The Best Piano Exercises (Part 3) – Broken Seventh Chords

Welcome back to our ongoing series of piano exercises. These are meant to be quick techniques you can practice with just a few minutes each day to help develop your strength. The first part in the series dealt with a Broken Triad Exercise and the second was Practicing Major Scales with C Major Fingering. This week we will be covering Broken Seventh Chords.

As long as you know all your seventh chords, you can play them in all keys as arpeggios. Why would you just play major and minor triads as arpeggios? Not only is this is a wonderful way to develop your technique but when you come across broken seventh chords in your music you will already know how to approach them.

The order I play them is:

– Major seventh chord
– Dominant seventh chord
– Minor seventh chord
– Half diminished seventh chord
– Diminished seventh chord

Why this particular order? If you play them this way, there is only one note that has to change between chords. Simply keep playing the chords one by one and go through all twelve of the keys. The video included with this article will show you a great example of this.

Here is the key on how to transition from chord to chord:

– Major seventh chord: Lower the 7th a half-step
– Dominant seventh chord: Lower the 3rd a half-step
– Minor seventh chord: Lower the 5th a half-step
– Half diminished seventh chord: Lower the 7th a half-step
– Diminished seventh chord: That’s it!

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com