(jazz music)
- I'm Peter Martin, and today I'm gonna
give you five easy jazz piano chords
that sound great.
Now the good news is you don't have
to learn a bunch of jazz theory.
In fact, don't learn a bunch of jazz theory first.
We're going to jump right in
and play some stuff that sounds great.
Because if you learn too much jazz theory,
your end up playing chords that sound like this:
(piano playing)
or even worse this:
(piano playing)
The old double root-root position.
We're gonna stay away from that.
Instead, we're gonna use
something called Root Shell Pretty.
Now these are chords that actual
jazz musicians use.
Professional jazz musicians, and they just sound good.
So skip the corny sounding root position chord,
let's jump right into Root Shell Pretty.
These are all built up the same way,
from the bottom up.
We have three notes in the left hand
and two in the right hand.
Let's jump in.
So we'll start from the bottom up:
C major 7. With the root on the bottom, that's C.
(music note)
Then we're gonna have the shell,
which is the third and the seventh.
E and B, so the third starting on C.
One, two, three, that's the major third.
And then, four, five, six, seven.
That's the beat, a major seven.
So, that's root and shell.
That's everything we need to do with our left hand.
Now we're gonna add the pretty notes
in the right hand.
And we're gonna go with a D and a G.
(piano playing)
Now the D is the ninth or the second,
you can think about it either way.
We call it the ninth because
we're gonna count all the way down to the root.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight
which is the octave, and then the ninth.
(piano playing)
And then the fifth is the G.
One, two, three, four, five.
(piano playing)
So that sounds pretty good.
Let's compare it to some root positions.
(piano playing)
Let's move on to our next chord.
The great thing about these, Root Shell Pretty,
is that they build up the same way for
a number of different types of chords.
We're go through five today, but
there's many more that they work on.
Of course, you can go and should go through
different keys as well. So, we're gonna
do a minor 7 chord next.
So the root stays the same,
still in the key of C,
and this is a C minor 7 chord.
(piano note)
And then we go to the minor third,
and the minor or dominant seven. Same thing.
So, we count up the same way. One, two, three,
but we're going up a minor scale now.
Four, five, six, seven, root, three, seven.
Root, shell. Root, shell. Okay?
Now for the pretty chords,
we're gonna change it up a little bit.
We're gonna use the ninth again.
Remember we're counting up again.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight, nine, or second.
(piano playing)
Then we're gonna go to the eleventh.
(piano playing)
That's a cool sound right?
And why is this this the eleventh? You can also
call it the fourth,
but we're gonna count up from the root.
One, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.
Or you can count up from this C.
One, two, three, four. Same thing.
(piano playing)
That's a nice sound. Let's do a C minor 7
in root position. No pretty notes.
(piano playing)
Let's move on to our third easy jazz piano chord
that sounds great.
This is a dominant seven.
SO this is C7.
A great chord, very useful.
Starts the same way, root on the bottom.
Shell is the third, the major third
and the dominant seventh.
So it's kind of a hybrid between the first two
that we see.
Same thing with counting up:
one, two, three,
major third.
Four, five, six,
dominant or minor seven.
Gives it that great dominant seventh
kind of bluesy sound.
(piano note)
Now, for our pretty notes,
we're gonna go back to use the same two
that we used on our major seventh.
Because they work nicely.
The ninth and the fifth.
(piano playing)
It's a great sound, right?
(jazz piano music)
Nice little voicing.
Again, that's the ninth.
One, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine.
And the fifth. One, two, three, four, five.
Root, shell, pretty notes.
Let's compare this to a root position.
(Peter "ehing")
Dominant seventh chord.
(piano playing)
Now let's move on to chord number four.
This one's great because it's still a dominant chord,
but we're gonna hit our first alterations.
Start to get some new sounds,
especially for our pretty notes.
So this is C7 sharp 11.
Our root stays the same of course,
still on C.
Our shell stays the same as chord number three,
our dominant seventh because we got the third. Seven.
Root, shell.
Now we're ready for our pretty notes.
We're gonna go for the ninth, the D, our old friend.
And this time, we're gonna go for the sharp eleven.
That's an F sharp.
Nice little sound there right?
And this is sharp eleventh because
we're counting up from the root.
One, two, three, four, then we're making it sharp.
So it's a C sharp.
C7 sharp eleven.
Now for our final jazz piano chord, that sounds great,
C7 sharp nine
This is another dominant seventh chord
with a nice alteration.
Really gives it a nice bluesy sound.
(piano playing)
A little bit harsh but dominant.
So useful. Sounds great.
Let's build it up.
Root.
(piano note)
Shell.
(piano note)
Third seventh
with the dominant seventh and the major third.
And then we're gonna go sharp nine.
(piano note)
Which is in a D sharp. Or an E flat.
Now why is that sharp nine?
Let's count up from the root:
one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, nine, and then we're making it sharp.
So, root, shell, sharp nine,
then we're gonna put a fifth on top.
Because it sounds good.
(jazz music playing)
Sharp nine.
Okay? So that's your five basic jazz chords
that you can play and learn today
and start sounding good.
I encourage you to try these,
there's a number of other ones.
A number of different ways to build it.
The main thing is that you get the concept.
Root. Shell. Pretty notes.
Okay? 'Cause that can be root, shell for a C7,
and then it might be two notes on the right hand.
That's a 13 and a sharp 11.
That could be the ninth and the 13th.
Could be the 13th and the third.
The fifth and the..
Lot of different choices.
I just gave you five to get started with.
Now let's talk about how we're gonna practice these.
You're gonna want to eventually learn them
in all keys.
Couple different way that you could do that
if we go back to voicing number one C major seven.
Root. Shell. Pretty tones.
You can just move up chromatically.
Take your time, move everything up half step.
(piano playing)
This is a piano so the shapes are
a little bit different.
The intervals are always the same
when we go to different keys.
But the shapes are a little different.
It's not like a guitar where you can
just shift your hand and keep your position the same.
Okay? So you can practice these all in that same way.
Minor seven.
(piano playing)
You can also got through the circle of fifths
or the circle of fourths just for variety.
(piano playing)
C major seven.
(piano playing)
F major seven.
(piano playing)
B flat major seven.
We're just moving up in fourths.
(piano playing)
That kind of a thing.
And one more way that you can practice this,
give you a little bit of interesting thing,
getting you ready for jazz piano chord progressions.
And that is to take number four and number five,
of our five chords.
This is number four.
C7 sharp 11.
Root. Shell. Pretty tones ninth sharp 11.
And combine that with number five,
which is sharp nine.
Okay, so this is chord number four.
C7 sharp 11.
That's number 5.
C7 sharp nine.
All I'm doing is going up a half step in the right hand.
(piano playing)
You can kinda see where this is going,
can be some beginning of some little bit
of melodies, little bit of voice leading.
Sharp, chord number four, chord number five.
Now we're going up a half step,
so we're going to D flat seven.
Sharp 11.
(piano playing)
To D flat seven sharp nine.
(piano playing)
D seven, going up half step again.
D seven sharp eleven.
D seven sharp nine.
(piano playing)
You'll see all this written out
in the worksheet that you can download here.
And hope you enjoyed.
Remember, stay away from root position voicings.
I mean, you wanna understand 'em
but you don't wanna play this.
(piano playing)
'Cause if you start playing that
you're going to improvise like this.
(piano playing)
We don't wanna do that,
we wanna be...
(jazz piano playing)
Alright, happy practicing.
(jazz music playing)