Add Tasty “Chord Candy” Piano Fills to Your Basic Pop Chords 

Am I the only keys player that gets frustrated at how easy it is to play across keys on guitar?

The tuning of the guitar makes it less intuitive for sure, but the upside is that it's extremely easy to transpose. Things like parallel chromatic movement of chords are so easy on guitar.

On the other hand, the guitar offers whole worlds of articulation that are either entirely impossible or much more limited on a keyboard, and simply unavailable on a piano.

Easy? I learn something on the guitar and can shift it and everything I know across all keys. But on the piano, everything I know in one key goes completely out the window in others, almost every single shape is different and I have to learn and memorise every triad, seventh chord, 9, 11, & 13 extension, altered extension, in all inversions, then times everything by twelve for all 12 keys, literally a ridiculous amount of shapes to memorise. That’s without things like confusing open voicings, rootless voicings, drop 2, drop 3, slash chords. You can have a chord progression and that same chord progression looks and feels completely different in each key, even technique and fingering is different, let alone with scales, there are endless concepts. And all this mirrored in both hands with all 10 fingers too. I get the guitar has some conditions and it’s very difficult but the piano has endless difficulties itself. I was playing in different keys on the guitar since day one, but for the piano it’s a Mount Everest to overcome, and most people never get there

There are a lot of different ways to frame “why” this works. One that resonates with me is that virtually everything Jeff is doing here is the “world of C.” By that, I mean that all of these chords come from either the C Major or C Natural Minor scale. The concept of “borrowing” chords from the parallel minor mode is called “modal interchange,” and it’s a popular harmonic concept common in many styles of music. (Note: this doesn’t apply so much to the final “diminished trick,” which I would say works mostly because you’re toggling between “resolved” and “unresolved” by way of half-step movement. 😁)

@bodhibeats8257 Thanks for sharing. I was expecting him to say something like that but he didn't.

the why is hardly as important as it feels when you’re a beginner, you’ll figure it out as you go

I'd say the why is rooted in tension and release. There's a constant back and forth between those two. He's not only creating tension with the chord progression (C chord being the release as it is the 1), but also in between each chord.