Kawai Piano Lessons: How to Sound like a Pro on

Want to sound more advanced on piano—without learning harder chords? In this quick lesson, pianist Michael shares a simple technique to make your chord playing instantly more musical and expressive.

Using just a few subtle note movements, you’ll learn how to add motion, depth, and color to your triads, transforming your comping from basic to beautiful in minutes.

Watch the full lesson above, or follow along with the complete transcript below.

Video Transcript

Hi there. My name is Michael and in this lesson we’re going to be working on sprucing up your chord playing. How often do you find yourself playing something like this?

If you want to get out of just playing major and minor chords all the time, which can be completely sufficient. Have endless depth. You can introduce just a couple of notes outside of the chord back and forth to just add a little bit of color. Here’s a quick exercise. Just moving the top, middle, and bottom note in and out of the chord, just to add a little bit more motion while you’re comping.

So what you’re going to want to do instead of just playing the triad.

Start by first moving the bottom note of your right hand down, back and up, back down, up.

Let’s move on and try the middle note down. Back up. Back down. Back up. Now let’s try the top note.

Down. Back up.

Down. Back up. Back.

Practice this with a metronome at different tempo, with different chords. And you’ll have new color in your chords in no time. For all the notation that we’ve reviewed today, please visit us.com.