Learning to play songs beautifully knowing only chords

[webbuildermn]

Hello all, first post and quite new to Piano. I'm more familiar with guitar. I know a good smattering of theory.

My question is given a set of chords to a song, how do you play it nice and make it sound beautiful? I know it's a big subject and success requires practice but how do you start on this path? Is there a specific term for this that would be good for search? What is the name for the decorative or embellishment notes add to chords to make it sound really fancy?

I can do this in the guitar but not yet in piano. I realized the shape of your hand tells a lot about the chord you are playing in guitar, but not as much in piano. I think in piano there is more freedom but therefore more complexity. In guitar there is more constraint but there is less need to think.

So if you're curious I'm listening to the Town I loved so Well by Phil Coulter. I don't have sheet music but that's actually good because now I get to think and learn. I do have chords. At least at tabs.ultimate-guitar.com the chords  for the first verse are G D C G, C G D, G D C G, C G D G, Em D C G, C Am D, G D C G, C G D G.

 

[ranjit]

I am assuming that you're talking about plain chords and not about chord extensions.

The basic idea is to play the notes of the chord in various configurations, voicings, and with different rhythms.

In general, most of the left hand accompaniments you find which use chords fall into certain categories:
- broken chords
- arpeggios
- stride
- walking bass
- chords played in inversions and voicings
- octaves

There might be some theory as to how exactly to play chords, but nothing much that I'm aware of. People do study how to voice complex jazz chords. And a lot of it is based around voice leading in some capacity. Basically, you don't want chords to jump around too much so that it doesn't sound disjointed. So, you use inversions to reduce that distance. Typically, you want the bottom notes to not leap around too much, so that they can form a kind of "melody" line.

For example, C major -> G major is often played C-E-G D-G-B.

You use broken chords when you play the notes of a chord in a certain punctuated rhythm. For a C major chord, play: C-EG, C-EG.

Arpeggios involve playing the notes of a chord one after another, sometimes over multiple octaves and in different patterns, and usually give a more flowing texture.

Stride is when you play a bass note or octave in the left hand followed by a chord, and keep leaping around.

You can think of walking bass as being similar to an upright bass playing. You target the bass notes of the chords/inversions, and walk around a bit to form a line.

Generally, octaves tend to give a bit of a "punch", especially so down in the bass registers.

I would suggest just looking up piano covers and checking out how they play the chords. There is a rather standard bag of tricks which is used much of the time. In addition to the ones I mentioned, there are some jazz style-specific left hand patterns.

[webbuildermn]

Thanks Ranjit, that was exactly what I was going for. A lot of stuff to search and figure out.

A pianist playing these simple basic chords:
https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/the-dubliners/the-town-i-loved-so-well-chords-866975

with the techniques you described (and many hours of practice)
perhaps changing the key

should be able to play this song as Phil plays:

Or any number of musicians. It's about independence from sheet music and being able to improve and ad lib and recreate.

Lots to chew on. Thanks!