Stay With Me - Sam Smith

Ease comes in many forms. Personally I like the ones that sound good best, but that's just me 😉 . Sometimes the difficulty lays in finding that which is in the end turns out to be easy. Strip the whole shebang down to what's actually essential. Effective. And sometimes that leaves you with just 4 different notes for an entire verse.
Their (changing) mutual harmonic relationship is what is important though. That is what counts. That is what's valuable. Keeping that in mind, this weeks tutorial, however easy it may be, teaches us many chord-skill refining lessons actually, amongst which: 

  • Effective voicing; stripping down and how playing lesser notes (e.g. NOT all the notes of the chord) can sound great.
  • Building up; both by adding (back) more notes of the chord and voicing / inverting 'em different higher up the keyboard.
  • Substituting a chord for another (or adding in an extra one) to dramatize / deepen / ease the sound and feel (or just to add some nice variation).
  • How to play a right hand melody, and some options to accompany it with the left.

Have fun! Cheers, Coen.

All skills, tricks, tips, techniques and knowledge from this- and all other lessons @ this website are taken and can be learnt from my book / course ‘Hack the Piano‘ – The unconventional shortcut method to truly understand music and the piano.

About Coen

Founder of Piano Couture and creator of the Hack the Piano method. Coen is a musician, reader, writer, web-designer, eater and traveler. Find him at CoenModder.com

3 thoughts on “Stay With Me - Sam Smith”

Leave a Comment

Subscribe to Get Free Updates

Stay up to date & receive free exclusive tips, tricks, lessons and offers.

Item added to cart.
0 items - 0.00
Subscribe To Our Newsletter

the Couturian

The Couturian is a free email newsletter with tips, tricks and lessons for playing modern piano without sheets.

Play It For Me

Get a custom-arranged piano recording
professionally played & recorded by Coen

Teach Me

If you want to learn how to play Chord Piano yourself,
this free workshop is the quickest way to learn how

Let's find what's right for you

How would you like your arrangement?