Every chord that you play has a different function and can be used for many different things. Today, we are going to look at some successful strategies to strengthen and alter your chords.
Here is the list:
1) Inversions
2) Chord Suspensions
3) Chord Arpeggios
Chord Inversions
Mastering inversions will take you a far way in your playing
In fact, many musicians don’t pay attention to inversions.
They learn their major, minor, diminished, and augmented chords and simply forget about an essential tool.
What makes you a super musician is that you focus on the small things. These 4 are excellent however need to learn that inversions can help simplify where you need to get to.
The melody will often times determine what inversion of a chord you play.
If you don’t know what an inversion is, here’s my simple definition.
“INVERSIONS are just different ways to play the same chord.”
For example, lets look at the C major 7 chord. The numbers are at the bottom.
C E G B
1 3 5 7
There are different ways that you can rearrange these notes to create different types of inversions. Here are the many different ways that you can rearrange them.
1 3 5 7
3 5 7 1
5 7 1 3
7 1 3 5
Generally, there are about 4 different types of inversions.
Now, imagine these numbers are notes in the key of C
C E G B
E G B C
G B C E
B C E G
These are just different ways to invert the C mjor 7th chord.
In summary, inversions are a great tool to use in your playing and you can use inverted chords to play the melody as well.
Chord Suspension
This is when you hold on to a particular tone and it resolves on the real tone.
This is a very popular way to end songs.
For example, your song ends on a typical C major chord:
C E G
If you wanted to change this to a suspended chord, you’d move the “3.” That’s E and you’d raise it a half step higher to the “4” which is F
So, instead of:
C E G
It’s now,
C F G ---Suspended 2
and resolves to CEG
Essentially, what happens is that there is some sort of dissonance between the CFG and is needs to be resolved to the C E G.
Chord Arpeggios
Chord Arpeggios are when you simply break up a chord and create individually sounding notes.
For example let's look at the C major 7
C/ C E G B
Basically, what you are going to do is play the C on your left hand and play the C E G B separately.
Many will add notes to the left hand to make the
arpeggio last longer.
You can add the following notes to make the bass stronger: C+G+C
This is heavily used in jazz and in creating solos, licks and runs
In summary, with these three tips on how to improve your playing will surely help the musician who is looking for a competitve edge. If you serious about the things that was talked about here are some of my recommendations:
1)300pg Home Study Course – “The Secrets To Playing
Piano By Ear”
This will teach you everything from scales, number
system, chords, and inversions to patterns, progressions,
altered chords, extensions, harmonization, and songs.
It’s like a crash course on everything you’ll need to
understand how music works.
300pg Home Study Course
2)Music Training Center and Musician Transformation Package
This will teach you the steps to improve your playing through live video, commentary and everything you need to know about chords, scales, runs, fills, progressions. This is a great to for the bassist,pianist,guitarist.
Music Training Center
3)Gospel Keys Jazz 101
This is a crash course for the person who wants to learn jazz techniques, scales, runs from an expert who has played for many famous people. This course will teach you step-by-step with live examples of how to play just like the professionals.
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I hope that this helps you in your playing and we will talk to you soon
BizModerator
The Business and Musicians Forum