Piano Chord Voicings

The Pianist's Palette
by David Longo

Dear Fellow Piano Enthusiast,

Welcome! It is a pleasure as well as a privilege to have you here...

I have a question for you:

Do you see yourself as an "artist?"

If you don't right now, one of my personal goals is to get you to change your mind about that.

If you can at least imagine yourself as an artist for a moment, would you agree that the more colors available you have to work with, the more potentially interesting any work of art of yours becomes? In addition, your overall experience becomes a whole lot more interesting, too, since nothing can replace the sense of freedom that any artist enjoys when having plenty of colors and tools at his or her fingertips.

It's this freedom that I want to help you achieve as it applies to expressing yourself musically. The more "colorful sounds" you have on your "pianist palette," the more of that freedom you are sure to realize.

In this manuscript, I would like to acknowledge a few of these "colors" with you, if I may. If this material is responsible for providing you with enough curiosity to cause you to want to move ahead on your musical journey with optimism and a hunger for learning more, then I will consider its purpose fulfilled...

If you are familiar with 7th chords to a degree (in particular, Major 7ths for our discussion here), you will take to this content very readily. If you are quite new to playing chords, there's good news in store for you as well. You will find it helpful to equip yourself with a knowledge of triads (three-note chords) so that you can clearly see that 7th chords are merely extensions of these. This is not to say that you cannot follow along here and play these examples before doing so. I am merely pointing the way for a more comprehensive experience. You can learn how to play the four basic types of triads using a very simple procedure that requires no previous piano experience whatsoever. This very easy method can be found at Piano Chords 101 (a video/guidebook combo makes learning triads a piece of cake).

At this point, I will trust that you, reading this, are ready to move ahead...

The following illustration shows a Cmaj7 chord in its most basic form. The chord is in "Root position" because the Root, or name, of the chord is the lowest chord tone being played. In addition, the chord is in "closed" position because each of the chord tones are as close as they can be to each other (in other words, there is no other C, E, G, or B in between any two adjacent chord tones that are being played (the next illustration will present an example where this is not the case):

You are encouraged to go to your piano or keyboard and play all examples

Let's give a listen to what Cmaj7, as shown above, sounds like on the piano (played twice):

Now let's take a look (and listen) to how making one slight change to this chord can create quite a different sound texture. What we will do is take that E and move it one octave higher, while all the other chord members remain where they are:

Cmaj7 Root Open

Although this chord is still in Root position (since the Root is still the lowest chord tone being played), this chord structure is now considered to be in "open" position, because not all of the chord tones are as close as they can possibly be to each other. You see, there is a chord tone that is not being played in between the C and the G. We have, you might say, "opened the chord up."
By the way, when take a chord structure and move the chord tones around like this to create different sound textures, the resulting chord structures are very often referred to as "voicings" or "chord voicings." Learning different chord voicings and incorporating them in your favorite songs is a most rewarding experience, as people who are involved with ProProach are well aware, since that is a major objective of that piano chord program.

Let's give a listen to this Cmaj7 chord voicing (played twice):

(continued)

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