Do you want to elaborate on the songs that you play?
Do you want to make songs sound more clever and more unique than what’s simply on the page or on the sheet music?
Do you want to write your own songs?
If you want to unleash your creativity at the keys you want to do all of those things and more, then you need to learn more about chords and their jobs than you currently know!
In this post you’ll learn how a greater awareness of chords and what they can do in a song will help you discover that inner creative pianist that’s lurking inside you!
I'm a fan of Jacob Collier, you might listen to him as well, there's been a lot of buzz recently because he's just released his third album ‘Djesse Volume 3’. I heard him say in a recent interview:
“Chords were my first crush, all I wanted was to understand them.”
He’s hit the nail on the head there. In order to become fully independent, creative pianists, we need to fall in love with chords and we want to understand them more!
So here's a scenario:
You possibly know a few three note chords, you probably know your major chords, your minor chords. You might know your diminished and augmented chords as well– all our basic triads. What about your four note chords, seventh chords– like major sevenths, minor sevenths, dominant seventh, diminished sevenths? All of those chords we can know technically what they are but here's two questions for you:
Do you know when to use each of those chords for a purposeful, desired impact?
Do you know how to identify those chords when you hear them based on the impact that they've had?
Essentially it’s the same idea for both these questions:
Chords have an impact on us– every chord has a job to do.
Every chord has its little piece of the story that it's trying to tell and by learning each chord's job and how it contributes to the story of the song then we can do those two things:
We can use chords for a desired intentional impact, and
We can identify them when we hear them based on the impact that they have had!
Why do we want to be able to do those two things?
Because that is what contributes to all those creative pursuits that we want to get better at as a pianist!
Using a chord for a desired intentional impact, to tell a particular part of a story– when might we need to do that? When we're songwriting!
We're writing a song and we need to tell that story in music so we want to be able to know the jobs of different chords and pull in the right ones to tell that story.
Also when we're arranging!
If you're arranging a song that you've already learned and you've got the proper chord in the song that you're supposed to play, but maybe you want to arrange it so that it sounds a little bit different but still essentially has the same job–we call that reharmonizing!
Essentially, we need to know what chords have which jobs so that we can have an intentional impact on the story of the song.
It’s the same thing for improvising, it's the same skill for riffing & comping. Think about reading from a lead-sheet, you want to expand on what you are being told to play, you want to fill in the gaps? We need to know what chords we can pull in that will still tell the essential story.
The second thing was how to identify them when we hear them based on the impact that those chords have had on us– based on the story they're telling us!
This skill is in turn what helps us to play by ear!
If we hear a chord or a series of chords and we can internalize it and recognize the impact those chords are having on us, then we are able to–based on the job the chords have done–find out which chords we are hearing!
So we’re talking about the forwards and backwards of the same idea.
When we put chords with other chords:
Chords have their own impact on us but then when we put them with different chords before or after they can start to change the job of that chord.
Here's an example; If you hear a minor chord just by itself we tend to say that a minor chord sounds a somber or melancholic.
Whereas if we put a dominant seventh chord straight after it (you don't need to know what a dominant seventh chord is to get this concept) it actually changes the idea of that minor chord!
It isn't so much about being sad anymore, it's about moving towards the dominant seventh chord and the dominant seventh chord has its own job where it moves towards the I (one) chord or Tonic.
All these chords are moving us towards the next chord, it's that forward momentum!
When we have that forward momentum, where the chords pull you along through the story, that's what brings us on the journey of a great song!
This is a huge topic we call ‘Functional Harmony’.
Musicians can study the function or ‘job’ of chords for a lifetime in order to write incredible complicated jazz compositions. We're not worrying about that just yet, that's a Berklee jazz degree away!
We're just going to learn some of the basics so when we hear music we can be aware of how it's moving us forward through the chords.
Just a smidge of awareness will unleash your ability to use chords and to identify them as well.
Discover my training ‘We Love Chords’!
You’ll learn different types of chords, what they're used for, and how to play them anywhere on the keyboard!
By learning not only how to play these chords, but understanding what each chord-type's specific job is– you can begin to intentionally use chords for the effect they produce. This improves your songwriting, improvising, comping, lead-sheet riffing & playing by ear!