I wanted to share a really cool chord with you guys. Ever looking to add some flare to your standard major triads? Well - add the 4th! In C major, the resulting chord would be C-E-F-G (if you play the chord in closed, root position). The great thing about this chord is that it still sounds very strongly like C major yet with some added dissonance. The E-F clash (those two notes are only half a step apart!) adds some ambiguity to the third and it produces a really cool effect! This works especially well in a cappella music! Here's an example of what this chord can sound like in an a cappella setting:
(listen around 0:50)
Doesn't that gorgeous dissonance just make you want to giggle like a tween justin bieber fan?! (just me?) Another way to think of this chord is a sus4 chord with the added third (the note to which the suspension in the former chord normally resolves). I've started including this chord a lot more in my arrangements just becuase of how cool it sounds. You can see this in my arrangement of "anything but fine" by Zox, which i've included below:
Measures 31, 55, 63, 83 etc. are examples of this.
So, next time you feel the urge to add a lil somthing to your standard major triad, try adding the 4th (in jazz this would be known as adding the 11th). I think you will shiver in awe, just like me, at how cool this chord sounds.
Tonight i recorded a piano/vocal cover of "Count on Me" by Bruno Mars. Here's a link to the video:
I hope you enjoy it!! I'm going to try to keep doing one cover every week. That, however, will prove increasingly difficult as the term progresses - i have a lot of things coming up in the next few weeks.
I recorded a cover this past Friday of Elliott Yamin's "Wait for you". I added some harmony vocals to the cover too, so i hope you guys like it! I'll try to get another cover out next weekend too (especially since it's a long weekend :D). Here's a link for my latest cover:
It's been a while since I last posted - blame that on the mountains of school work and vast seas of MCAT practice exams I have been occupied with for the past month. Anyways, I recorded a piano/vocal cover of "Not over you" by Gavin Degraw tonight! I hope you like it:
I've decided to put my Apologize all A Capella cover on hold for now - it's proving much trickier than i thought it would be. I'm going to try to do another piano cover this weekend! Any suggestions?
I just wanted to let you all know that i'm working on my next cover and i should be able to put it up sometime this coming week. I'm going to post another Tips 'n Trix also sometime next week! Get excited!!
Just a piece of music to keep you entertained:
This song is the instrumental version of the original song by the German heavy metal band Equilibrium - to be honest, i don't really enjoy metal screaming in german, but you've gotta give them props for having amazing instrumental parts!
Tonight i had the pleasure of recording two covers with Aleksya Aguirre! We did covers of "Billionaire" by Bruno Mars and Travie McCoy and "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz. I hope you enjoy them!
Also, be sure to check out Aleksya's youtube channel:
I've been asked a few times about some tricks for playing piano accompaniments/covers of songs, so i thought i'd try to include a few helpful tips n' trix every so often to help out those of you who want to cover songs on the piano.
I wanted to talk today about cool chords to sprice up your piano accompanying life (think Oprah but for piano!). I mainly wanted to talk about ways to turn generic chords into more interesting and useful chords. Most songs have chord progressions written online that you can use when trying to cover a song. An example of a site that has a compilation of user written chord progressions is the ULTIMATE GUITAR TABS ARCHIVE (yes the caps are important!) whose URL is:
I think sites like this are a great place to start when you are trying to cover a song because they give you a nice chord structure for the song you are playing. There are two types of chord listings posted on this site: guitar tabs and lyrics with chords. For piano covers, you want the latter - staring at a bunch of fret diagrams doesn't really do it for me ^-^. For those of you not familiar reading chords from a site such as this, the chord is usually listed above the word on which the chord changes. To give a brief example, i looked up the chords for "Just the way you are" by Bruno Mars, and have pasted the first 2 lines below:
E
Oh her eyes, her eyes make the stars look like they're not shining
C#/C# m
Her hair, her hair falls perfectly without her trying
This format signifies that an E major chord is played around the "Oh her eyes" and the chord switches to C# minor at the first "Her hair" - now, the timing isn't always precise with this, so make sure you listen to the actual song when determining when the chord switches! But, the location of the chord changes is generally pretty close to the actual chord.
Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about what types of chords you can expect to see, and give examples for those of you who might not know that much about chords. There are 3 main types of chords i've encountered when looking up chords for songs: 1) major, 2) minor, and 3) dominant seventh/resolving dominant sus 4
So let's get a little bit more in depth into each of those types of chords.
1) Major: A pianist's bread and butter - the type of chord of which most songs are entirely made. A great example of a song that uses a lot of major chords is Fireflies by Owl City:
An example of a major chord would be represented, as above in the little chord snippet from "Just the way you are", as a capital letter, referring to the root of the chord. So, for instance, the chord "E" is an E major chord composed of the notes E, G#, and B. As another example, a major "Ab" chord would be composed of Ab, C, and Eb. These chords seem quite simplistic, and it's because they are. I will go into more depth later about how you can make them sound a lot cooler.
2) Minor: How on earth would we compose emotional, soul-wrenching music without minor chords?! You will mostly find minor chords in ballads or songs moaning over lost love (see "Last to know" by Three Days Grace below, it's one of my favorite songs and it uses a lot of minor chords).
An example of a minor chord can be seen above in the snippet from "Just the way you are" - they are usually represented as a letter followed by a lowercase 'm'. So, for instance, the example of a minor chord used above is "C#m" whose notes would be C#, E, and G#. Another example of a minor chord could be "Fm" whose notes would be F, Ab, and C - basically, you lower the third from the major chord. These chords have a little more sound depth than major chords, but are still pretty basic - i'll talk about how you can make them sound a lot cooler later!
3) Dominant seventh/resolving dominant sus 4: These chords just scream "cadence" - like seriously, how would we close out an awesome chord progression without some type of chord to lead us back into the next iteration.
Both of these chords are taken from the dominant of the key of the song - the key a perfect fifth above the tonic (key of the song). For instance, if the song you are playing is in C, then the dominant key is G.
A dominant seventh chord is normally abbreviated as the letter of the dominant key followed by a "7" and comprises the major triad discussed for major chords (which in G would be G, B, and D) and adds a minor seventh interval to the chord - this note will always be the fourth note in the scale of the key you are in (so in C, the minor 7th interval for the dominant seventh chord would be an F, in G, the minor 7th intervalwould be a C, and in C#, the minor 7th interval would be an F#, etc). So, a dominant 7th chord in it's entirety in C major would be written as "G7" and be composed of the notes G, B, D, and F - this is a pretty awesome chord for leading back into C because it resolves so nicely.
A pretty cool alternative is what is known as a dominant sus 4, or suspension 4, chord which is normally abbreviated as the key followed by "sus4" (ex. Asus4 for a chord with A as the root). This chord involves playing the 4th of the dominant chord instead of the normal 3rd that exists in a major triad. So, in C major, the dominant sus 4 chord would be written as "Gsus4" and be composed of the notes G, C, and D (substituting the 4th, the C, for the 3rd, the B, from the major chord). This chord is then followed by a resolution of the "C" (or 4th) in the chord to the "B" (or 3rd) in the chord, before finally going back to the tonic key. I personally prefer this chord over the dominant seventh chord because it sounds more modern (instead of a chord that is religiously used in classical music).
These are the three basic types of chords that you will encounter with most modern (i.e. 1950s-present pop/rock/r&b/country) music. As i said earlier, i'm now going to talk about how you can make simple major and minor chords sound more interesting!
1) Major Chords:
The one cool improvement to major chords i'm going to talk about in this post involves using the 9th of the chord. Let's imagine we are in the key of Bb (which is one of my favorite major keys!) - the major triad in Bb comprises Bb, D, and F. The 9th of the Bb major chord is a C. So, instead of playing Bb, D, F as a Bb major chord, i instead play Bb, C, D, F. This adds a little bit of dissonance to the chord without overdoing it. Generally, when i play this chord, i will either play it such that the 5th or the 9th of the chord is more spread out from the other notes. For instance, to seperate the 5th from the rest of the chord, i will stack the chord in the following order: F, Bb, C, D, and to seperate the 9th, i stack the chord as: Bb, D, F, C. Spreading out the notes makes the chord sound slightly less dissonant. So, playing around with the 9th in major chords adds some complexity and dissonance to major chords making them more interesting to listen to than their more simplistic counterparts.
2) Minor Chords:
There are a lot of things you can do with minor chords, but i'm going to talk about the most common thing that i do with minor chords which is to add the 7th to the chord. Note, due to some similarities between major and minor chords in terms of intervals, adding the 7th to a minor chord is identical to adding the 6th to a major chord. So, let's say we are in the key of D minor (my favorite minor key). A basic minor triad in D minor comprises the notes D, F, and A. What i usually do with minor chords though, is add the 7th (in this case, a C) because it takes away part of the harshness that is sometimes heard with minor chords. In terms of how i stack these chords, i generally try to keep the notes closer together than just stacking them as (in this key) D, F, A, C. The two most common orientations i would use would be first inversion (F, A, C, D) and second inversion (A, C, D, F), with a slight favorite to the former. I generally prefer minor 7th chords to basic minor triads because they sound warmer.
I highly recommend playing minor 7th chords and incorporating the 9th into major chords in the majority of songs you encounter especially since it makes transitions smoother between most chord progressions in pop songs. Just to give an example, a very common chord progression (for the purposes of this example, say we are in Bb major) involves the progression from Bb major (the tonic) to G minor (the minor 6, the chord with the submediant as the root) to Eb major (the 4th, the chord with the subdominant as the root) then to F major (the dominant chord). Using both minor 7th chords and a major 9th chord makes the transitions much smoother - we can see this by looking at the notes played for each chord. In the first chord, if we play a straight major triad, we play the notes Bb, D, and F. Now, if we transition to the second chord, a minor 7th chord with G as the root, we play the notes G, Bb, D, and F - adding a G to the previous chord. Now, if we play the third chord as a major 9th chord with Eb as the root, we play the notes Eb, G, Bb, and F - substituting the D in the previous chord for an Eb; raising one note by a half step. For the last chord, we play the notes F, A, C, Eb if we use a dominant 7th and F, Bb, C if we use a sus 4 chord - the transition isn't as smooth for the 3rd to the 4th chord in the progression, but due to how well the 4th chord leads into the next iteration of the progression, this isn't as important as the first 3 transitions. Voila! We now have a beautiful chord progression - i wonder why 90% of pop songs today use this exact progression?!
I hope you all have found these tips for playing chords helpful for your own piano aspiriations. I will definitely post more tips in the weeks and months to come about how to go about using these chords - using them as solely block chords or arpeggiating them, etc. - in the following weeks and months. I'll also try to include more theory for those of you whose backgrounds are less exposed to lots of theory.
Have a great rest of the day! I'll try to get my cover of Heaven by Bryan Adams up tonight!
I wanted to share my performance of one of my favorite chamber music pieces - Mendelssohn's D Minor piano trio. This was performed by myself on piano, Anne Cai on violin, and Evan Lynch on 5/8/11 at a concert hosted by MIT's Chamber Music Society. Here's a link to the video on youtube, i hope you enjoy it!
