How To Turn a Chord Into a “Cascading Waterfall Run”

It’s pretty easy to take most any chord (4 note chords are easier than 3 note chords, generally, simply because of the way your hand is constructed) and turn it into a “cascading waterfall” of sound.
For a complete course in creating piano runs, please click here: Piano Runs Galore!

This piano lesson video is the second in a series of videos on how to create unique chord substitutions - making surprising chord changes that are individual for each song and each musical situation.

For a complete course in Chord Substitutions, please go to “Chord Substitutions: 3 Secrets of Creating Fresh Harmonies“

Among the various ways to reharmonize a tune are three specific but easy methods. This is part one of a three part series, and deals with a simple question you can ask at any point in a song to come up with new and fresh chords: “Into What Other Chord Does This Note Fit?”

Watch this short video and you’ll understand:

Then come back here tomorrow and we’ll take up part two of the series.

Imagine if a painter only had 12 colors to choose from. He wasn’t allowed to mix them together, he couldn’t dilute the colors, he could only use one type of brush and every painter had to use the color and type of canvas. Visual art would be boring, wouldn’t it? Artists would have a much tougher time developing their own style and even the person with no interest in art would begin to notice that everything she sees is based on the same 12 colors.

If musicians could only use triads (Three note chords based on 1-3-5 of the scale) the world would sound like it would look with only 12 colors. The various styles or genres of music would be much tougher to distinguish from each other and their unique sound that we’ve grown to love would be gone.

This is why composers developed extended chords. Extended chords “extend” the basic triad by adding notes to it. Extended chords, combined with creative voicings, are what give the different styles of music their unique sounds. Let’s look at how they work.

First, we will call a triad the building block of all chords. Remember that if we have a C Major triad, it is built by stacking the first, third, and fifth scale degrees on top of each other. This is referred to as a C Major chord. If we add another note on top of our triad, we would add the seventh scale degree (because for now, we always skip a note in between). Now we have a chord called a “C Major Seven” chord. The notes of this chord are C-E-G-B.

We can add another note on top of that. Do you know what it would be? It would be a D because we’re skipping a note. Now, although technically D is the second scale degree because we went in to a new octave, when we’re building chords, we call it the ninth scale degree. So now we have C-E-G-B-D. This is a “C Nine” chord.

Are you seeing the pattern? The next tone we add would be an F and we would have a “C Eleven” chord and the next would be an “A” and we would have a “C Thirteen” chord. Of course one cannot extend to a fifteenth chord because we’ve used all of the diatonic notes.

As we always say, very little in music is painfully simple and extended chords are no exception. First, these are the most basic of extended chords. There are many others. For example, there is another seventh chord called a dominant seventh chord that is spelled, C-E-G-Bb. There are hundreds of extended chords.

The other complication with these chords is that the more notes that we add, the worse they sound if we don’t do some creative voicing. When we write a seventh chord, for example, we often remove the fifth of the chord. This gets increasingly complicated as more tones are added.

Now, go to the piano and listen to these extended chords. You’ll find that your musician’s toolbox has just been expanded. And if you really want to get up to speed on extended chords, grab our course on “Super Chords Made Super Simple!”

Copyright June 16th, 2011 by Duane Shinn. Please do not copy without permission!

Once in a while it’s good to take a little review of the basics, so we’re going to take a quick look at augmented triads and see how they are formed and how logical they are. Augmented triads (3-note chords) are formed by raising the 5th of a major triad 1/2 step. Watch this 5-minute video:

Have you heard of the Crash Course In Exciting Piano Playing?

Using original chord substitutions in your piano playing puts your own stamp of originality on the music, so your song doesn’t sound like everyone else’s song. There are some basic principles of chord substitution which you can use right away, and this short video covers those methods.

For a complete course on Chord Substitutions click here: Chord Substitutions

There are scads of ways to add fillers to your songs, from counter-melodies to passing tones to unusual chord sequences to quartal voicings to…and on and on. Three of the easiest ways to take the chords of a song and make fillers out of them is to create open-voiced offset intervals called “straddles”, to break them up as 2-1 or 3-1 broken chords, and to rapidly “shake” the chord and then run it up the keyboard. Watch this short video to get the idea:

Keep learning! I hope you are always working on adding some new technique to your musical toolbox. For lots of ideas browse our online catalog of piano courses.

Chords, as you well know, are based on scales, and the most basic form of chord is a triad — a three note chord consisting of the root, 3rd, and 5th of a major scale. The most usual way to play that chord is as a stack of 3rds (the interval between the root and the 3rd of the chord is a major 3rd, and the interval between the 3rd and the 5th is a minor 3rd, hence, a stack of 3rds). But when you invert a chord, you always have a combination of 3rds and 4ths, giving a sense of balance to the chord.

But it is also possible to create a chord using a stack of 4ths by using tones outside the triad, such as 6ths, 7ths and 9ths. In this short video I demonstrate how to create a chord made of the 3rd, 6th, and 9th of the scale which I call a “6/9″ chord (but you’re not going to see it in written music, since most people call it a 13th).

An arpeggio is one of those terms in music that sounds very impressive. If you go to your friends and tell them that you played arpeggios in your piano lesson today, they are sure to be impressed. It sounds like something complicated and difficult and our first word of advice is to let you friends think that. You’ll impress a lot of people!

Now for the secret. We music types know that an arpeggio is not a difficult concept at all. In fact, the name contains the definition. Arpeggio is an Italian word meaning broken chord. Simply speaking, when we play an arpeggio, we split a chord in to its component notes and play them individually.Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say that we play a C Major chord. You probably remember from our chord article that a simple three note C Major chord is the 1st, 3rd, and 5th scale degree of a C Major scale. In this case, a C Major scale has the notes C-E-G and they are all played at the same time. When we play an arpeggio we simply play each of these notes separately. Maybe we play 1-3-5 up and down in quarter notes. In this case, we would play 1-3-5-3-1 broken up like we would play a melody.

You might be wondering, “what’s the point of an arpeggio? Why would we bother learning these?” Your teacher will probably show you various exercises using arpeggios but here are a few reasons that they help you to be a better musician:

• If you’re a wind player, they increase the range of notes both high and low that you can play. By playing arpeggios that start in your low range and go to the top of your range, you’ll practice sounding good in all areas of your instrument.

• If you’re a string player, arpeggios help with hand positions.

• Pianists learn specific fingering patterns for various arpeggios depending on the key you are playing. Learning these different fingering patters is essential as you advance as a player.

• For any musician, in order to play an arpeggio you have to know how to spell your chords. This helps you learn and practice constructing chords.

Of course there are many other reasons that arpeggios are important but your private teacher will help you make arpeggios something that will help you to be a better musician.

Last, arpeggios don’t have to be just 1-3-5. You could play arpeggios based on any chord you can think of. You can also combine chords. For example, you could play a C Major Arpeggio as you go up and a D Major arpeggio going down. The amount of exercises and music constructed using arpeggios has no limit and if you study some of the music you play, you’ll find countless examples of arpeggios.

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A suspension in music is when the previous chord has a “hangover” into the new chord. The symbol for a suspension is “sus”, so C7sus, F7sus, etc. It is a note “left over” from the chord before it. Listen to this podcast on music theory and you will understand:

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Polytonality involves playing two chords at the same time, usually in opposite hands. But you can also play in two keys at the same time. There is a world of discovery waiting for the pianist who experiments in this area. Listen to this podast and you’ll understand. Double-click on the player below – it will take a few seconds to start playing.

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There are about a zillion things you can do with chords so there is no need to overuse any one technique. To turn a chord into a “cascading waterfall run” you simply take any 4 note chord (you can also do it with 3 note and 5 note chords, but 4 is probably easier simply because of the way our hands are built. Start high on the piano keyboard and simply break up the notes of the chord from the top down, then move to the next inversion of the same chord and do the same, and so on until you get as far down the keyboard as you want. Watch this short video and it will be clear to you:

To create a tremolo as illustrated in this short piano video, take any 4 or 5 note chord and rapidly alternate the notes using wrist action, not finger action. This creates a sustained effect of the chord in play and is useful in certain situations, often at the end of a song.

Enharmonic notes are simply notes that have more than one name. Just as you might be known by not only your given name, but also by your nickname, so notes can have more than one name. The same is true for enharmonic chords — they can be known by multiple names as well. For example, the Db major chord sounds exactly the same as the C# major chord, but looks different on printed music, and has two different names: C# major and Db major.

As you no doubt know, there are 12 possible major chords because there are 12 different piano keys on which you can build those chords. (There can be more than 12 names for those 12 chords, of course, because we can call the same chord two names, such as Db or C# — we’ll do a video on enharmonic chords another time). Once you know those 12 major chords, it’s a snap to learn the minor chords, because all you do is lower the 3rd of the major chord one-half step. For lots of good stuff like this, come on over to http://www.facebook.com/pianochords and sign up for our free newsletter on piano chords and chord progressions as well as grab the Major-Minor Chord Chart.

This podcast is about parallel stacked 3rd chords and how to use them. It the audio I reference a printed sheet which I have lost track of (used with my private students back when I taught privately), but you can easily visualize what I’m talking about withour the sheet.

Double-click the audio player below to listen:

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Do you know the incredible benefits that come to you by
learning chording techniques on the piano?

There are many — way more than just 5. But due to space
limitations, I’ll just list 5 out of hundreds:

1. By learning chording techniques, you are at least
quadrupling your chances of creating exciting new sounds
on the piano — sounds that most other piano players have no
idea how to create. That’s because arranging using chord
techniques is open-ended — there’s no end to the styles
and applications you can eventually learn and apply.

2. Learning chording techniques in NO WAY interferes with
your ability to sight-read music. Some ill-informed people
think it does, but not so! Ask any great jazz musician
from Dave Brubeck to Andre Previn to Oscar Peterson to Chuck
Corea to…. They ALL read music prolifically, yet choose
to apply chording techniques to song after song, creating
many of the great classic tunes we all know, like “Take
Five”, etc, etc.

Knowing chords and being able to apply techniques to those
chords actually HELPS YOU TO SIGHT-READ FASTER, because
instead of just seeing groups of random notes on the sheet
music, you can see chord patterns forming and dissolving
into yet another chord, another chord progression!

3. Knowing chords and applying chording techniques allows
you to become a first-rate accompanist for singers and
other musicians, should you want to do that. You will be
able to “wrap the chords” around the singer to support
them, rather than be in competition by playing the melody
from the sheet music. You’ll be able to create fills and
counter-melodies and a host of other devices that can make
you the most desired accompanist in your area.

4. By knowing chords and chording patterns you will
automatically open the door to opportunities to play at
places you never could if you only “play music as
written”. When people hear you play, they will immediately sense
that “this person knows what they are doing”, which can very
well bring invitations to play in fraternal clubs,
churches, community centers, and even weddings and
funerals. I have had students of retirement age who have
fulfilled their lifelong dream to play in public, even if
in a small venue. I recall a CPA in Washington State who
took lessons from me by cassette for a couple years and
got good enough to play at a local restaurant-pub on weekends.
He didn’t need the money, but just LOVED the opportunity
to play for folks and have them sing along.

5. Being able to apply chords to song after song means you
NEVER HAVE TO PLAY A SONG THE SAME WAY TWICE! When people
see me play, they often ask me to play the song again –
but are often surprised when I play it again, since I
create new chord progressions and fills and improvisations
each time — so it never sounds the same.

There’s a classic story about Erroll Garner, the great
pianist and composer of the classic song “Misty”. A lady
came up to him after a concert and raved about how he
played “Misty”, and asked him to play it again the same
way. His reply was “I can’t remember how I played it last
time — but I’ll play it again anyway”, which greatly
surprised the lady.

You can create motion in your songs by adding passing tones to your repertoire of piano techniques. Look for opportunities to add a 2nd or a 6th or a 7th under the right hand melody — non-harmonic tones that “pass through” the chords you are playing in the right hand.

For a complete course in using passing tones please go to Passing Tones To Add Motion & Interest To Your Songs

The Alberti bass is a style which simply breaks up any 3-note chord into a pattern consisting of bottom note, top note, middle note, top note, and repeat. Watch this short video and you’ll instantly understand how to apply it to most any song:

Piano players can get a different kind of sound in their chords by using a stack of 4ths — open voicing in 4ths. It seems counter-intuitive at first, but once you get the idea and like the sound it creates, it is a type of voicing that you can use in many situations. Listen to this short podcast (click on the player below) and you’ll understand.

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