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In this piano lesson, I’m going to teach you how to take standard Major 7 chords, the kind you hear all the time, and “phatten” them up into fantastic Major 9 voicings. And here’s why they’re so great – This Major 9 voicing can be used almost anytime on the piano when you see a capital M7 or MAJ7 written on sheet music.

Maybe you’re not reading music, maybe you’re writing it. If you’re a song writer and you want to really open up the sounds in your music, try throwing in some of these Major 9 voicings on the keyboard. In either case, you’ll find it’s a quick way to substitute some phat chord sounds for minimal brain effort.

To demonstrate this Major 9 chord voicing in action, I’m going to play through the first half of the song titled “When the morning comes”. It’s a real laid back mellow piece. And it’s ideal because it really uses this particular chord voicing quite a bit. Here it is…

[ transcript note: in the video above, piano plays in this section ]

Watch the Video Version of this piano lesson (top of this page)

There’s lot of stuff in that piano video to study. Also, if you don’t mind the shameless plug of my work you can find the full version of that song on iTunes. I just played about half of it here in this piano lesson. If you want to find it you can do a search for “Piano Lessons” – we’re under “podcasts”.

Alright, let’s go back to the video piano lesson. For the sake of time, in this video I’m just going to drop into the video about half way through the piano lesson so you’ll really get a feel for what’s being taught here. You’ll see what it’s like to take these Major 9 chord voicings and apply them to your music. It will really open up the possibilities in the sound of the keyboard. Here’s the short excerpt from about half way through this piano lesson…

Use that chord voicing in your left hand and in your right hand you play it a triad built a fifth up from the root. You can play it anywhere you want. Then go to a triad build a second up from the root. In this case it’s a D triad. Look at that, isn’t that nice? Now those notes are technically not within the chords. But they’re passing tones because we use them as such. Listen to this..

[ piano lesson video playing here ]

So there’s the D triad. And then it moves back to the MAJ9, and guess what – you can straddle the D chord as well! Isn’t that nice?

Now we can go and use that same technique now that you’ve got it. Now you can use it on the E flat. Wow – It’s like the sun is coming out! This would be a great time now and go back and review the song that I used in the opening of this piano lesson.

Everything that you’ve learned so far I used in that song on the piano. In fact, if you watch that song, every time I come to a C chord, you’ll see I’m using a big lush, nice, open Major 9 voicing. And as my right hand is playing, look really carefully and you’ll see I’m just playing things from G triads, D triads and you know all the tricks to that.

This has just been a really short sample from Phat chord voicings, Chapter 2. If you’d like to see more, go to playpianotoday.com/video

In this website, there’s a wealth of online piano and keyboard lessons that you can dig into right away including this lesson.