
In case you don’t know, middle C is located at the very center of the piano.Īfter finding that, place your middle finger on the E key. In order to play a C major chord, place your thumb on middle C. Perhaps this is because songs written in C major tend to be uplifting. Out of 1,300 songs, most of the songs ( 26%) were written in C major (following G major (12%)). If you don’t learn any other piano chord, learn this one. To get you started, we’ve created this article that introduces four of the main piano chords. Once you know the basic piano chords, you can go off of that. The notes are one key (or two intervals or half steps) apart from each other. Specifically, you normally use your thumb, middle finger, and pinky finger.

In case you didn’t know, piano is based on a foundation.Ī part of this foundation is piano chords.Ī chord is a triad, where each hand uses three fingers to play three notes at the same time. Julian runs the popular Jazz Tutorial YouTube channel and writes educational jazz lessons at JazzTutorial.Playing the piano may look complicated. He has a masters degree in music from Bristol University, and has played with and composed for a variety of big bands. Julian Bradley is a jazz pianist and music educator from the U.K. The Ultimate Chord Symbol Guide 7 Chord Progressionsħ Sweet Chord Progressions sheet music 5 Jazz Piano Endings Get clarity on jazz piano chord symbols - V7sus4, Cm6, C/Db. So, it's more in your hands and your wrists than it is your fingers, but to practice it you just want to find any chord voicing, just practice rippling it. It's like doing one of those wave things. To ripple a chord, you're basically doing this with your hand. In fact, I would always alternate between playing a chord all at once and then rippling and then playing all at once again. So use your rippling for the bigger chords, but you don't want to do it on every chord. Now, any chord can be rippled, but it certainly works better for the more interesting chords, sort of the bigger chord voicings, especially if you're playing with two hands, rather than if you're just playing a seventh chord, it's not very effective. Basically play it from bottom notes and you arpeggiate it upwards but you do it very quickly like this. It adds sophistication to all of your playing. Rippling chords is an essential jazz piano technique. Okay, so let's talk about rippling chords. And that's what I'm doing, every single chord. Again, find my fingers to the notes, lock my hand, push downwards, find my fingers to the notes, lock my hand, push downwards. So, in slow motion find my fingers to the chord voicing, I lock my hand and then I push downwards with my wrist.


I’ll, first of all, find my fingers to the notes, and then I'll sort of lock of my hand, so the muscles sort of tense and I just lock it in place, and then finally I apply pressure from my arm and I just have this locked hand, which just goes downwards. So how do you practice this? Well first of all here is the technique. So, this is one of the things I think about a lot.

I can always hear when a piano player isn't playing it as one and it just doesn't sound confident. And what I don't want to happen is where you get a sort of jumbled. When I play a chord voicing, a lot of my focus is on playing every single note in that chord voicing as one, so at the exact same time. Okay, let's talk about a technique, which I call playing chord voicings as one.
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10 Exotic Jazz Sounds PDF Lesson Transcript
