KEYS
SECRET CHORDS THAT PLEASE THE LORD ? | David Pfaltzgraff
Photo by Yanna Zissiadou on Unsplash
I always tell people that I ’ m a guitarist who plays keys , not the other way around . If she ever heard this , it would probably upset my Mom , who diligently gave me weekly piano lessons through elementary school as my introduction to music .
But once I hit my pre-teen years , I decided that guitar was a lot cooler after my parents gave me my first acoustic and not long after that I dropped piano to focus on the six string . During my high school years I cut my teeth in youth band , jamming away with an Epiphone Les Paul through a Marshall half stack . After I learned basic chords my practice time for several years was evenly split between digesting guitar tabs of my favorite pop-punk bands and learning finger-picking songs by Phil Keaggy . It was a bit odd , but I knew what I liked .
All of that to say , by the time I came back to piano as an adult upon realizing that I ’ d need to dust off my chops if I was going to be of any help to the keyboardists volunteering on my worship team , I had a good decade or more of chord sensibilities specifically shaped by what felt natural , intuitive , and smooth from the fretboard , not the eighty-eight keys of a piano .
When my Mom taught me piano , I learned the instrument classically , with traditional sheet music . So , when I began to reacquaint myself with the instrument in a modern worship context it was impossible for me to separate what I knew to be true from guitar , with my approach to the keyboard .
This interesting background made some things intuitive to me that might not have been otherwise , but I also had to change my mindset on others to unlock the keyboard to a fuller potential .
In this article I ’ d like to talk about a couple things I ’ ve learned that can make all the difference when choosing your chord voicings from the piano , and how my goofball pre-teen guitarist self deserves a bit of the credit .
POWER , CHORDS When I was a kid learning the aforementioned pop-punk songs , I quickly found that they all shared the same kind of chord voicing : a power chord . This basic combination of the root , 5th , and octave showed up over and over , in every guitar-song I learned .
This taught me that chords don ’ t always need to have lots of harmonic complexity to have a powerful impact . What a basic power chord may lack in overtones it can more than make up for in fundamental effect if it ’ s hit at the right time , in the right register , with the right intensity .
If you play guitar you ’ re surely familiar with power chords . From the piano I find that sometimes similarly sparse chord shapes can work just as well , especially if you ’ re in the lower register of the keyboard . These chords work because they strongly emphasize the fundamental and leave space elsewhere .
I also love to play this style of ‘ piano power
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