5 Ways to Make Your Piano Chords Sound Better

In this article, I give you 5 ways to make your piano chords sound better.

This is a piano-focused tutorial for those of you who want to improve your piano writing skills.

Even if you don’t consider yourself a pianist these tips will really help you to improve your piano writing skills.

Who Am I To Teach You This?

Over the years I have become known for my Piano Works with Elephant Music which has been amazing as it has meant that I have been able to continue to compose piano-based music for film trailers.  Which is amazing!

The most recent of which was a drama-focused release (Piano Works 9) where we recorded the piano live with an amazing string trio.

The sound we achieved was intimate and almost Phillip Glass-sequel which was amazing. I got quite emotional about it!

5 Tips to Make Your Piano Chords Sound Better

• Use Different Voicings
• Use tension and release in your chords (suspensions)
• Use 5th chords in your left hand
• Layer ostinatos over your chords
• Explore different voicings (7ths etc.)

How I voice chords on the piano

I’m not a trained pianist. I came to the piano as a guitarist, so everything here is what I’ve picked up over years of writing piano parts for trailers.

The first thing I do is split the job between the hands. My left hand lives below C3 and is the motor: it plays the bass line and the driving rhythm. My right hand sits above C3 and plays the melody and the supporting harmony notes, usually the third and fifth of each chord.

In the left hand I stick to roots, fifths and octaves. Rocking between the root, the fifth and the octave gives you movement straight away, and it’s something you’ll hear pianists like Ludovico Einaudi do all the time. I avoid thirds down low because they turn muddy, especially once the sustain pedal is down. Talking of which, lift and re-press the pedal at each chord change so the harmonies don’t pile up on top of each other.

For tension, try keeping one note sounding across the whole sequence. If I’m in E minor, I’ll hold the E over every chord: E and B over the E minor, E and C over the C, D and E over the D. That shared note creates a gentle suspension that pulls against each change.

Inversions are worth a try too. Sometimes a chord with its third in the bass, like a G with a B underneath, sits much more smoothly than the root position version. Close voicings, where you keep the notes bunched together rather than spreading them out, let you keep the tension of richer chords like minor 11ths while the part still sounds simple.

Finally, patterns do a lot of the work. A simple arpeggio in threes over a bar of four adds urgency without changing the harmony at all.

If you want to go further, 6 Easy Ways To Write For Piano covers rocking notes, arpeggios and rhythmic chords, and What Are Suspended Chords? explains how sus2 and sus4 chords are built and when to resolve them. My Cinematic Piano Course goes through left and right hand writing, patterns and chord sequences step by step.

Happy composing!Rich