I am playing piano starting about 4-5 years ago and working hard.
For a long while I have been struggling with chord extensions, ie. those exotic notes that the best players pepper their playing with.
I have a good degree of flexibility with basic chords and inversions but using these extra notes does not come easy to me - yet. I can fill in maybe a ninth or a sixth as a passing tone, but that's about it.
It's not that I don't know where they are, it's more that when I do use them my ear says 'well what did you do that for!" - although, paradoxically, I find these notes fine in other peoples playing.

I was speaking to another (better) piano player and he has suggested that instead of reaching for an inversion of a chord - left hand root fifth, or, root octave, or root 7th and right hand an inversion of the stated chord - as I normally do. Instead of this, I should think of 'feature notes'. He thought of these as frequently the third and the seventh, plus any exotic. notes from the chord symbol.

Interestingly, he filled in the other missing spaces not with the notes from a associated scale (e.g. diminished scale to go with diminished chord) but just with the regular notes from the key of the piece.

I feel there is something in this approach, but I can't think of a way to get this approach 'instantaneous' as it has to be for improvisation.

The piece we were looking at was Bewitched


Any thoughts appreciated...

Win 11 64, Asus Rog Strix z390 mobo, 64 gig RAM, 8700k