by Tania Gleaves on January 18, 2010
Unsatisfied with your present piano skills? Want to know the top ways to sound great playing piano?
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Develop and refine your piano technique.
No matter how advanced your playing develops, you’ll always benefit from returning to the basics. Returning to the basics in fact, is one of the top ways to sound great playing piano and it means practicing your scales, chords, sharps, flats, and all the other grunt work you learned as a beginner. You’ll want to be so skilled that you can repeat your lessons with your eyes closed! After you’ve mastered the basics, you’ll want to then practice playing the piano emotionally. There are several tools you can use to convey emotion in your performance, many of which manipulate volume and rhythm with range dynamics, legatos, slurs, staccatos, ties, transposes, and more.
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These are some of the items you can develop and refine before you set out to play chords progressions and accompaniment. Quite often, learning pianists will rush into their lessons without taking the time to appreciate the details. As they say, the devil is in the details. So resist the temptation to skip lessons 4, 5, and 6 before you’ve even learned lesson 3! Lesson 7 after all, may introduce concepts that depend on knowledge gained from the lessons you might have “glossed over.”
Developing and refining your musical ear
We know a fellow who likes to poke fun of speech and emphasize an important reality about our senses. He likes to tease people who say they have an ear for music or an eye for art. As always, this fellow’s response to such a phrase is, “Oh really? Well I have two! One on each side of my nose!” Although he’s a bit too literal for our tastes, he does make a good point. And that is to “see” clearly, or in our case, to “hear” clearly.
We suppose our friend is really saying, listen ‘twice’ as hard. At the same time that you listen to a great piece of music — and enjoy it — you’re also evaluating it . Even while you’re playing the piano yourself, you’re evaluating how faithfully you’re representing the song’s emotion and technical notation. To strengthen your listening skills however (or to listen with *both* of your ears as our friend would insist), you can record yourself playing the piano, and then evaluate the result. After enough practice, you’ll be able to do this without the aid of a tape recorder and make an immediate assessment the minute that you press a key.
Another way to strengthen your listening skills is to evaluate the music that moves you. While listening to the music of others, ask yourself what it is about that music that excites you. Then try to incorporate its characteristics into the music that you play (or at least, into your playing style). Of course you could do just the opposite as well. Evaluate what it is about music that bores you to death and then do everything you can to avoid it in your own music!
Just don’t make the mistake of believing that your opinion is the only one that matters. Seek out the opinions of others and ask for honest criticism. Don’t ask for just the sugarcoated stuff. Ask your friends and family to be a brutally honest as they care to be. Then use that criticism to improve your style.
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by Tania Gleaves on December 6, 2009
Looking for an easier way to play the piano? Want the top 10 ways to improvise on the piano?
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1. Use fake books. Fake books, as one of the top 10 ways to improvise on the piano, are gentle introductions to what could be interpreted as the Wild West of improvisation. Improvisation is largely based on freedom of expression. Without having a good foundation of the basics, beginners may feel intimidated by the possibilities. Fake books however contain music that provides opportunities of expression. Since it’s music lacks full notation, fake books allow the musician to fill in the missing parts with what *could* be there or what *should* be there without leaving *everything* up to the pianist.
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2. Make up your own songs. Making up your own songs really isn’t as easy as you might think. If you’ve been trained in the classics for example, you might find it difficult to break from instilled patterns. See if it helps to hum a random melody right off the top of your head at first. Then fill it in with interesting chords. You could probably fill up an entire album of improv this way!
3. Imagine how a master would play a song. Here, you can put your imagination to use and let your fingers tell the story. Ask yourself what Alicia Keys would play for a crowd — impromptu of course. Since her music is already a bit unconventional, your mind shouldn’t have too much trouble inventing new tunes for “her” (er… we mean, for you).
4. Improve a song with elements from your culture, the current holiday, etc. Every culture has it’s own unique set of chords and rhythms so why not incorporate them into the contemporary music that you play? This way, you can spice things up. You could for example, give the National Anthem an Brazilian spin or Italian twist.
5. Try to forget whatever you’ve learned about notes, intervals, scales, chords, and all the rest. Approach the piano as if you’ve never seen the thing before and you wonder what it does. Touch it’s keys and see if your random play generates any interesting tunes. If you should ‘accidentally’ discover a cool tune, melody, chord, or rhythm, build on it. Think of another section that would go well with the element that you just discovered. Keep following this pattern and you’ll have an entire song in no time.
6. Remember that when improvising, there are no mistakes. Okay, that’s not entirely true — but the idea is to break you from fearing improvisation. The thing that prevents a lot of us from even trying improvisation is our own fear.
7. Try different elements within a single song. Mix and mash different rhythms, octaves, dynamics, and more just to see what results. While you might not find anything appropriate for an entire song, you just might discover a unique passage that would fit well in an existing song.
8. While you’re experimenting, record your efforts. You can easily create a database of unique passages if you record your efforts into a sound database. Your database needn’t be anything fancy, as a simple file of wav files will suffice. Just remember to give your recordings descriptive names.
9. Chord it. Play a steady beat and a single chord with your right hand in other words, and use then use your left hand to decorate the chord with an interesting melody.
10. Try playing a song that you’ve committed to memory — only play it backwards. You’re sure to find some unique and creative passages using this method!
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