Comping is pretty much an essential skill if you want to be a decent pop pianist. The video below is designed to tie in with my book, How To Really Play The Piano and offers an overview of getting started with comping and the basic techniques used in working up piano comps. (You don’t need to be reading the book to benefit from the tutorial.)
As well as stunning singing (!) from yours truly, the vid covers the basics of what comping is and is not, and looks at how we approach commercial sheet music when developing comps of other people’s songs. I also have a couple of other videos on comps and comping, which you can find listed on the How To Really Play The Piano resource page.
The one essential point I make in the video that’s really worth repeating is that successful comping depends on two things:
- Complete familiarity with the important chords in the most common keys, both major and minor
- Willingness to spend time experimenting and playing around with chords so they fall naturally under your fingers and you get a deep sense of how to make particular sounds
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It’s also very useful to understand some basic harmony, because most comps that you play will be based on chord progressions that behave in fairly standard, predictable ways. Knowing a bit about how chords work with one another makes coming up with comps much easier. If you want to improve your knowledge of harmony as it relates to playing the piano, there’s a full section of information in the book and several harmony-related videos on the resource page.
As ever, if you have any questions about any of this, post them in the comment thread and I’ll get right back to you. Enjoy the singing…
