Piano Clues

This article is for people who wish to learn how to accompany a singer, or their own singing.

When you play accompaniment, you just play the bass and the chords but not the melody of the song.

Of course, different styles have different requirements — in Jazz, you wouldn’t even play the bass, for example. The patterns I present here are suitable for pop and rock music.

The prerequisite is that you know how to do voice-leading. We’ll use voice-leading to go as smoothly as possible from one chord to the next (no big jumps).

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Suppose in a particular tune C chord is followed by F chord. Then you could play it like this:

However, that’s quite a big jump. As a result, the music sounds disconnected. Another way to play this chord progression:

Now only two tones change — the C remains in the same place — and they jump only a very small distance (a half-step and a whole-step, respectively).

The result is a much smoother sound. This principle is called voice-leading.

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You can’t. At least not without a lot of work.

The idea is seductive: it’s easy to convert MIDI to sheet music, so if it were possible to extract a MIDI file from an MP3, then you would have easy access to the sheet music of your favorite songs.

The problem is this: An MP3 — or WAV or any other type of audio file — is like an apple pie. It’s easy to make apple pie from apples: you cut them up and put them into the pie. But it’s impossible to get back the original apples once you have the pie!

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If you like to play computer games, and want to learn to play the piano at the same time, then check out Synthesia.

This game is similar to the popular game Guitar Hero. Notes come falling down from the screen and you have to press the right keys on the piano at the right time to score points.

The music comes from MIDI files, which means the number of songs you can play is virtually unlimited because for almost any song you can find one or more free MIDI files on the internet.

Download Synthesia for free at: www.synthesiagame.com

Even if you don’t like to play games, Synthesia still provides a good way to see what’s going on in the MIDI file.

It’s much nicer than the on-screen keyboard from VanBasco because you can see the notes ahead of time. This is quickly becoming my favorite tool to play back MIDI files.

Give it a try!

You can watch a nice video demo of Synthesia here.

Today’s tip is especially for pianists who play, or want to learn to play, classical repertoire.

A fine gentleman by the name of C. C. Chang has written a book called The Fundamentals of Piano Practice and he is kind enough to give it away for free on the web.

Chang claims that with the principles from his book you can learn piano up to 1000 times faster compared to other methods. The book not only teaches you how to play, but more importantly: how to practice!

You can download the book here as PDF or read it online here.

Worth checking out!

Here is a video I recorded that demonstrates the various sounds on the Yamaha CP33 digital stage piano.

The sound was captured directly into the computer and added to the video later, so what you hear is exactly what you get.