Right-hand Techniques for Chord Style Piano

In my previous blog entry I introduced a variety of left hand techniques to enhance chord style playing. But what about the right hand? In standard notation the right hand often plays more than a single note, and there are chord style piano techniques that allow us to do the same thing.

One option for adding additional right hand notes is to find an arrangement featuring two notes for the right hand as well as chord symbols. Usually this requires finding a complete standard notation version of a song and sometimes it can work well. There are two drawbacks to this approach, however. First, it requires additional time and practice to learn to read and play more than one note at a time on the treble clef. Second, and perhaps more significantly, the chords won't always sound with the additional notes being played. This is because music arrangers expect musicians to either play the full arrangement of a song or to play just a single melody note along with the chord. They don't usually try playing their arrangements with left hand chords and multiple right hand notes to make sure it sounds okay when played that way.

A better option is to ignore any non-melody notes that you might see on the treble clef and just make your own decisions about which additional notes to play with your right hand, using the chord symbol as a guide to ensure that every note will fit. This technique is somewhat advanced and can require a lot of practice to perfect, but it can help certain songs sound more "full."

In the example below I am using 6th and 5th intervals in the right hand, with octave chords roots being played by the left hand. Note that even if a lead sheet only features a single melody note, any chord note can be added to the right hand, as long as it is BELOW the melody note and not so far away that both notes can't be played with one hand:

If we can play octaves with the left hand, why not play them with the right hand? You might be surprised how much more full this can make a song sound. In slower songs playing the lower note of an octave just a little bit before the higher note can also create a very pleasing and beautiful effect:

Finally, we'll look at adding "fills" with the right hand. Note that in this example, even though the melody might sound a little bit different than what we're used to hearing, all of the original melody notes are still played. We're just adding extra notes in between some of the melody notes. These extra notes, in most cases, simply came from the notes that are contained in the chord. For example, in the first measure I added an E note, which is safe because E is one of the notes in the C major chord: