Jamcast!

Soft rock piano exercise

Bill — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 09:09:28 +0000

“Rock piano” actually covers a massive range of piano styles. In recent years the piano has had a bit of a revival in mainstream chart music, especially in the UK, with bands like Keane and Scouting for Girls putting the instrument right at the centre of their line-ups.

Anyhow, this tutorial looks at the way you can use a repeated right hand lick over a chord progression in the left to get a distinctive soft-rock sound. It’s a useful technique you can adapt to quite a few situations - it’s also useful for songwriting.

One of the interesting things that’s going on here is the contrast of the constant E-based right hand over the changing progression in the left. As the chords in the left hand change, they alter the flavour of the right, creating interesting harmonies that imply suspended fourths and ninths - a sound that’s very common in a lot of rock piano, and also in country and folk.

Why piano scales are important

Bill — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 09:24:48 +0000

Piano scales often get a bad press. Repeated scale practice is often cited as a reason for quitting piano lessons among beginners. The simple fact is, though, that scales are incredibly important - it’s very difficult to become a really good pianist unless you master your scales and practise them pretty regularly.

The problem is that it’s very rarely explained to piano learners why scales matter so much. The video above covers my thinking about scales in a bit of detail, but here are some of the key points:

Knowing your piano scales helps you to function effectively in different keys. If you play your scales regularly, then a wide range of keys will fall under your fingers much more naturally than might otherwise be the case. It’s quite common for piano improvisers only to be able to play in a relatively small number of keys: knowing your scales helps you break out of that trap.
Scales give you balance and control at the piano keyboard, and improve coordination. You’ll find that if you play regularly you get better strength in your fingers, and greater finger independence.
If you’re going to play any classical piano, a knowledge of scales - and an ability to play them smoothly - is absolutely essential, simply because classical piano music contains so many scale runs and arpeggios and so many sections where you need very fine motor control in your fingers.

Suspended ninths - a.k.a. “the country third”

Bill — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 09:01:07 +0000

Licks based on suspended ninths are really common in all kinds of contemporary music - especially pop ballads, folk and country. And they’re not just confined to the piano, either: the so-called “country third” is one of the most characteristic sounds of the last thirty years or so. Best of all, it’s a really simple concept to understand:

Suspended ninths (and their close cousins, suspended fourths) have their roots in church music, and it’s mainly from the hymnal tradition that we get the concept of the major ninth (which, of course, is the same note as a major second) as a resolver on to the major third in a tonic triad.

Like I say in the video, the country third works very well over major chords, but can be a bit problematic over minor chords - but you can usually solve that problem by moving everything up by a minor third.

Intervals - the basics

Bill — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 22:35:44 +0000

An “interval” is the technical name for the distance between two notes, although it’s also used to describe the particular character of two notes being played together - a “major third”, “perfect fourth” and so on.

It’s useful to understand intervals, because they help you describe music independent of key - i.e., without having to refer to specific notes. This video tutorial covers the basics:

As you can see, there’s a bit of technical language involved in intervals, but it’s worth knuckling down and learning the basics, because understanding how they work and how they are labelled is incredibly useful.

Easy piano improv - the 4 minute jazz piano tutorial

Bill — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 18:03:38 +0000

Here’s a piano tutorial I made this afternoon for fun, and to try to prove a point. The point is that improvisation can be very easy. Piano students often get terribly hung up about how difficult it must be to “make it up as you go along”…

The point, of course, is that when you improvise on the piano you are usually working within some sort of framework which has its own natural limits. That might be a chord progression, a rhythmic pattern, or a particular scale. Although you have a lot of discretion to improvise as you like, you don’t have complete freedom. And it’s that relative lack of freedom that you can exploit to come up with impressive improvisations.

The way I get people to start improvising is to begin with just one note and slowly build outwards, using an increasing number of notes from the blues scale – which is, of course, one of the most important scales in jazz. Of course, piano improvisation is much harder than improvisation on many other instruments simply because you need to play more than one note at a time. However, once you realise that fundamentally it isn’t some sort of witchcraft, it’s all just a case of practice and experimentation.

I - IV - V piano chords

Bill — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 09:29:04 +0000

If you’re going to master piano chords, the most basic essentials are the I, IV and V (1,4 and 5) chords in any key - also known as the tonic, subdominant and dominant. They tend to be the principal chords in any piece of music. So if you’re in a position where progressions based on them fall naturally under your hands on the piano keyboard, you’re off to a good start for improvisation, songwriting and general piano playing.

Whatever you do, don’t forget to figure out the I, IV and V of as many keys as possible - don’t get “trapped” in a few simple keys. At the same time, don’t feel you have to learn every single voicing and inversion of the chords on the keyboard. Just pick up what they are and how they work, and start to develop a good feel for them, and the rest should come naturally!

Adele - and arpeggios on the piano

Bill — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 09:32:32 +0000

An arpeggio is a pattern of notes that you make by playing the constituent notes of a chord individually, in some kind of order. Arpeggios have been an essential part of piano playing for a couple of hundred years - in fact, ever since the sustain pedal was invented, which allowed them to be played smoothly. This video tutorial looks at the basics of arpeggios and broken chords and how you can use them in your piano playing, songwriting and improvisation.

In this video tutorial I use the song Someone Like You by Adele as an example of this. The piano accompaniment to the song uses very simple arpeggios based on broken triads.

If you’ve ever had piano lessons you’ll probably be very familiar with arpeggios, because they’re a key part of piano education, especially as you get into higher grades and start playing a lot of nineteenth century piano music, where they feature very heavily. In particular, you’ll probably have been taught how to pedal broken chords properly, which is important, as it’s very easy to overpedal and end up with a mushy sound.

One of the big advantages of learning arpeggiation skills is that it helps you develop comps for certain types of song very quickly, and, if you’re a songwriting, you can also use them to work up provisional piano parts fast.

In fact, if you get the combination of fingering and pedalling right, and arpeggios are an incredibly powerful all-round tool, as the accompaniment to Someone Like You shows. You can put a great deal of expression into them very easily, and use them to create rhythm, movement and harmony all at once. On a real piano, or a high end digital piano, you can get very rich, powerful, rolling sounds. You just need to exercise a certain amount of precision and care on the keyboard, and you also need to know your piano chords very, very well - as usual, it all comes down to practice!

Elton John’s piano style

Bill — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 09:44:01 +0000

This video tutorial focuses on Elton John’s piano style. Elton John is really important in history of pop piano and modern piano comping because, in effect, he pioneered many of the techniques that are so widespread today.

The tutorial takes the song Amoreena as its starting point, but touches on quite a few other aspects of the way Elton John plays the piano.

A point that’s really worth repeating is that Elton John started off with a strong classical training. He had lots of piano lessons as a kid, and you can see that reflected in the way he plays to this day. He’s very confident with scale runs and arpeggios, and he has a very good touch on the piano keyboard: everything is very elegant and controlled, with perfectly executed phrasing and dynamics. That’s something you very rarely hear in self-taught pianists.

Another major influence from his childhood is church music. You can hear many hymnal influences in his songwriting, particularly the way he uses suspended fourths – a really characteristic Elton John sound.

He is also clearly a very big fan of the blues, and uses blues licks extensively in his piano playing. If you’re not quite up to speed with the blues, you can pick up the basics from my other website, www.bluespiano.tv, where I have quite a few of my blues piano tutorials indexed. You can also find them all – along with all the videos from Jamcast – in the timeline on my YouTube piano tutorial channel.

So, with all of the above, you should be able to make a good start on playing Elton John’s piano music. Nearly all of the chords and lyrics of his songs are available online – a quick Google should help you find as many as you want. If you have any questions, either on Elton John or any other aspect of piano playing, just leave a comment and I’ll get right back to you.

Pentatonic scales for improvisation

Bill — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:39:21 +0000

Pentatonic scales are really handy for improvisation. This tutorial focuses on using pentatonics for improvising on the piano, but the basic theory and practice that I’m talking about can be applied to just about any instrument playing in any genre - jazz, blues, pop or whatever.

The key point I make in the video is about the universality of pentatonic scales. The regular major and minor scales that we learn in our music lessons are actually a product of the Western European musical tradition, and don’t appear in, say, Chinese or native American music.

Pentatonics, however, are a feature of just about every form of pitch-based music that humanity has ever created. They are, you might say, deeply rooted in the human brain and integral to our understanding of what music is. The benefit of that to you, as an musical improviser, is that notes taken from the pentatonic scale of the key you are playing in are always “safe ground”. It’s pretty hard to play something that sounds wrong or out of place if you confine yourself to the pentatonic scale.

The other useful thing to know about pentatonics is that you can use them to write really memorable tunes. However, that’s another subject for another post. If you have any questions on the video above, do the usual thing and stick them either in the comment thread below or on the original YouTube video page.

Jazz piano improvisation exercise in E flat

Bill — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 09:25:37 +0000

This is a fairly basic, but pretty enjoyable, jazz piano improvisation exercise in the key of E flat. You should find it useful if you’re just getting into jazz piano and/or improvisation in general, because it uses a very simple chord progression and limits the number of notes you have to play in the right hand. In other words, it’s kind of difficult to get lost!

As with all my improvisation exercises – whether for jazz, blues, or pop styles – the secret of success here is to practise it repeatedly. Good improvisation starts to happen when your fingers “think” for themselves. In other words, the basic skills need to become so rooted in your brain that everything starts to happen unconsciously once you sit down at the piano.

If you find this difficult at first, do what your piano teacher always taught you to do and try it with your two hands separately. First of all, master the chord progression in the left hand. When you can play it without thinking about it too much, move on to the right hand pattern and get yourself really comfortable playing notes you’re “allowed” to improvise on. When things are flowing – and that might take quite a few repetitions – try putting the two together. As usual, it’s worth stressing that if you’re completely new to improvising on the piano keyboard it’s a good idea to play exercises like this dozens or hundreds of times. If you annoy the neighbours, you’re doing it right.

As usual, if you have any questions just post them below or (alternatively) in the comment thread on the YouTube video page.