Piano Key1

There are really only two ways you can play chords on the piano - solid or broken. While solid chords are nice, it’s the arpeggio or broken chord that students love to play! Cascading notes shimmer and glide up and down the piano keyboard to create a waterfall of sound!

Creating a broken chord piano improvisation need not be difficult. All that you need to know is what chords to play and how to create the broken chord sound. Knowing the chords you will play is the easy part. Creating the broken chord sound can present some with problems. These problems can be easily overcome if we start out by using a special chord structure known as the open position chord.

Did you know that the piano keyboard is not used to its fullest potential? And that thousands of beginning piano students start out by playing a three-note triad that is as outdated as the dinosaur?

It’s true. The piano keyboard is huge! Over 80 keys big. Why not come up with a chord structure that uses more keys? Why not indeed!

There is a chord structure called the Open Position chord that uses more than 2 octaves of the keyboard. Both hands are called into play here to create a modern sounding seventh chord that is used frequently in pop, jazz, and new age music.

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So, you love the sound of New Age piano. You may have wondered how certain people can just sit down at the piano and start playing from scratch. It’s not magic! It’s called knowing what you’re doing and you can do the same! To begin, you need to know a few chords. I suggest complete beginners start out with something called the open position chord. This chord structure has many, many benefits for the beginner (and advanced student!)

First, it’s a modern sounding chord. Forget about triads and scales. The open position chord allows you to play seventh chords right away. This chord structure is used by most jazz and contemporary piano players.

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When most people look at a piano keyboard, they see a sea of black and white keys. They can’t understand how someone can sit down at this confusing combination of notes and create music.

Of course they can’t! They haven’t learned how to look at the piano keyboard in such a way that it all makes sense. All they really need to do is understand how to see it like the pros do. And pros see the piano keyboard as scales and chords.

All you really need to know to start out is to learn chords and that’s it. Just think of the guitar player as an analogy. They begin to make sense of their instrument rather quickly. Why? Because they are

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Chord jumping is a simple technique that allows you to use much of the piano. You simply take a chord and “move it” up the keyboard.

Now, I’m not talking about inversions here, although there’s nothing wrong with inversions. I’m talking about taking a simple chord structure and just using the entire piano to create with. Here’s what I mean.

Take the lesson “Coral Reef” for example. Here we have 2 chords, A minor and F Major. The beauty of only having 2 chords for this improvisation exercise is that it frees you up to experiment. That is, you can focus on moving them around instead of looking to see when the chords change.

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