How to Play Chords on the Piano - Part 1

Welcome. I'm Robert Estrin here at livingpianos.com and virtualsheetmusic.com with a two-part series, "How to Play Chords on the Piano."

Today's talk is going to be about how to play slow chords on the piano. Okay well, what is the technique for chords? And what's so special about chords anyway? Well, believe it or not, you can get a drastically different tone out of the piano by how you use to press the keys. I'm going to demonstrate this with the Chopin Prelude in C minor. I want to show you first the way that, you know, it doesn't give the most pleasing sound. I want to start with the Forte Chord. I'll talk about piano chords later in this piece, but first the Forte Chord. If I just sail into them and hit them hard, you're going to get kind of a slapped sound like this.

[Music]

Why is it a slapped sound? Because I'm basically slapping the keys. Interestingly if instead, you apply pressure to the keys. That's right. You release the weight of the arm to the bottom of the key bad on each chord. Listen to the beauty of the tone you can get out of a great instrument like this.

[Music]

Now once again, practicing without the pedal, you can achieve a wonderful legato. But the secret is not just slapping the key with a hard motion at the beginning of the note, but to pressing to the bottom of the key with a full weight of the arms, gives that beautiful sound. And if you are even a halfway decent in piano, you can exert tremendous energy without ever getting an ugly sound.

Now, what about when there's quiet chords? If I were to play the next section and even use arm weight. I'm not going to slap, I'm just going to be gentle. But listen what happens, you lose the melody. Listen to that.

[Music]

Here is the secret. The softer you play on the piano, the more difference you must make to delineate the melody notes, generally the top notes. So in a loud chord, you can just play them all equally and that top note is going to come right through, but when you play very piano chords quietly, you have to kind of reach for that top note and you'll get this kind of sound

[Music]

And incidentally, that's a general rule of piano playing. The more quietly you play, the more difference between accompaniment and melody you must achieve.

Well, that's all for part one. Watch for part two, "How to Play Fast Chords on the Piano." Thanks for joining me. Robert at livingpianos.com and virtualsheetmusic.com.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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