Take Your Piano Chords to the Next Level (Beginner Lesson)

If you’ve learned your root position triads, congratulations! This is a MAJOR step in your piano journey. Chords and chord progressions are the foundation of music, so you’re well on your way to becoming a well-rounded piano player and musician.

At this point, you can probably look at a lead sheet and “strum” the chords along with the melody. And while this sounds fine and dandy, you may find yourself wanting to play more. So, how can we make our chords sound even better? In this lesson, we’ll show you ways to take your piano chords to the next level with a few simple techniques:

1. Play With Both Hands
2. Inversions
3. Broken Chords
4. Left-Hand Patterns

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The Chord Progression

We’ll be working in the key of D major for this lesson, and our chord progression is the I-V-vi-IV pop progression that is found in pop songs everywhere:

D – A – Bm – G

Before you start dressing up the progression, practice the chords here in their basic, root position form first:

You can also experiment with playing just shell chords and removing the center note.

Play With Both Hands

An easy way to spice up chords? Play them with two hands! 

Now, hand independence can be a tricky thing for beginners. But if you’re just learning how to play with both hands, you can still spice up your chords with an easy two-hand pattern. Such as this one:

With this pattern, you don’t even need to play both hands at the same time. But by using two hands, you cover a wider ranger of notes. A pattern like this is perfect for playing and singing at the same time.

Try experimenting with similar two-handed patterns.

Inversions

Inversions will instantly level up your playing. What are inversions? Inversions are when we play the notes in a chord in a different order. 

For example, here is the root position and two inversions of the D major chord. We create each inversion by taking the bottom note and flipping it up an octave.

Root Position

1st Inversion

2nd Inversion

You can learn more about inversions here.

Inversions aren’t just for show. They’re useful. In fact, inversions can be used to transition faster between chords.

Here’s me using the second inversion of our D major triad to transition smoothly to A major root position.

Broken Chords

Playing chords broken is an awesome way to make your chords sound fancy and more advanced. This is actually quite easy. Simply take your triads, inverted or not, and play each note separately.

In the example above, I added the root note with my left hand and played it in an octave. This adds more depth to the song.

Broken chords are used by tons of pop artists, including Adele. In fact, by playing this progression broken, you’re basically playing “Someone Like You”!

Left Hand Patterns

This final technique combines a little bit of everything we’ve learned so far.

On our left hand, we’ll play a broken fifth pattern. And then we’ll pair it with chords (inverted or not, it’s up to you!) in our right hand. Like this:

We hope you leave this lesson with a few new ideas on how to spice up your chords! If you want more support and feedback from real teachers, consider joining Pianote as a Member. Here’s a free trial to get you started!

Related Free Lessons:

• How to Play ALL Piano Chords (Major, Minor, 7ths)
• 4 Chord Piano Songs (Play Hundreds of Songs on Piano With Just 4 Chords)
• Why We Love Chords! (The Foundations of Music)

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