Chords for Piano Lessons - Phat Chord Voicings Ch. 1

Welcome to [D] PlayPianoToday.com
[D] _ This is chapter one from the lesson titled Fat Chord Voicings.
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_ _ [Em] _ _ _ _ [A] In [E] this edition of Fat Chord Voicings,
[A] I want to show you how to take a simple minor chord and really make it [G] rich like this. _ _
[Dm] _ [C] Do you hear how rich and mysterious [Em] those chord voicings are?
[E] _ _
[G] Let's take a look at how that's done.
Now one of the great things about this
voicing that I'm showing you in this edition
is that you can use it almost any time you see a simple minor chord like on a lead sheet
or maybe in music that you're writing and you include a minor chord.
Throw in this voicing instead and instantly you've got a lot of richness.
Let's take a look at how it's built.
The voicing we're looking at
is this.
Nice and open.
It's an open voicing because the notes are spread out
and it's [Em] based on an E minor triad.
Now
we studied how to put all these triads together at the beginning of Pattern
Piano and Keyboard, the original course.
If you haven't had a chance to go through that course yet, make sure you
take time to go through it.
So here's E minor.
This would be E major.
Here's E minor.
Now in Pattern Piano and Keyboard, the [D] original course,
we studied where the seventh comes from.
[G] So this voicing that I'm showing you includes the seventh.
[F#] It also includes that what is it note.
What is that note?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
So we've got E
minor triad, [G] 7 and 9.
Now we're going to take [Bm] those same notes
and spread them out
[Em] into a voicing.
[G] Isn't that fantastic?
Those are the exact same notes but spread out.
Let me show you how to do this.
To dig into the original course, go to _
playpianotoday.com forward slash
video.
There you'll find a wealth of online piano and keyboard lessons,
including the original course.
In addition, you'll find lots of style development lessons
that are designed to follow up after you've gone through the original course
and you've learned to play piano and keyboard by ear.
Let's get back to the lesson.
_ _ This is what separates folks who begin to play the piano and say, yeah I play
chord piano and they just kind of bang out the chords,
and those that really create fantastic music.
And it isn't that huge of a concept.
Once you understand how to voice chords,
your musical vocabulary becomes so much
richer.
From [E] there, you begin to play rhythmic
patterns and that's what we cover in our original course.
You can find that on the main menu under more lessons.
And now before we go on,
I want to show you graphically exactly what it means to take a closed voicing chord,
like the E minor 9 that I just showed you, and open it up
into a voicing.
Now on the screen you can see exactly what I played
just a minute ago.
This is the standard closed
position non-voiced E minor 9 chord.
From bottom to top, let's take a look at the notes.
On the bottom you've got an E, which is the root, right, or the bottom of the chord.
Then you've got the third, which is G natural.
Then you have the fifth, which is B.
Then you have the dominant seventh,
which is D.
And above that you have the F sharp, which is the ninth.
Are you getting this?
I hope you're getting this.
If you haven't, you need to go
through the original course.
I know I beat that to death, but the truth is, once you understand music, then
you can be really creative and
that's my number one thesis.
So that's the standard
A number one way that 99% of the world keyboard players
play an E minor 9 voicing.
But not you.
We're gonna spread this thing out and give it some new life
with a fat chord voicing.
Take a look at the screen again.
It's exactly the same notes.
You still have an E,
a G, a B, a D,
and an F sharp.
They're just in different places.
And notice,
they're spread out.
That's why the sound is so open.
That's why this works so well when you have another instrument
or a voice singing or playing the melody.
It can just sail right through without
getting all clustered and bound up.
So I've got the left hand playing the root way down on the bottom.
It's an E.
And it's playing the fifth, which is a B.
Now the right hand is playing the denim colored notes.
[Em] It's kind of the cool man.
[Bm] He's playing the third,
right?
A G natural.
[Em] He's playing the dominant seventh, which is a D.
And it's [G] playing an F sharp up on top.
That's what it means to take a [Em] closed position chord
and open it up into a fat chord voicing.
In fact, that's the exact voicing that we're studying in this lesson.
Let's take a look at it one last time.
Here it is in closed position.
[Bm] And then we're gonna open it up into a nice fat chord [Em] voicing.
And roll it.
You can [G] roll it like a guitar, up or down the keyboard.
It's kind of a nice guitar technique.
Alright, let's dig into this.
This has just been the first six minutes of Fat Chord Voicings Chapter 1.
I hope you've enjoyed it so far.
If you'd like to see more,
go to playpianotoday.com
forward slash video.
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there's a [C] wealth of online piano and keyboard lessons
you can dig into right away, including this lesson.
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