you can think of the root like a plant. The root is what is growing out of something, right? Our chord is growing out of the root. Now, the reason that's important is that we can expand the sound of the chord across the piano a little bit more when we add in the root with our left hand, an octave lower. Here's what I mean. We're playing a C chord. Well, I know my root is a C. So I can take my left hand. I can play a C note, an octave lower, so I'm moving down to the next. See. Now I've got my cord and my root note, an octave lower. When I play them all together. It's got more of a full sound than just the C chord by itself. Now the root note will always follow my chord. So if I'm playing a C chord, I've got my sea route. If I move my cord down to a G, Well, my route would also move down to a G. So wherever this hand goes, I'm gonna look at the lowest note and play it an octave lower. Those are root notes. 17. The Sustain Pedal: Now we're going to talk about sustaining our courts. At the moment, the chords that we're playing are sustained so long as our hand is pressed down, press down on a C chord. The minute I let go, the cord stops. This is tricky, especially as I'm getting to know and grow comfortable with my chords when I need to play them in a row. Maybe I want to play a C chord to a G chord. Well, I can play my C. Then as I get my fingers in position for a G, there's this long silence until I finally hit it. One of the things these chords getting cut off has always reminded me of is like a karaoke machine. It's a little bit silly. Well, this is where the petals of the piano come into play. Now, if you're on a keyboard or you're on a real piano, you've got some petals underneath. You may have one pedal. You may have to, or you may have as many as three. What we're looking at is the pedal all the way to the right. If you've got three petals, we're looking at the rightmost pedal. You've got two petals. We're looking at the rightmost pedal. And if you've got one, that is the one pedal that we're looking at. This is called the sustain pedal. The sustain pedal holds down notes for us. Even when our hand lifts off the piano. You can see I've got my sustain pedal right down here with my foot on it. If I press down a chord and let go, the note stops. If I hold down the sustain pedal, I will press down a chord and let go. And it continues until I take my foot off the pedal. This is a great way to fill space when we're getting our fingers used to moving back and forth between chords. So again, if I'm doing C to G, I have C, G. Well, this can change a lot if I hold down my pedal. But now the notes are blending together. So here's a great rule for sustaining our courts. When your hands go down, the pedal goes up and then immediately back down. That's going to cancel out the notes of the previous chord and sustain your new cord. Here's what I mean. I'll play C and sustaining. I'll move to G and I'll lift up to get rid of the C and then sustain it again. So every chord is up with the foot and back down, up with the foot and back down, down, down, down. That's how we sustain chords using the pedal to fill space that would otherwise be blank. 18. What is a Key?: Welcome to the second section of this course. We now know basic courts and now we want to figure out how to make them fit together well, whether we're playing a song or making our own song. There are some chords that fit well together and some chords that really don't fit that well together. The first thing we need to understand is what a key is. Now, a key is a set of notes on the piano that sound good. Together, they work well. You can think of them almost as a family of musical notes. Now, each one of those notes can be turned into a cord. And these are the chords that sound good together. Now, the chords in a key also use notes that are in the key. So we've got a key of notes. All of the chords in this key will use notes in the key. E.g. we know that cords, the basic chords use three notes. Well, looking at the first chord in a key, we're going to be using note 13.5, a key. Our second chord would take that exact shape and move it up by a note, every note moving up. So the second chord would use notes 24.6. The third chord would use notes 35.7. Now the fourth chord would use notes for six. And then you'll notice we've run out of notes and we start back at the beginning with note number one. So every chord in a key starts on one of the notes in the key and uses notes exclusively from the key. Let's say we're in the key of C. Now, in the key of C, we have a list of notes that sound good together, and we'll talk about how to find these as well. Your first chord in this key will start from a C note, and we'll borrow the first, third, and fifth note out of the key. So here that would be C, E, and G. And we realized that that is a C major chord. Your next chord would start on a, D, the second chord, and it starts on the second note out of the key. And it uses notes 24.6 or D, F, and a. So we know just from this that a C chord and a D minor sound good together. Now why is that D minor and the C is major? Well, that entirely has to do with the space between the notes. When we're looking at 13.5, that just happens to work out the intervals workout to be major and minor. When we're looking at 24.6, in this case, the intervals happened to work out to be minor and major. This gets complicated and can really easily be confusing. What we need to know right now is that a key is a set of notes that sound good together. And each one of those notes can be turned into a chord. And so we can find a set of chords that sound good together. In the next lesson, we'll look at how to find the notes in a key. And then we'll look at how to turn those into courts. 19. Finding Notes in a Major Key: Back at the beginning of this course, we talked about half-steps and whole-steps. And now we're going to use them to figure out how to put together a key. Just like intervals. And just like chords, we can have major and minor keys. Now, when people write a song in a major key, the overall theme of the song will sound happy. Even if there are minor chords in the song, we're in a major key. So you can kind of think about all of this as a funnel. Almost. You've got the key which sets the tone of the overall song. In that key are chords. And there are major chords and minor courts. But no matter which chord we're using, if it's in the key, the key is what's going to set the tone major or minor. Right now we're going to look at how to find the notes in a major key and turn those into courts. There's a simple rule for finding the notes in a key. This rule is whole, whole half, whole, whole, whole half. Now, what does that mean? That means that, that no matter what note we start with, we can move up whole-steps or half-steps to find the notes in a major key. Let's say I want to create a song in the key of G. Now, I don t know the notes in the key of G, right? So we'll start from a G note. And we'll say, I need to know the group of notes that fit really well together. Well, if I know this rule, I can apply it. Take g and I need to move whole, whole half, whole, whole, whole, half. So a whole step up from G, I'm going to move right here and I know that that's an a note. Next is another whole step. And I know that that's here. At a b. I've got a half-step, which is right to, uh, see another whole step, which is a D, whole step which is an e. And now a whole step, if I move a whole step up here, I'm going to land on an F sharp. And then one more half-step, I'm back to G. So I know that in the key of G, It's mostly white keys, but we do have one sharp. If I didn't use that rule and just played the white keys, my f without the sharp might sound a little odd. We want that to be sharp. Let's try a different key. Maybe I want to play in the key of a. So I'll start from an a note. And again say I need to know all the notes that sound good with this a, to make it major and happy sounding. Well, we'll take the same rule and apply it to the notes here. Hall. We need a whole, so I am going for C-sharp. Half. Whole, whole, whole half. So I know to start from an a and make it sound major. I need a C-sharp, F-sharp, G-sharp. Otherwise, I have a very sad sound. If I do all the white keys, I need those sharps in there to make it happy. We can apply this rule to any note on the keyboard to find the notes that make a major key. Now when we've got a major key, we can turn each of these nodes into a chord that sounds good with the other chords in the key. Let's see how to do that. 20. Turning Major Notes into Chords: Now that we know how to find notes in a major key, we want to learn how to turn each of those notes into a chord that works well with the cords around it. So we've got our notes and we'll use maybe the G as an example. We're in the key of G, and from the last video, we learned that we need an F sharp. And then every other key is white, so we have whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, and half. All of those notes sound good together. Well, maybe not when you play them at the same time, but they work well together in a musical family, we could write melodies with those keys, but we want to turn each one of those into a court. So how do we know how to do that? Well, here's another rule that helps us. Major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, minor. When that's written out, it looks like you've had a delicious meal. But we can apply each one of these to each note in our key. Now, we see we have courts. We have a G major and a minor, B minor, C major. And so now this is a group of chords that sound good together. We figured out the notes in a key with holes in half, and we turn each one of those into a chord. Now, I can take any one of these chords and I can put them in an order. Maybe I want to do G to a minor, to C, to D. Okay, well, those are all in the same key, so they should sound good together. I've got G with a root note, a minor, C, and D. Interesting. Let's try another combination of these chords and see if those sound good together. Maybe this time, I'll start with D. I'll go to a minor, B minor, and end on g. Once we figured out the notes in a key and turn those into chords, we can't make a mistake. These are all chords that work well together and notes that work well together. And we can create songs using them with confidence. Now, that's how we create a major key. But what about a minor key? 21. Finding Notes in a Minor Key: We figured out how to make notes and chords in a major key that sound good together. But not every song in the world is happy. We want to figure out notes in a minor key and how to turn those into courts. With a major key, we started with a major chord. Now in a minor key, we start with a minor chord. The rules look the same, starting with whole and half notes for the single notes, and then major and minor for the courts. Except this time they're a little bit different. As for the notes to find notes in a minor key, we have whole half, whole, whole, half, whole, whole. Now, there's an easy way to remember this. This is actually the same exact rule as the major key. But starting from the sixth note, you'll see that they overlap and match up. We're just kinda sliding it down and starting from the sixth position here. So again, if I'm starting from a C, I had my major key. Now to make it minor. I'm going whole, whole, whole, half, whole, whole. So I had major. And I have minor. In the same way. Each one of these notes can be turned into a chord. When played together, they'll sound good together. They also may sound a little bit more somber than when we made our major key. 22. Turning Minor Notes into Chords: Let's turn each one of these notes into a cord to complete our minor key. Now, in the major key, we add major minor, minor, major, major, minor minor. In our minor key, where again, taking the same rule and sliding it down, starting on the sixth position. This time we have minor, minor, major, minor, minor, major, major. So that means if we're in the key of C, will have C minor. Our D will be minor. Our E, or in this case, E flat major. Now we're getting into flat and sharp chords. So let's keep in mind here that all we really need to do for these chords to not be overwhelmed is to count the spaces. We're starting on a black king, but we're counting for a major chord, 1234. And on top of that, 123. So again, we've got a set of chords that sound good together. But instead of for a major key, well, we're looking at chords for a minor key. 23. Roman Numerals: Now, one of the ways that we referenced these chords is with Roman numerals. If we look at a key again like the key of C, and we will write out every chord in here. Well, underneath the chords we're going to apply roman numerals to each one. Now, frequently when you see a chord progression, you might see the name of the chord. Or you might also see Roman numerals, e.g. in the key of C, we might say we're playing C to F. We could also say that in the key of C, we're playing one to four. It's the same exact thing. Now, of course, writing out the chords and writing out the Roman numerals each have their own benefit. For now, it's just important to remember that we apply roman numerals to the chords of a key. 24. Chord Progression Practice: We should practice chord progressions. We'll start in the key of C. And let's say we're going to do C, F, G, and E minor. Now, for the Roman numerals, this would be 14523. So on the keyboard, I'm going to find a C chord with a sea route. Now. I'm going to move through the chords one after the other, to F, to G. And then to E minor. Maybe I want to do the key of G. Now I'm going to play G, a minor, B minor, and D, which now would be 123.5. Practice these chord progressions as well as some of your own. We'll talk later about how to go online and find chord progressions for any song that you're interested in learning. And remember, you can write chord progressions by choosing a key using the whole and half rule to pick notes. The major and minor rule to find the chords in that key. And then picking some with Roman numerals. And all of a sudden you've got a progression of your own. 25. Transposing Progressions: One of the important things that Roman numerals help us to do is to transpose chords. Now, transposing is when we take chords and change the key, we've got the same distance between every chord. We're just changing the key. And there's a few reasons you might want to do this. You may find as you move forward that different keys have different feelings attached to them. Or are you might be working with a singer or singing yourself in a key that just doesn't match your range. You might want to move up by a step or down by a step so that you can more easily hit some of the notes. In that case, we would transpose e.g. let's take the key of C and again say we're doing one to four, which would be C to F. You'll notice between C and F, we've got 12345 half-steps. We've got C, five half-steps up, F in our key, it's one in four. Well, you're working with a singer who says, I'd really be more comfortable doing this in the key of G. Well, it's the same exact thing. We were playing one to four in the key of C. Now we're transposing it to the key of G, and we're still playing 1241. Now in this key would just be a G, and four in this key would be a C. So we've got G to C. And we can count the half steps again and see 12345. It's the same distance between the cords. The only time that transposing might not line up with the half-steps like that, is if you change from a major key to a minor key, but moving from one key to another and keeping it major or minor, the space, the distance between the chords will always be the same because each key follows the same hole in half rule. We can try this with a larger progression. Maybe I want to do 1564 in the key of C. Well, that would be C, G, a minor to F. If I want to transpose that to the key of say, a, my one would be a, my five would be E, my six would be F sharp minor, and my four would be a dy. So I have key of C or key of a. Similar feelings because it's the same progression, but in a different key. 27. Tonic, Subdominant, and Dominant: Welcome to the third section of this course. We're now into intermediate chords. We've learned how to construct basic chords and how they fit together in major and minor keys. From this point on, there's not a whole lot of new chords we're learning so much as we're manipulating the chords we've already got. We're either adding notes or changing notes to follow certain sets of rules. But the fundamentals will always be there. For now, we're going to start with a little bit of terminology that helps us understand chord progressions, like we've just talked about. We're talking about the tonic, the dominant, and the sub dominant. Now, these are not new chords, but rather new names for things we already know. We're talking about the chords in a key. The first chord in your key, the root to the one, is your tonic. When we finish a song, it's nice to land on the tonic for a nice resolving sound. E.g. if I'm in the key of C, I'll play C. G, a minor. That's hanging. Hanging. And it wants to land on the tonic. The dominant is the fifth chord in a key. So we just played C to G. G would be the dominant of the key. The sub dominant is the four right before the dominant. Now, why are we going over this? Well, this is terminology that you may hear playing with a band or watching courses. These are also, if we look at our key with the major and minor rule, these are the major chords of the key, the tonic subdominant and the dominant. 28. Octave Root Notes: Now we know how to do root notes. But a common practice on piano is to double up the root note with octaves. Now, this will take a little bit of practice, but muscle memory will kick in. We're also going to stretch our hand. As long as you can stretch your hand one octave, you'll be fine. E.g. here I've got a C chord. And we've chatted about adding in a root note, an octave below. Now we can take it one step further by playing that root note with and reaching the next C down with our pink. Now we're expanding our cords even further across the piano to get a more full sound. Take some of the chord progressions we've done in the past, and now try playing them. Doubling up your root node with an octave. 29. How to Play Rhythm: Knowing how to play chords and chord progressions is fantastic. But we can really bring a song to life by thinking a little bit about rhythm. Rhythm can be the difference between a boring, plain song and an exciting, really fun song. E.g. here's the same chord progression played twice. The first time. We're just going to let these chords ring out until we play the next one. It's nice. Sounds nice. But that same thing for three 4 min. Well, your audience could fall asleep. Now, of course, simpler rhythms can be really nice for slow songs or sad songs. But we also want to know at least how to add rhythm in. It's important for us to understand that songs typically have one of two timings. We either have four beats or three beats. And all that that means is that we count our song in groupings of four or three, e.g. playing that progression, I can play 12341234. Or if I'm doing three beats, 12312323. Now, each of these 4.3 can also be subdivided with ends 1.2 and 3.4 and 1.2 and 3.4, or 1.2 and 3.1 and 2.3. And now we can pick and choose which beats. We want to press our chord down on. E.g. maybe I want to press down if we're doing four beats on one, the end of 2.4, well that's going to sound radically different than just holding down my chord. So now I can play the 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1, 2 and 3. And that's a big one. We could pump on every number one and 2.3 and 4.3. A great way to pick rhythms is actually just to circle different options in front of you and see how that sounds. You might find some really interesting rhythms in there. The other note is, we don't need our hands, our left and our right hand, to sync up all the time. We could do a little back-and-forth with the root node and the core itself. And so again, as you're circling options and finding out these different rhythms, you can also try mixing left hand, right hand and sometimes together to really bring your song to life. 30. The (b5) Chord: One of the really nice things about some advanced and intermediate chords is that you'll realize they really just tell you what to do in the name of the court. That's the case here as we look at the flat five chord. Now, the flat five chord is an add-on to a chord that really just tells us to make the five of our chord flat. Now, remember, when we're numbering the notes in our chord, We're playing 13.5. So when we're talking about a flat five, were talking about that highest note. So let's say, I want to play a C minor flat five. Well, I know I'm going to start on a C note. I know I'm going to play a minor chord, and now I know I'm going to flat the five. So we've got C, C minor. And then I can take my five and I can make it flat. It's got this haunting, eerie feel to it. Now, if you've been paying attention, you may have noticed something odd when we were building keys and finding chords in them. And we're gonna take our new knowledge and we're going to go back and fix it. We had said that the chords in the key were major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, minor. And this is true. We didn't learn that wrong. What we didn't mention though, was that for the cord to perfectly fit in a key, the seventh chord is a minor with a flat five. And we see that because we're building every other note. So by the time we get to the seventh chord and we'll use the key of C as an example. By the time we get to the seventh chord, which in this case is a, B. We've got the notes B, D, and an F. Now, that is not a B minor chord, but it is the notes in the key. It's really a B minor with a flat five. So when we're putting chords in a key, it's important to note that the seventh chord in its perfect key fitting form is a minor flat five. So we've got major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, minor flat five. And that fits perfectly. We have C, D minor, E minor, F, G, a minor, B minor flat five. There's a tension there that resolves back to C. That is our minor flat five chord. 31. What Are Suspended Chords?: The next few lessons are going to be about suspended or sus chords. Now, sus chords are a special type of chord. And really what we're doing is we're taking the three of our basic chord and removing it to either two or four. We're going to look at each of these shapes in the next couple of videos. But in this one, let's talk about why suspended chords are useful to know. On the one hand, suspended chords can help us keep one stagnant cord. Interesting, if there is a part of a song and this happens frequently where you need to play one chord for a long time that can get very monotonous and boring. Suspended chords help us keep a single chord interesting. E.g. let's say we need to play a C chord. We need to play that C chord. I don't eight times in a row. Oh man. That's four. That's five. That's six. I mean, it drags on suspended chords. Help us keep that interesting. Let's give a listen to what it sounds like. And then we'll go learn the shapes. That was eight times right there and it moves much quicker than when we were just hanging on that. See? The second reason to learn suspended chords is that they can help you resolve really well. If I'm playing a chord progression that goes C, G, a minor, F, and lands on SSI, or that would be 1564. Back to one. Let's listen without a suspended chord. That's pretty nice. Now let's try it with a suspended chord to finish. So we'll suspend the C and then play a regular C. Or we could do something like this. It's a nice way to finish a progression. 32. The sus2 Chord: We're going to start by learning a SAS to chord. Now, these sus chords, again, we're moving the three in accord to either two or four. So instead of playing 13.5 with USCIS to chord, we would play 12.5, pulling the notes again out of a key. Which means if we're playing in the key of C, or we're playing a C chord. Instead of playing C, E, and G, we would play C, D, and G. You'll notice from a major chord we're moving three down by a whole step. So if I want to play a CSS2, playing right there, if I want to play an F Sus too well again, I'd take my three, I'd move it down. By a whole step. This changes a little bit. If we're moving to a SaaS to from a minor chord. Notice here that the big difference between a major chord and a minor chord is that we're moving the middle note down by one. From an E to an E flat. Major to minor depends on the middle note, because the middle note changes either end of the interval, right? One gets larger and the other gets smaller or vice versa. So when we're moving from a major chord to assess to our middle note would move down a whole step. If we're moving there from a minor chord, we'd be playing the same exact notes. But if we're going to change it and relate it to our chord, now we're moving down by a half-step. Minor to major. 33. The sus4 Chord: Let's take a look at a sus4 chord. So now in this case we'd be taking 13.5, which for the example C chord we've been using is C, E, and G. And now we're moving that three up. So it's 14.5, or in this case, C, F, and G. From our major chord, you'll notice we're moving up by a half-step. Which means that if we're playing something like an F chord and we want to change it to a sus4, we wouldn't move our middle note up a whole step. Even though it looks right, it doesn't sound right. We want to move our middle note up by a half-step, which in this case would be a black key. If we're moving to our sus4 from a minor chord. Again, remember that three, that middle note is moved. So now we're moving up by whole step. So remember a major chord moving to SAS for removing up by a half-step, a minor chord moving to assess for removing up by a whole step. Two and sus4 are the same shapes. No matter if you're moving from a major or minor, we're only changing how far we're moving to get there. 34. Slash Chords: Occasionally when we're playing a song, we're going to come across a chord that looks like this. It's got a slash right through the middle of it. Now sometimes people will guess that we're playing two chords. One chord with the left hand and one chord with the right hand. And that's not a bad guess. It's close. What we're actually doing is changing the root note of our chord. A great way to think about this slash is to replace it with the word over C. If we look at something like C slash E, we can think about it as c over E, which means that we'd be playing a C chord. But instead of a C root note, we'd be playing a C chord over an E, C with C, c over E, c over f. Sometimes these can get a little crazy. Maybe we'll have dy over g. Back to regular d. You'll find that oftentimes, whatever the slash is, is probably one of the notes from your chord. It's either the one, the three, or the five, because those fit best with the chord we're playing. Now, that's not an absolute rule that may change, but it is a frequent rule. So C with the root, C with the third would be c over E. C with the fifth would be c over G. 35. Spread Voicing Chords: Let's talk about spread voicing chords. Now, spread voicing is a really nice and unique sound. The chords we've been playing so far have been within an octave space. Now for getting the root note an octave lower, these three primary notes of a chord are within an octave. Spread. Voicing is when we take a chord and expand those three notes wider than one octave. So e.g. maybe I will have a C and a G from a C chord in the left hand. Now, in a normal C chord, my E would be between them and they'd fit in this little octave space in a spread Voicing chord. Maybe I'll move my three higher. Now I've got the three notes of my C chord. This is still a C chord, but it's spread out over an octave. There are two ways to use this. We can play them as regular chords and it sounds really nice. Another way we could do this is use our left hand to play those three notes underneath a chord instead of just a root node. This is where things start to get a little complicated and we're going to talk more about this style of playing later in the course. But as an example, I could play a C chord. And with my left hand, I could spread out a C chord. So I've got my regular C chord down here. I'm playing these notes one at a time. In this spread voicings style, root, fifth, third, all the way on top. That will be a little tricky at first. But practice playing around with that, both as the way you're playing your cord. And you can also try it as the root notes underneath accord with your right hand. Don't get frustrated if it's difficult at first. We'll keep practicing and will absolutely get it down. 36. Intermediate Chord Practice: Let's pause right here and get a little bit of practice in. We're going to take another chord progression, but instead of just doing basic chords, maybe we'll start to play with them. We could take a progression like C, F, G back to C. Let's start right there. Now let's take the new things that we know and start to combine them. Maybe we can play C, F over a, G. And our last C, we can suspend and then resolve. So we'll say c sus4 to c. So now we're playing C, F over a, G, c sus4 and resolve it. One thing you may notice is that that changed the base, the roots down here a lot. Instead of C, F and G. Walking up, we went C, F over a to G. And that made our root very different. Instead of walking up. Now we're going. That can change the feel of a song a lot. So let's practice again. C, F over a, G, c sus4 and resolve it. That's pretty nice. One other thing we could try doing is maybe spread voicing with a sus chord. You can always combine different rules. So we have a C, maybe we do a CSS2, and maybe we do spread voicing. So 12.5, we can do 15.2. So CSS2 spread out to F over a. Take some of the chord progressions we've already done, or that you've made yourself. And start picking chords in that progression to make these changes, to make one of them a spread Voicing chord. Make one of them a sus chord, make one of them a slash chord. Just start adapting chords to try these different techniques. 37. 7th Chord Introduction: These next few lessons are going to cover seventh chords. We should talk about what a seventh chord is. So far we've been playing three note chords that have been 13.5 borrowed from a key. Now, seventh chords are when we continue this pattern and we add in a 7,135.7. So these are now four note chords. 38. Major 7th Chord: Now, there are a few ways to find a seventh chord. We could do it with intervals or half-steps, starting with a basic chord using C as our example. If I want to put a seven on top, well, I can take my top note and make a major third interval. And that would be four half steps, 1234. I could also look at the notes in my key and say, okay, for a major chord, that would be C, E, G, and B. Another way to think about it that I like a lot is that your major seven is a half-step below the octave. So if I'm playing a C chord, well, the octave from my root node is C. The major seven is a half-step before that. If I'm playing a G chord, my Octave is a G. So my major seven is a half step before that. That would be F sharp. 39. Minor 7th Chord: For a minor seven chord. Here's the changes we're making. First of all, we know from a major chord to a minor chord, the note we're changing is the middle, the three. So it's down by a half step. We're also going to be changing the seven. So if I've got my major seven there, I'm moving the three down by a half step, and I'm moving the seven down by a half-step. Another way to think about it is that on top of a minor chord, we're adding a minor interval, so 123 half-steps. A third way to think about it is that from any minor chord in a key, we're counting 135.7. And finally, my favorite way to find a minor seven. We talked about how the major seven is a half-step below an octave, while the minor seven is a whole step below the octave. So if I'm playing from a C note, that's going to be C, E-flat, G. And then that third minor interval on top would be a B-flat. If I'm playing from a, gee, I'd have G minor third and the fifth. And then sitting on top of those, I have my octave and I move down a whole step to an F. The seventh chords are inherently jazzy. They have a really nice smooth tone to them, so they could also fit well in a softer song. I like them a lot to resolve. So if I'm playing a song, C, G, a minor, F, and I want to resolve, I could resolve to a seven. That is a nice resolution in a song. 40. Dominant 7 Chord: Let's talk about a dominant seventh chord. Now, you may remember from some of our terminology, we had in a key, the tonic subdominant dominant. Now a dominant seventh chord, if we're playing, this shape, fits perfectly in the fifth position of the key. And we'll talk about that in a couple of lessons where we talk about fitting seventh chords into a key. Here's our dominant seventh shape. We have a major chord as our base, so I'll use C as my example. I've got a C major. Now to fit here, to fit our major seven. We've got a major shape on top. So a major chord with a major seven on top. Our dominant seven changes a little bit. We've got a major chord, and then we put a minor third interval on top or a minor seven. I always thought this was kind of like a carnival sound. Little bit, little bit cartoonish. But we've got a dominant seven shapes, so we can think of that as root third, fifth. Then instead of seven, we've got a flat seven. We're flattening that seven shape. 41. Minor 7 (b5) Chord: Now, just like we have a minor flat five chord, we can also have a minor seven flat five. And that's a long chord. Let's say we have a C minor seven flat five. Well, we don't need to get overwhelmed. We can just take these one step at a time. We know we've got a C chord. We know it's going to be a minor chord. We know there'll be a minor seven on top. And we know we're going to flat our five. So let's say we have a C minor with a minor seven on top. And now we take our five and we just make it flat. 42. Diminished 7 Chord: Finally, we have something called a diminished seven chord. And we're actually going to learn this one by starting from that minor seven flat five shape. So we have a minor chord, a minor seven on top, and B flat are five. Now, we can think of diminished as diminishing smaller, right? Everything is smaller. We've got one flat, three, flat five. And by the time we get to R7, we actually move it down. Again. This is our first example of a double flattened note. A diminished seventh has a double flat seven. It's not a chord. You're going to come across often, but it is a very haunting, an eerie sound. Again, we can try it maybe from an F, and let's take this in steps. We've got F. We're gonna go minor and add in the minor seven. So right now I'm playing an F minor seven chord. We've got a minor third interval, major third interval, and a minor third. Now I'm going to take my five and flat it. And then take my seven and flat it one more time. For that haunting diminished sound. 43. All Chord Review: Let's take one quick look at all the chords we know put together and relate them to each other. If we've got a major basic chord, we're playing 13.5 using C as our example. This would be C, E, and G. To change major to minor, we're going to take our three and move it down by 11 flat, 3.5 or C, E flat and G. We could also flat the five to play a minor flat five, C minor flat 51, flat three flat five, or C, E-flat, G flat. We could play a major, 7,135.7, or C, E, G, and B. We could play a minor seven by changing our three in R7. One flat 35, flat seven, or C, E-flat, G, and B flat. We could play a dominant seven by playing a major chord with a flat seven on top, 135, flat seven, or C, E, G, B flat. We could play a minor seven flat five. By playing that minor seven shape, flattening the 51 flat three flat five, flat seven, or C, E-flat, G-flat, B-flat. Or finally, a, C diminished 71 flat three, flat five, double flat seven, or C, E-flat, G-flat, and a. Next, let's take a look at how the seventh chords fit into a key to replace our primary basic chords. 44. Fitting 7th Chords in a Key: Now, thankfully, fitting seventh chords into a key is really easy if we already know how to fit basic chords into a key, C, we have major chords, and we have major seventh chords. We have minor chords, we have minor seven chords, and these are what we replaced them with. So we look at our key and we see major, minor, minor, major, major, minor minor. Or we see the rule for the minor key as well. We replace our major chords with major seven chords. We replace our minor chords, minor seven chords in the seventh position, or down here in the second position, where the minor flat five chord fits, we replace that with the minor seven flat five. The only other thing to mention is that in the fifth position of the major key, or this position of the minor key, we fit our dominant seven chord. Now, that's not hard to remember. The dominant seven chord goes in the dominant position in the major key. 45. 7th Chord Practice: Let's go ahead and do a chord progression using seventh chords rather than just basic triad chords. Now, we'll go ahead and we'll pick a chord progression. Maybe this time will be in the key of G. And we'll do 15461 in this case would be a, G. Five in this case would be D, four would be C, and six would be E minor. Now we want to turn each of those into seventh chords. So one would be G major seven. So I'll take my G chord and I'll find my major seven to go on top. Now for my five, I'll put the dominant seven. So I'll find my cord and find that dominant seven on top. When I come to four, I'll do a major seven again. And then six is a minor chord. So I'm going to have a minor basic chord, a minor triad, and put my minor seven on top. So I end up with, go ahead and take any of the chord progressions we've been using together or that you made. And try turning each of those chords into a seventh chord. 46. Rolling Chords: Now we're going to learn a little technique where we roll a chord for a nice effect, rather than playing all the notes at exactly the same time. We're still playing notes together. We're just breaking them up by milliseconds. I'll show you what I mean. Here. I have a C major seven chord. What I can do is work my way up all four of those notes, holding them down as I go and rolling them very quickly. This adds a nice soft theory will feel, rather than hitting the notes all at exactly the same moment. And we can hear the difference. If I play C to F, Here's what it sounds like. Now I'll try rolling these chords. 47. Chromatic Motion: We're going to talk about chromatic motion. Now. Chromatic motion is when we use in-between notes as stepping stones to get from one chord to the next. This is a very jazzy idea here. E.g. if I'm moving from a C chord to a D minor chord, C, D minor. There are notes that I'm skipping over to get from C to D minor. These are notes that are outside of the key. But we can use these notes as quick stepping stones to work our way up. And that's what chromatic motion is. One note to the next, to the next outside of the key. E.g. I've got my C and my D. I can go from C, moving every note up by a half-step in-between. And then one more time to D. You'll notice my f stays the same. I'm moving most of my notes up. I could even do it just with the root. You can hear how jazzy that is. We can use chromatic motion even with just our root note. If we're playing big progressions. Notes outside of the key that make the baseline, or even our whole chord progression a little bit more interesting. Now, this isn't a technique that you want to over use, but it is one that can wake your audience up as they're listening to your song. Use it artistically and think about the right moments to toss that in. 49. Major 6th Chord: Now we're going to look at something called Six chords. As you may have guessed from seventh chords. A sixth chord is your basic major triad. With the six put on top. We'll start by looking at the major sixth shape. I've got my 13.5 chord. We'll stick with C as our example. And my six of course is right after five, which in this case is an a. Now years back, six chords used to be played, omitting the fifth. So you would have 13.6. Now we play all four together, 135.6. Another way you may see it written is something like a C add six. We could also try this chord from a different shape, maybe from an a. So we've got an a major chord and we add in a six. Something important to note is that the six is one whole step above the fifth. 50. Minor 6th Chord: Now let's learn a minor six shape. For our major six. We played a major triad and we put the six on top. For a minor six, it's not that complicated. We play a minor triad and we put the six on top. So we had major triad and the six. Now we have a minor triad with the six. 51. Chord Tensions and Extensions: We're briefly going to look at chord extensions in core tensions. Now, tensions are actually things that we've already been playing without even knowing it. Tensions or just any note in your chord that's not a part of the basic triad, are the basic building of the chord. So we just learned six chords. The sixth would be a type of tension. Now, extensions are when we lengthen the cord beyond the seventh note. In the next couple of lessons, we're going to learn about 9s, 11s, and even 13s. And each of these would be an extension. So we have tensions which can help give character to a chord without changing its basic form. We have extensions which lengthen our chord beyond the seven. 52. Major 9th Chord: Now, ninth chords can be broken up into major, minor and dominant chords. And we're going to look at major ninth chords. Now, I know this sounds like a lot of learning, but remember, every extension is just building on what was before it. So we took a major triad chord and we add it in a seven on top of it. Now, we continue extending that pattern by adding in a nine. For a major nine, we take a major chord or major seven and just put the nine on top of it. And that's really just counting from 123-45-6789 with a major chord. Another way you could do this as realized that nine is a D, and we also have a D, an octave lower. And that keeps things a little more close to what you're playing. But I also like the spread out feel of having a nine up here. 53. Minor 9th Chord: For a minor nine, we're not doing much different. We're going to play a minor chord or a minor seventh chord and put that same nine on top of it. So I'll look over and I'll play a C minor seven. Now, I'm not going to change my nine. I've changed what's underneath the nine for major. But now I'm moving to a minor seven. I'm putting the same nine on top. That is personally my favorite chord. Minor 9's on either piano or guitar. I love the sound of them. 54. Dominant 9 Chord: Another ninth chord shape we can learn is the dominant nine. Now, just like the major nine and the minor nine, we're not changing the actual position of the nine. We're changing what's underneath it. So I played a major seven with my knife, a minor seven with my nine. And for the dominant nine, I'm playing a dominant seven, which was 135 flat seven. And now I've got that same nine on top. 55. Sharp (#) and Flat (b) 9ths: As a last note about ninth chords, you may sometimes see a chord that specifies to do a sharp nine or a flat nine. So maybe we're going to play a C dominant seven, which could also just be written C7 with a flat nine. Well, in that case, I'm gonna come over and play that 135 flat seven. And on top of it put a flat or a sharp nine. 56. 11th Chord Extension: We're spending one video looking at 11. Now, in the same way, we counted up to nine, we're just counting up to 11. So we have 1357. This would be our 91011 is a very jazzy chord. And you may see something like a C Major seven sharp 11. Well in that case we find our 11 and make it sharp. You may be thinking that chord doesn't sound very good. There are a lot of scenarios where chords that don't necessarily sound great on their own actually fit in a chord progression very, very well. So at least understanding how to do these chords is enormously helpful for those moments when they do fit so beautifully, or for the moments that we come across them in a song and need to at least understand what the paper we're looking at is calling for. 57. 13th Chord Extension: Finally, just like we looked at 11's, we can do the same thing for 13th. 13th chords could call four sharps or flats. So if we look at our C major seven again, we're going to find our 13, which again is the six an octave above, and then we can make it sharp or flat. There are very few scenarios where you might use those chords. But if you're interested in playing jazz, you're going to come across those chords much more often than if you're interested in playing rock or blues. 58. Playing Extensions Over the Root: Now some of these chords are very spread out. And you may wonder how your hands can even reach that far. Something you could do is play the roots of these chords in your left hand and manage the rest of the chord in the right hand. E.g. let's take a look at the C Major nine. I have 1357. And then nine, something I could do is play my one in the left hand. Then I can play almost a seventh chord shape to reach the whole chord. 59. Combining Chord Steps: Now at this point with these large chords, it can be really overwhelming to see something like an F sharp minor seven, flat five sharp nine. What do you do with that? So these are the types of chords where it's really helpful to take them step-by-step and for the sake of future practice and not getting too nervous when we see something like this. Let's go ahead and take it together. In fact, let's make it even longer and say it's over a. F sharp minor seven, flat five sharp, nine over a. This is probably the longest cord that you'll see out there. It's not something will come across very often, but if we can do this, we can do anything. So let's take these one at a time. We're starting on an F sharp. That's easy enough. Now we want to go ahead and play a minor chord. So I know that that's a minor third interval plus a major third interval. And I've got an F sharp minor. Now we add in a 71 step below the octave. So I've got an F sharp minor seven. Now, next we have a flat five, which I can do with my fifth, and a sharp nine. Now, how do we get a sharp nine here? Well, I'll put the root in my left hand. Keep my other notes in there. So I've got my 1357. This would be my nine. So I'm gonna make it sharp. Now on top of that, we have this over a. So my lowest note, I'm going to change too, an a. So now I have an F sharp. Minor, seven flat five sharp nine over an a. So when we come across long big adult chords, don't get overwhelmed. Break them down and think about them step by step. Again, these big advanced chords, they really just tell you what to do. Think about them more like instructions than anything else. Break it down step-by-step and you'll realize they're really manageable. 60. Arpeggios: Now we're going to look at something called arpeggios. Arpeggios are when we take a chord shape and break them up into single notes. These single notes are a little more spaced out than when we just rolled our chords. They might be more related to when we were playing, are spread voicing chords in the left hand. So looking at arpeggios, I can take a chord like a C minor seven. Then what I'm going to do is break them up note by note. Maybe I'll work my way back down. What we've just done is arpeggiating a chord. We've turned a chord into an arpeggio. So I can play maybe a root note. And this chord that I've just turned almost into a melody, a rhythmic melody. That's nice right there. We could also do the arpeggio in our left hand. Underneath courts. For arpeggios, you can practice them with any chord progression. They also don't just have to be with seventh chords. You could do them with our basic triad chords. You could even add intentions or the octave on top. 61. Inversions: We know how to construct a basic chord, and we know how to add character to those chords with extensions or tensions. Now, something very important to know is that it doesn't matter what order the notes are in. E.g. in a G chord, my notes are G, B, and D. Now, those three notes will always hold the substance of a G chord. It doesn't matter the order that those three notes are in. In fact, mixing up the order of these three notes. It's called something. It's a technique called an inversion. We're inverting or flipping the chord. So when we learn these basic chords, we're learning them in root position. All of the numbers are in order 13.5. Here's our G root position, 13.5. Now we can mix up the order of these notes. I'm going to take my lowest note number one, and move it up an octave so it's at the top of the chord. 3.5 stay exactly the same and one is on top. This is still a G chord. I've still got G, B, and D. Now the order is 35.1. This would be a G chord as a first inversion. Now, let's say I wanted to do this again. I could take my bottom note and I could leap frog it to the top. Here. I'll keep my 5.1 where they are and just put this three on top. Now, this is not a spread voicing because this cord is still within an octave. It doesn't expand beyond an octave. Now this is now a second inversion. If I played that game one more time and took my bottom note up an octave, I'm back to root position. Now. I can use inversions really powerfully. I can use an inversion to land on a chord and run it up the piano from a root position. First, second, root, first, second. All I'm doing is playing G chords up the piano. I could also use inversions to play more complicated chord progressions. Close. Here I've got C, F, G, back to C. Now, what if I went ahead and started using inversions? Well, I can take my f and see that I've got a C on top. If I move that C down, well, this is pretty close to a C chord. So C to F using an inversion is a lot easier than C to F. As root courts, I've also got a G right there. Look at those three notes, G, B, and D. So all of a sudden, instead of playing C, F, and G, I can keep my hand nice and close and place C, F, G, back to C. So when we're looking at chord progressions, we want to think about inversions. Think about playing these chords nice and close in a way that might be easier for our hands to manage. You'll also notice that in versions have different fields to them, different characters, because a different node is on top and on the bottom. So we can use these to kind of lead and guide melodies really well. See, my top note for C, F, and G root position would be here for the C, here. And here. This is a pretty high note if I'm playing them as inversions. Well now my top note is G, a back to G, and staying at G. So on top. That's very different than playing root positions. Lead lines on the top or bottom of your chord with inversions. It's something to think about when you're playing songs or song writing as they can change the feel and mood of your overall song. Now, one more note on inversions here is that we can get into third and fourth inversions when we add in more notes, the more notes we have in accord, the more inversions we can play. If I play a C chord, I have two options for inversions until I get back to my root position. If I add in a seven, well now I have more notes to leap frog. So I have my root position. First inversion, second inversion, a third inversion, before coming back to my route. Now, these shapes are helpful to know compared with one another, but also helpful to know on their own. Because what that means is, for a C major seven, I could also play it just adding in a lower B. That's also a C Major seven. Some of these shapes are easier to get to depending on where our hand already is. So knowing the different inversions, shapes for different types of chords can really make playing the piano that much easier. 62. Advanced Chord Practice: Let's pause right here and practice some advanced chord progressions. I'm going to put them on the screen. I want you to pause and try them, genuinely try them and if you find one difficult, pull it apart, give it time, give it space, and let yourself learn these different shapes. If you need to go back and re-watch and then come back to it, that's great as well. But let's learn these advanced shapes and then we're moving forward to specific styled courts. 64. Blues Style Playing: Now we're going to take a look at blues courts. If you're interested in blues music on the piano, while I have good news for you, It's actually really easy to play. What we're doing here is we're going to transform the major chords in our key into dominant seventh. So if we're in the key of C, we have a C major seven, F major seven, and a G dominant shape. We're going to transform our C major seven and our F major seven into a C dominant seven and an F dominant seven. And that's going to give us a very bluesy feel for the key of C. Now you'll see what I just did there was I added a little bit of chromatic motion in the left hand, and I went back and forth between the key C dominant seven, F dominant seven, and the G dominant seven. I got this chromatic motion in the left hand. You can play around with walking baselines as well. Move your bass note around. Another motion that I'm making here is on that base I'm hitting the flat seven. That's because we're playing everything has dominant seventh, which means for our see, we've got that flat seven in there. Same thing from the f. So everything here, I'm just playing around with the bass notes there and the flat sevens and some chromatic motion and changing all the major chords in the key to dominant chords. 66. Jazz Style Playing: Now, a lot of times throughout this course we've played a type of chord and mentioned how jazzy it sounds. Again, chromatic motion. Seventh chords and ninth chords are going to be where our jazz music lies. So we've got some chromatic motion, may be jumping outside of the key and coming back in. We've got ninth chords and I'm going to play those a lot with my left hand taking care of the roots. So again, that's jazzy right there. I've got a seventh chord, maybe I'll change my route. 13s as well are very jazzy. Adding in that sharp and flat 13, we mentioned in that course that you'll come across those more often if you're playing jazz than other styles. So if you are interested in jazz, I would say jump outside of the key with chromatic motion and turn a lot of your chords into nines and 13s, especially dominant nines. 68. Rock Style Playing: Let's talk about rock music on the piano. Now, we can play piano like a piano, or are we can play piano like a guitar. The way chords work on a guitar are very specific to a guitar. But if we understand how it works, we can play that style on the piano. E.g. rock music. Guitar very often uses something called power cords. Power chords use roots and fifths and octaves, but not very often, thirds, which means on a piano, maybe we can play a C chord. Take our third out, we have a root and fifth. And we could do the same thing in the left hand, which gives us kind of a more pop rock feel on the piano. Certainly more so than our blues style or our jazz style. You'll notice with rock, I'm being a little more aggressive in the rhythm. It's a little more punchy and quick rather than the jazz which is softer, and The Blues which has a little more swing to it. Now we're thinking punchy, quick, short roots and fifths. 70. II - V - I: We're going to be looking at some common chord progressions together. These are progressions you'll hear if you're looking for them on the radio, or progressions you can use when you're writing your own songs. The first progression we're going to look at is a 251 to 51 is a very common progression. We work our way up to five and resolve down to the one. In fact, an important note is that Five often resolves to one. It's a really great and powerful motion in music. When I had an old teacher, one of our jokes was, I'm gonna leave you on the five. That was our insult to one another because you leave someone on the five and there's just this tension there that's unresolved. To 51 will take these in the key of C. Two in this case would be D minor five, and resolves down to one. Really straightforward. If you're playing a song and you're not quite sure how to end. It never hurts to go with a 251 progression. Since it's so common and familiar at this point, it may even invoke feelings of comfort in your listeners. 71. I - V - VI - IV: Combinations 145-6 will make up over half of the pop songs that you hear on radio today. So for this video, we'll play around with 156.4. We could probably name 20 to 30 songs right off the bat that those chords fit. Now, if we play them in the key of C, will have C as our 15 with G, a minor for six, and F for four. Again, we can practice transposing by taking that 1564, maybe move, move it down to the key of F or the key of D. No matter what key you play. 1564 in or 15461 for five-six, you name it. It will be familiar. But there's a reason it's used so often. It's powerful. It's, it's a major progression, but it's got a little bit of a somber feel to it with that minor six. 72. I - IV - V - VI: Since we've done that as an example, we'll also do 1456, just walking up the notes here and we'll finish by tossing in a seventh chord. Maybe we'll finish with a seventh. We'll do this in the key of g1456 and land resolve on the tonic as a seventh chord. We could also play that from maybe an E. You'll see there we have a sharp chord, E to a, B, C-sharp Minor, and land on your ie. 73. I - II - VI: Now, not to be forgotten are some of the other minor chords in a key. So maybe we could play one to six. Again, a major progression, a major key, but the bulk of our chords are minor. Something we can do that we haven't talked about Is place chords on different beats. Sometimes chords will have just one hit, one quick hit. We've talked about rhythm, right? Playing, hitting differently on different beats. But we could also put a cord just on one final beat here. Something like this. Just one quick passing chord. 74. 12-bar Blues Progression: Another very common progression is the 12 bar blues. Now, we actually played this progression in our blues chords video. But here is the 12-bar blues. We play 1241 for 541. So if we're in the key of C, That would be C, F, C, F, G, F, C. And it sounds more bluesy when you add that dominant seven in there like we chatted about. But let's play it just as triad courts. If you're heading into the music world and especially playing with other people, you may very well here someone asked you to play the 12-bar blues. Maybe a guitarist will want to play over it. But the 12-bar blues is definitely essential to know how to play 1414541. And sometimes you can end with the five as well coming back down 5415, back to the one. 75. Out of Key? I - bVII - I: We're going to look at one more common chord progression together. And this one we're going a little out of qi to do a flat seven. We're playing one flat seven back to one. So we've got one flat seven. Back to one. Really simple. This one's got more of a heroic theme to it. It kinda makes you puff out your chest a little bit. It's got feelings, confidence in it. As a reminder because we haven't talked about it for a bit. Remember with that pedal, we're really lifting up and pulling back down. Every time we're playing a chord, I'm holding it down. Can make up and down, up and down again. So every new note is hanging on while the old notes filter out. 76. Playing Piano With a Band: Now we'll talk a little bit about playing with a band if that's your goal. The job of the pianist is to be where the other instruments aren't. Base is going to be really low. Guitars can be either kind of in the middle of this audio spectrum or, or high up, depending on what they're playing. The job of the piano is to kind of fit in-between everyone. So if you've not got a bassist, maybe you can hit those low octave who notes and do the job of the basis who's missing? The guitarist is hitting higher up on the spectrum. Well, you can deal with chords in the middle there. Or if the guitarist is doing chords, you could come and hit some root notes, maybe add some jazz notes in there and do some maybe inversions as well. Where the guitarist is hitting root positions or sometimes on guitar you're playing second inversions. You can be hitting first inversions to avoid that wall of sound and be playing something unique. So everything's just meshing together. 77. Finding Chords to Your Favorite Songs: Now we've chatted a lot about playing these progressions are making your own, but what about songs that you're hearing on the radio? And you want to be able to find those progressions. Well, let's open up a screen here and take a look. For just about any popular song. You can look up the name of that song and then the word cords. There are a few different websites that are going to show you, but this one is my personal Favorite. When you go in there, you're going to be looking at guitar chords by default, but there's a piano button that's going to show you the piano shape for every chord in the song. Now, if some of these chords seem a little too difficult, we can always transpose like we were talking about, except this time we don't have to build a whole key. We can just click this button up and down. These sites tried to do a great job of putting the cord right above the word. You would be singing when that chord hits. But they're not always perfect. So it's helpful to know the song in your head. What we're not going to get on sites like this is any sort of rhythm for piano playing. You're going to have to do the rhythm method that we talked about or listen to the song to find what fits best over this tune. 78. Final Project: You've made it to the end of the learning portion. Congratulations. Now we're doing our final project. As a final project, we're going to make three chord progressions. The first chord progression is going to use what we learned in the beginner cord section. We're just building basic chords and doing root notes underneath them. The second chord progression will be for the intermediate cord section. So maybe you can do some seventh chords, maybe you can do some sus chords and add some rhythm in there. You can even do a slash chord. Our last chord progression will be what we learned with the advanced courts. So add some tensions in there, add some inversions in there and make a great chord progression. Or for your third chord progression, you could also do some blues, jazz, or rock style, like we talked about. You can upload these either as a video or audio or if your camera shy, you can just type out the chords and share a little bit about how they went and what you found difficult or easy. 79. Congratulations!: You made it to the end. Congratulations. Hopefully you learned something valuable in this course. If you have any questions for me, you can reach out at Jacob at lamb lessons.com or go to lamb lessons.com for more courses. Looking forward to seeing you there.