How to stink less at piano
I'm looking for some suggestions about how I can stink a little bit less on piano. In my role, I use the piano with some frequency, and I'm skilled in reading music and playing melodies or chords, but not both (outside of the basic I, IV. V, maybe vi), and forget about anything with parts. I'd really love to be able to play accompaniment to simple songs outside the basic boom chick boom chick left hand right hand pattern. For example, I'd like to know a few different ways to play along with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star so I don't fall asleep at the keys. I've tried using method books to improve my skill, but they're either way too hard or way too easy.
Can anyone recommend any exercises, etudes, or anything else that can help me seem like a better piano player than I am?
Funny you ask this, as this is something I’ve been focusing on recently! :-)
It’s unclear how much keyboard fluency you have, but that’s something I’ve seen pay the most dividends when I’ve worked on it. Transposition and knowing chord inversions are key.
Breaking it down:
The steps above are essentially drills you can practice on your own without any courses, but I’d encourage being intentional with daily practice. None of this has to feel like a chore—you can play by ear, and to gain familiarity with new keys, transpose! I have a checklist on my iPad with the scales that I've transposed a piece too.
Some extra stuff that is a bit advanced but has been helpful for me:
You can also work with a numbering system for notes from C through B starting from 0 through 11 and perform modulo math quickly if you want to do something like quickly identify a fifth below a particular note. Say we're on the note D, we can convert it to its absolute number which is 2 and -7 (a fifth) and modulo 7 gives us 7 which is G. You can also just add 5 instead of subtracting 7 as it's just modulo
There's also things you can do like identifying which scales have a minor chord you're playing. For example, G minor; I know it exists as the minor chord as ii, iii, and vi degrees in three major scales. The mental shortcut for that is the second note in the triad (Bb major) and raising the third note in the triad by one semitone (Eb major) and three semitones (F major).
You can also learn rules for harmonizing chords that you can quickly fall back on. For example, I have '2 down and three up' as a fast rule for harmonizing a note in a scale. What this means is, apart from using the note's chord like E minor to harmonize the note E in the scale D major, you can quickly convert E to its scale degree which is ii, and -2 gives you vii (C# dim because of modulo 7) and +3 gives you V (A) so you can use them to harmonize.
If you’re looking for a course to follow, I’d recommend PianoDiary, as it focuses heavily on improvisation. Pianote also offers shorter guest courses, but I’ve found they sometimes lack clarity in teaching how to reach the point of being able to improvise effectively.
Good luck!!
I'm a professional jazz pianist and piano teacher so I can have a go trying to assist!
You're kind of asking for two related but distinct things:
3_3_2_LA has some good suggestions in regards to the first question, and I agree that getting comfortable with triads and their inversions is a great place to start, but I think a gradual approach, focusing on developing 1 new idea, chord, inversion, or key at a time is the way to success and not being overwhelmed.
By way of example - say we play 'twinkle twinkle' in the key of C - here's a very simple chord chart:
| C | F C | G C | G C ||
Now step 1, which you can already do from the sounds of it, might be just playing through the whole thing with our left hand playing the root notes, and our right hand playing root position triads.
Next we can practise the same progression with our right hand playing 1st inversions throughout, and then second inversions, all while our left hand just chills on root notes.
Again in this method we want to just focus on one new idea at a time, so we're ignoring our rhythmic element for now and just playing whole notes.
Finally comes the most important concept, which is voice leading, where we try and lead through twinkle twinkle using only the inversions that require the least movement in our right hand.
Again by way of example, if we start on C root position C E G, then the 'laziest' way to get to an F chord is to play C F A, the second inversion.
Through mastering this method, you gain a powerful way to create a multitude of variations of a chordal accompaniment.
To address the second part of your question, once we have some simple chordal variety mastered, we can learn come basic comping patterns. These can be as simple as playing half notes in the left hand against quarter notes in the right, but here are some more suggestions for your practise:
Of course, the exploration in this vein can be almost infinite! Good luck, and message me if you need any further clarification.
It sounds like you recommend focusing on right-hand chords, while keeping the left hand relatively simple?
(It so happens, that's how I'm practicing on accordion.)
To start with yes absolutely. Learning to improvise harmonic accompaniment freely is mostly about trying to fully entrain a full stack of interrelated knowledge, but it's basis is all voice leading.
Learning about this via right hand triad inversions is a great first step to understanding the phenomenon more fully, as it provides discrete shape-based building blocks that the learner can quickly memorise and start associating with sound.
I find that as soon as new learners start to try to think theoretically or mathematically about their constructions, they become pretty limited by how fast they can think.
Ideally, you think as much about what you play as you do when you speak in a conversation.
You said it better than me. I do need "A better approach to rhythmic and textural structures to give your chordal accompaniments more variety."
I teach elementary music, but my degree is in trombone. I can play the lazy way I IV I V V7 I with 2 hands in all major and minor keys, but beyond the boom chick pattern, i dont know what to do with this skill.
My audience is primarily children between 5 and 10 years of age. Often, I need to accompany very simple songs with no changes (doggy doggy, see saw Margaret daw). Do you know any other patterns I can practice to expand my textural vocabulary?
I'm going to answer your question in two ways:
Answer 1 - Here is a link to a bunch of simple comping patterns you can apply to the right hand. Try having the left hand play quarter notes or half notes against them, and experiment with moving the left hand note between the root and 5th.
Answer 2 - Answer 1 gives you something straightforward to practise, but it may not be all that useful in the long run if further exploration is the goal. I would recommend using the link provided (or another - it's just the first thing I found that looked ok) as a starting point to start writing your own rhythms, or ripping off any more you hear in your favourite music. There is no 'right' way to do this, but if you find it hard to just sit and play, try writing out a simple new rhythm as notation or even just rhythm slashes, and give it a go on a couple of different tunes. In this way, you can slowly build a memorised repertoire of rhythms while playing a variety of tunes, and eventually these merge and meld, starting to form the basis of a personal textural language that defines your approach
As a previous pianist who played at a level where a fellow student went on to play at Carnegie Hall (I also played Hungarian Rhapsody with/against him at a recital, ala Daffy and Donald), I couldn't play jack unless it was written in front of me in normal music.
I later learned guitar where I actually learned the concepts of music, not just the stuff written on a page. That was enhanced when I was still crappy at guitar, but I got to play bass... and things kind of started to make sense.Then Rock Band helped drag me back down into following "notes" when I "learned" to drum (I actually had started drumming before RB, but it kind of dragged me back into that dependency hole).
The whole reason I bring this up is because I feel like the OP may be like me - you need to "feel" the music, for lack of a better term. Understanding only comes this way, at least, that's how I experienced it. And because, I read your post and I know what you're saying, but honestly it means nothing of sorts to me. I hate to say that, but reading music and people who know/understand/feel music are two completely different groups, and that first group (of which I am a part) are seriously screwed when trying to cross over.
I'm just an amateur, but the way I think about music performance is that there are multiple "tracks" you can use to keep track of where you are in a song. If you've heard it many times you might remember the lyrics, the melody, and the rhythm, often to the point where you can hear it in your head. If you learn it from sheet music, it includes where you are on the page. If you've learned to play it, includes the mechanics of the user interface, for example, black versus white keys on a piano, and the fingers you use to play the notes.
Another important "track" that you might not learn when playing piano sheet music is the chord progression. Playing from lead sheets will ensure that you're at least thinking in terms of chords, even if you haven't memorized them.
These "tracks" can be learned in any order and they're mutually reinforcing. The more of them you learn, the better you know the song. Traditional music instruction often relies too much on sheet music, so you don't learn the other tracks as well.
Going without sheet music forces you to rely on other tracks, but often that means relying too much on "muscle memory" because you haven't learned another way.
Oh, for me it's not about "performance", it's about what you can actually play.
I recommend reading through some posts from Yeargdribble on reddit.
He's a professional piano player who constantly posts about his experiences and how he practices. Here's an example post about how to learn to spell chords faster.
I’m the worst person to give advice on this, because I have no skill or talent for piano and haven’t even attempted to practice in years, but I would probably try looking more into jazz piano techniques where improvisation take center stage. When you give yourself more freedom to make mistakes and not sound optimal, it gives you more license to practice, which is ultimately what will make you better at most everything.
I'm not sure exactly where you're at; I mostly do improv, so I'll just infodump some advice on that. Here are a few things that really helped me (follow at your own risk; my piano experience has been very unorthodox):
'Figuring out' songs. I.e. 'arranging by ear' -- Do it yourself! This will be hard, but it lays the foundations for eventually playing by ear. Start with simple songs like Twinkle Twinkle: find the key signature, work out the melody (replay the song 'till you get it), and then begin trying to see what chords match the melody (start by trying chords in your key signature, e.g. if you're in C major, then try C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, Bdim). Replay bits of the song, stumble over those chords, realize something's off, try to figure out what it is. Write it all down if you want. This can make learning less grind-y and more project-based, if you're into that.
Play. Many burn out from excessive practice. Give yourself the space to play (it's called "playing", after all :) -- to start, drone out simple progressions (or even just root notes) in your left hand, and fiddle on the pentatonic scale with your right hand. Mess around! Try raising/lowering notes in a chord by a half step. See how your progression sounds if you replace that F major with F minor. See what that song sounds like if you play the melody starting on A instead of C. Forget about the 'rules' and try to accidentally stumble on something that sounds good. Most of what you try will sound bad, but only at first. Practice alone is not sufficient!
Learn to love extensions. Add 7ths to your chords. Add 9ths. 4ths, 6ths, whatever -- throw down a few more fingers and see what sticks. Even if you aren't a jazz fan (I am not a jazz fan), its open-ended approach to voicing chords is essential to modern music. Almost every good song uses something more than basic major / minor triads.
Some random tricks, when you get there: