Do you know anybody who seems like they can play any song and change it a little bit to make it sound even cooler? Have you ever heard a musician who plays a solo while the rest of the band plays along in the background? Playing music without the notes of the solo being written out is called improvisation and is a practice that often defines jazz music.

First, how does anybody play music without the help of the notes written out in front of them? The answer is simple: We don’t know for sure. To some it comes easy — to others, not so much. Some people have a seemingly unexplainable talent for listing to a piece of music and improvising over top of it while others who are otherwise very talented musicians can’t function without music.

Some people who improvise don’t need any music at all while others have something called a lead sheet in front of them. A lead sheet has the main melody of the song along with the names of the chord changes and where they occur. By watching this, the person improvising can construct melodies of their own based on the chords.

Can improvisation be taught? Yes it can but it’s important to start simple. Go online and find a lead sheet of a slow song that you enjoy. Each of the chords listed are based on scales so if you see a “C” listed, that is based on the C Major scale. As you’re just beginning, only use the first 5 notes of the scale for each chord and simply have some fun. Try to construct a melody using the five notes and then when the chord changes, construct a melody that is based on the new chord.

As you get better, you can use more notes, make your melodies more complicated, and possibly even use a few notes that are outside of the chord. Remember that the most important part of improvisation is to not plan out your melody too much. This should be fun so try something new each time and if sounds terrible, laugh it off and try again.

What’s the secret of good improvisation? Those who seem to have a talent for it understand that a lot of music has chord changes in very predictable patterns and for that reason, those who improvise a lot can hear those changes. Like everything else, artists who are naturally talented at improvisation have also practiced it a lot. Don’t forget that anything in music, regardless of your level of natural talent, will take a lot of practice.

If some have a natural talent for it, is improvisation something that can be taught? Yes it can! If you know somebody who seems to have a natural talent for improvisation while you struggle, don’t get frustration. Some people’s brains are simply wired for improvisation while others are better wired for reading music off of a page. The world of music needs both types of musicians.

Improvisation is truly one of those musical skills that should come not so much from a piece of paper but from inside of you. It’s an opportunity for you to express yourself as an artist. Have fun!

Listen to this short podcast on syncopation:

Enhanced Podcast Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

How Does Improvisation Work?

Can I Learn to Do It?

There are main 3 ways in which a pianist can use improvisation in their playing:

- Melody
- Harmony
- Rhythm

If you understand how these areas work, and know how the original is supposed to sound, then you can learn how to improvise them. It’s like acting or doing a comedy sketch, you really need to know how to play the music correctly before you can successfully improvise with it.

Melody Improvisation

If you are going to work with melodic improvisation you can either decide to play most of the original music and only keep a few familiar phrases to identify the piece, you could play around with improvising just the odd group of notes here and there, or you could create something in the middle. Listen to what you’re playing. Does it still sound good? Is it still recognizable as the melody you’re supposed to be playing?

Harmony Improvisation

Here you have greater scope to improvise because the melody line will carry anything that you change in the harmony and still leave the listener feeling that they heard the tune they expected to hear. You could add more depth to the base line, or remove the base line. You could add a counter melody that works with the main melody. You could use the basic harmony chord structure and improvise this using such things as passing notes and suspensions to create a completely different sounding harmony that was originally composed.

Rhythm Improvisation

With rhythm improvisation you can play around with different styles of rhythm. Perhaps your romantic love theme could turn into a dance tune by quickening the pace a little. Cover artists often use this technique in order to put their own mark on a song made famous by another singer.

Apart from these structured forms of improvisation that deal with music already composed, you can also improvise using your knowledge of music themes and structure to create something completely new - a real time composition. This allows you to create a new melody line with harmony as you play and each time you sit at the piano to use this free form kind of piano improvisation you will compose something original.

Any piano player can learn to improvise using the above techniques but in order to perform an improvisation that’s fresh, but it takes practice. If you use melody, harmony or rhythm improvisation methods then you need to practice to ensure that you don’t fall into the trap of playing the tune the way it’s usually played. If you’re going to free form improvise then you must know how to bring a melody and harmony together with a rhythm in order to create something that sounds as if it’s always been that way. You are making it up as you go along, but the end result needs to sound flawless and that takes hours of free form practice in order to ensure that you don’t bring discord into the music by using a combination of opposing chord - unless, of course, that’s your intention!

For wonderful courses in improvisation and other related subjects please go to Improvising & Other Good Stuff!

Copyright June 17, 2011 by Duane Shinn. Do not use without permission!

Imagine if a painter only had 12 colors to choose from. He wasn’t allowed to mix them together, he couldn’t dilute the colors, he could only use one type of brush and every painter had to use the color and type of canvas. Visual art would be boring, wouldn’t it? Artists would have a much tougher time developing their own style and even the person with no interest in art would begin to notice that everything she sees is based on the same 12 colors.

If musicians could only use triads (Three note chords based on 1-3-5 of the scale) the world would sound like it would look with only 12 colors. The various styles or genres of music would be much tougher to distinguish from each other and their unique sound that we’ve grown to love would be gone.

This is why composers developed extended chords. Extended chords “extend” the basic triad by adding notes to it. Extended chords, combined with creative voicings, are what give the different styles of music their unique sounds. Let’s look at how they work.

First, we will call a triad the building block of all chords. Remember that if we have a C Major triad, it is built by stacking the first, third, and fifth scale degrees on top of each other. This is referred to as a C Major chord. If we add another note on top of our triad, we would add the seventh scale degree (because for now, we always skip a note in between). Now we have a chord called a “C Major Seven” chord. The notes of this chord are C-E-G-B.

We can add another note on top of that. Do you know what it would be? It would be a D because we’re skipping a note. Now, although technically D is the second scale degree because we went in to a new octave, when we’re building chords, we call it the ninth scale degree. So now we have C-E-G-B-D. This is a “C Nine” chord.

Are you seeing the pattern? The next tone we add would be an F and we would have a “C Eleven” chord and the next would be an “A” and we would have a “C Thirteen” chord. Of course one cannot extend to a fifteenth chord because we’ve used all of the diatonic notes.

As we always say, very little in music is painfully simple and extended chords are no exception. First, these are the most basic of extended chords. There are many others. For example, there is another seventh chord called a dominant seventh chord that is spelled, C-E-G-Bb. There are hundreds of extended chords.

The other complication with these chords is that the more notes that we add, the worse they sound if we don’t do some creative voicing. When we write a seventh chord, for example, we often remove the fifth of the chord. This gets increasingly complicated as more tones are added.

Now, go to the piano and listen to these extended chords. You’ll find that your musician’s toolbox has just been expanded. And if you really want to get up to speed on extended chords, grab our course on “Super Chords Made Super Simple!”

Copyright June 16th, 2011 by Duane Shinn. Please do not copy without permission!

Have you ever heard a piece of music that sounds like it was going along just fine and suddenly the whole thing sounded higher or lower? Or have you heard a piece that sounded just as happy as can be and then with the flip of a switch, it became sad?

This isn’t by accident. Composers employ a technique called modulation to accomplish that. So why do they do it, anyway? Sometimes there are real-world reasons such as a duet between two singers with very different ranges in their voice. By moving the whole piece up or down, two people with very different vocal ranges can sing it.

Often, though, there are much less technical reasons. Sometimes composers employ modulation simply to make a piece of music sound fresh in the listener’s ear. Music is largely based on repetition and repetition can get boring. Modulation makes the music sound fresh in the ears of the listener.

But you’re probably saying, “You’ve told me what modulation does but you haven’t told me what it is or how to do it.”

Here it is: Modulation is simply changing the key of a piece of music while the piece is being played. For example, maybe the key of the music was G Major but that key was getting a little stale in the ears of the listener so the composer changed it to A Major just to freshen it up.

Sometimes the composer changes the written key signature in the music while other times they don’t. If the modulation is a very temporary event, the written key signature often doesn’t change. If it is going to remain for a long period of time, the person playing the piece will often see a new key.

Now, you’re probably saying, “That’s really cool. How do I do it?” There are musicians who specialize in the study of music and how it’s put together. These people are called music theorists. They will tell you that modulation is often difficult. Not all keys can be used next to each other (the way not all colors can be combined on the same painting) There’s a complicated process in the world of music theorists.

There’s good news, though. There’s a whole other school that isn’t really a school at all. Musicians without all of that advanced knowledge figured out that sometimes modulation works by simply changing the key abruptly. They found that an abrupt change is sometimes pleasing to the ear. They also found that if they can get to the V Chord (five chord) which is the chord that is built on the fifth note of the key, that makes it easy to jump in to another key.

Those scholarly music theory types look over their glasses and say, “we call the V chord a pivot chord.” That’s just a fancy name for a chord that can be found in both keys.

By the way, if you’ve heard of transposition, modulation is different. Transposition is taking an entire piece of music and changing it to another key. Modulation is a change in key within a piece of music instead of the entire piece.

If you want to study modulation more, there are plenty of books written on the subject and those academic types are right, it is rather complicated sometimes but sometimes music is all about finding something that sounds good and doing it. Spend some time experimenting with modulation. We have a course on modulation and transposition at our catalog site - click the link below.
Copyright by Duane Shinn June 12, 2011. Do not use without permission.

Remember to check out all the piano courses at Play Piano Catalog!

Head towards the internet and do a search for Arnold Shoenberg. Listen to some of his music and other composers who use the twelve tone composition technique and you will instantly have opinions. If you’re like many, your opinion will be extreme like or extreme hate.

12 tone composition, also loosely referred to as serialism was invented by Arnold Shoenberg in 1921. In traditional music some tones become more heavily used than others. Remember our discussion of key signature? If a piece of music is in the key of C Major, the note, “C” will be used in that piece much more than any other note with “G” probably being the 2nd most used. Notes like “D” and “A” will feel left out unless the music changes keys to D Major. Notes like F# may never be heard while the music is in the key of C Major.

Shoenberg knew that this unequal emphasis of certain notes is what gives traditional music its “traditional” sound. He wanted to invent a type of music that sounded entirely different than traditional music so he came up with the Twelve Tone Row. The basic principle is simple: You can’t repeat a note until you use the other 11 chromatic notes. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? First you use C, then C#, then D, etc. until you’ve used all of them. Then start again! This simple technique is actually very complicated.

First, we have to construct a row. To make our row, we have to use all 12 chromatic notes only once but we can use them in any order we would like. How many rows do you have to choose from? 9,985,920! That’s a lot of rows but it’s even more complicated than that!

If you were only allowed to play your chosen 12 tone row, that would be boring! There are a series of what Shoenberg calls transformations that we’re allowed to use. We can play our tone row backwards, (called retrograde) we can transpose it up or down as many steps as we would like, or we can “invert” the notes within our row (If a note went up a minor 3rd, we could move it down a minor 3rd instead), if we want to keep our 12 tone composition simple. We can then harmonize our original tone row of choice by using one of our simple transformations.

In actually, these transformations get extremely complicated. There are 48 different transformations when you combine transposition, inversion, and retrograde. (We’re leaving some of the more confusing parts of this technique out of this article so if you do the math, it won’t work out)

By combining different rows using their transformations, you will get harmony. The rhythms you choose are entirely up to you so the way your rows interact with each other is one of the many ways your music becomes unique.

Before you get too excited about learning this complex technique, don’t expect your 12 tone music to be pleasing to the ear in a traditional sense. It will never sound anything like the music you hear on the radio nor will your non-music friends have a lot of positive comments. You’ll hear something like “DUH! Even I could write that!”

12 tone rows is yet another tool in the composer’s toolbox. Play around with it and have fun!

Once in a while it’s good to take a little review of the basics, so we’re going to take a quick look at augmented triads and see how they are formed and how logical they are. Augmented triads (3-note chords) are formed by raising the 5th of a major triad 1/2 step. Watch this 5-minute video:

Have you heard of the Crash Course In Exciting Piano Playing?

Using original chord substitutions in your piano playing puts your own stamp of originality on the music, so your song doesn’t sound like everyone else’s song. There are some basic principles of chord substitution which you can use right away, and this short video covers those methods.

For a complete course on Chord Substitutions click here: Chord Substitutions

Have you ever wondered what those strange symbols are at the very beginning of each line of music?

Doesn’t it seem a little bit pointless to have them at the beginning of each line? Those symbols are sharps or flats and the collection of those sharps and flats at the beginning of every line is called the key signature.
Have you ever looked a piece of music and noticed that although there are sharp notes and flat notes in nearly every piece of music, you don’t see a lot of them written? Once you get beyond the sharps and flats on the extreme left hand side of the line, they aren’t written in the music so how do musicians know to play certain notes as sharp or flat?

That’s where the key signature comes in.

Here are four rules to remember when learning about key signature:

• A key signature cannot have a mixture of sharps and flats. It has to be one or the other or none at all.

• The sharps and flats are always written in the same order.

• Just because a note is in the key signature doesn’t necessarily mean that you will find it in the actual music.

• If the key signature says that a note is sharp or flat, any note, regardless of octave, will be changed. So if the key signature shows an F#, high F’s, low F’s, or any other F is sharp.

Before we learn how to use the key signature, memorize the order of sharps and the order of flats. The order of the sharps is F,C,G,D,A,E,B. The order of flats is the order of sharps backwards: B,E,A,D,G,C,F. What is this? This is the order, left to right, that the sharps or flats will placed in the key signature.

Now that you have memorized your order of sharps or flats, look at rule #2 above. The sharps and flats are always written in the same order. Let’s say that your key signature has two sharps. You can squint your eyes and look at what lines or spaces those sharps are on or you can remember your order of sharps. If there are two sharps, look at the first two sharps in your order, F and C. This means that every time you come across an F or C in the music, you play them as F# or C#. It’s that easy.

If your key signature has 4 flats, recall the first four flats in your order of flats: B,E,A,D. All of these notes are flat if you have to play them in the music.

What if there are no flats or sharps in the key signature?

That’s not a misprint. That’s allowed as well. This means that all of the notes are natural (white keys on a piano or keyboard) in the piece of music you are about to play unless the composer adds a sharp or flat to a single note in the music.

Make sense? Next time you play a piece of music, take a look at the key signature even if you only read chord symbols or tabs. Knowing which notes are flat can help you decipher some of those complicated chord symbols.

The blues scale is kind of a unique animal: half diatonic scale, half blue notes. Some people think that only the flat 3rd, flat 5th, and flat 7th of the diatonic scale is used in the blues, but that’s not the case. It’s the juxtaposition between the major 3rd and the minor 3rd, the perfect 5th and the diminished 5th, and the major 7th and the minor 7th that creates that facinating tension that creates the “blues” sound. The human voice can sing in the cracks between the major and minor 3rd, but that’s not the case with the piano — we are stuck with fixed pitches — so we need to create some tension between the two. Watch this short video and you’ll get the idea:

If you want more instruction on the blues, go to Playing The Blues on our online catalog of piano courses.

Here’s a bluesy little chord progression you can use in quite a few musical situations. It involves playing the IV chord of the key and then playing the IV chord of that IV chord to create a chord progression that gives a blues oriented sound. It sounds confusing but I think you’ll understand it when you see it on the video below:

For more instruction on the blues check out Blues, Boogie & R&B

There are scads of ways to add fillers to your songs, from counter-melodies to passing tones to unusual chord sequences to quartal voicings to…and on and on. Three of the easiest ways to take the chords of a song and make fillers out of them is to create open-voiced offset intervals called “straddles”, to break them up as 2-1 or 3-1 broken chords, and to rapidly “shake” the chord and then run it up the keyboard. Watch this short video to get the idea:

Keep learning! I hope you are always working on adding some new technique to your musical toolbox. For lots of ideas browse our online catalog of piano courses.

Among the ways to reharmonize a melody is a technique I call the “half-step slide”. As you progress from one chord to another, look for a way to “slide in” to the target chord — like a runner stealing 2nd base and sliding into the bag. Watch this short video and you’ll understand:

Why do I need to learn scales and chords and music theory? Well, if you have the talent of a Mozart or Bach or Erroll Garner or Oscar Peterson or Dave Brubeck, you probably don’t. But if you’re like the rest of us — and 99.9% of us are - the more you learn about music, the better. After all, chords are formed from scales, and scales are the building-blocks of melody. And of course there would be no rhythm without the juxtapostion of note values and chord lengths. If you are at all interested in increasing your knowledge of music in any of these areas, come on over to http://www.playpianocatalog.com and browse through our 300-plus courses.

A piano has 88 keys, 36 are black and 52 are white. When depressing the keys, you trigger hammers inside the piano to hit strings, which is what produces the sound. The keyboard has white keys that are tuned to play “natural” notes, and black keys that are tuned to play flat and sharp notes. (This is an over-simplification, but this is an article for pure beginners.) The first key (on the leftmost side of the keyboard) is an A and the final key (on the rightmost side) is a C.

Piano keys are laid out in what are called semitones, or half steps, and are arranged to follow a chromatic scale (each key is one half step away from the adjacent one). You will see alternating black and white keys all the way up the keyboard, except there are no black keys between the B and C or between the E and F because there are no black keys between those notes.

Some people believe that the piano is based on the C scale, but that is not so. The piano can accommodate you playing any musical scale; simply find your starting note, and play the remaining notes of the scale in the correct order. Playing left to right will cause ascending tones to play, while playing right to left has the opposite effect, resulting in descending tones.

You can also examine the octaves of a piano keyboard. An octave is defined as a note that is one full scale higher or lower than the original note (the first and last note of a scale). Even if played an octave apart, notes that carry the same pitch have the same name — so you can play an A, then play another A an octave higher or lower. Notes are measured by their pitch (a specific note or tone). Pitch (hz) is a measure of cycles per second. Let’s look at an A, which is measured at 440hz, then the A above (an octave higher) which measures 880hz. Another octave up the scale, the next higher A measures 1760 hz. The basic framework for the scales and chords is provided by the octaves.

Pianists face many challenges, including developing the ability to stretch their hands and fingers far enough to reach all of the keys needed to play certain groups of notes that produce chords or arpeggios. The required strength and flexibility are built up over time, using certain, specific exercises designed to do this. Sometimes the music calls for all ten fingers to be playing a piece as written. As a basic rule, the left hand is used to play the lower notes that appears on the bass clef, while the right hand is used to play notes on the treble clef. The right hand is usually used to play the song’s melody, while the left hand supports the melody with a harmony of some kind. (Again, an over-simplification.)

It is highly unusual but possible for a portable, electronic keyboard to have all 88 keys. Considering how big or small it is and what it is used for, a portable keyboard can have as little as 24 keys. The keyboard player is restricted by its limited number of keys, and frequently has to adapt the music to it by playing an octave higher and lower than originally intended.

For a wide variety of courses in playing the keyboard please visit our online catalog of piano courses.

If you love old hymns and gospel songs, take a look at this 7-minute video. It is a preview of a course I have in arranging hymns and gospel songs — making them more interesting and exciting using chord techniques such as passing tones, color tones, chord subs, rapid runs, melody alternations, and so on. After you watch the video, come on over to “Best Loved Gospel Hymns” and check it out.

Here are some ideas for improvising on the blues scale. I picked the key of F, but of course you can play it in any key you choose as well. Notice that in the blues scale we use a flat 3rd, a flat 5th, and a flat 7th, plus the other notes of the diatonic scale. It is the juxtaposition between the notes of the scale and the flatted notes that creates the typical “blues” sound. Watch this short video:

For a complete course in playing the blues please go to Playing Blues, Boogie & Rhythm & Blues

There is a style in music called “new age”, and while I don’t care for the title, it is a beautiful style that is so nice for relaxation and meditation, that I thought I would make a short video showing how you can create your own little “peaceful song” using just 3 or 4 chords. I chose Am, F, Dm and Em, but you can choose any chords you like. The key is to play rubato (which literally means “robbed time”) and get lots of contrast between arpeggios for an open sound and supportive chords.

Watch this short video:

Chords, as you well know, are based on scales, and the most basic form of chord is a triad — a three note chord consisting of the root, 3rd, and 5th of a major scale. The most usual way to play that chord is as a stack of 3rds (the interval between the root and the 3rd of the chord is a major 3rd, and the interval between the 3rd and the 5th is a minor 3rd, hence, a stack of 3rds). But when you invert a chord, you always have a combination of 3rds and 4ths, giving a sense of balance to the chord.

But it is also possible to create a chord using a stack of 4ths by using tones outside the triad, such as 6ths, 7ths and 9ths. In this short video I demonstrate how to create a chord made of the 3rd, 6th, and 9th of the scale which I call a “6/9” chord (but you’re not going to see it in written music, since most people call it a 13th).

Have you noticed that any music that uses orchestral instruments is often referred to as classical music? If you have any doubt that this is true, take a look at ITunes, the most popular music download site in the world. Anything that would be performed in a concert hall is lumped in to the “classical” genre. Is this accurate?

To be simple and blunt, no! If we were to be honest, the reason this type of music is called classical is because it’s old. Any piece of music that is hundreds of years old probably does deserve a label, this we’ll agree with, but let’s get some history behind this.

As we crack open the music history books, we see that the world has gone through a series of musical periods that are marked by big changes in how music sounded. We started with the medieval period where music was chanted without the use of instruments. By the time we got to the Baroque Period, where we find composers like Bach, hard and fast musical rules were developed and nobody dared to change these rules. Everyone who takes or has taken piano lessons is probably aware of those rules.

Although the Baroque Period was about hard and fast rules, that didn’t stop Baroque music from getting quite complicated. As we moved in to the “classical” period, there was an effort by those like Mozart to go back to simplicity.

We later moved in to Beethoven and Romantic Period, Debussy and the Impressionist Period, and finally what we consider the 20th century period with composers like Copland.

What does this music history lesson have to do with the question at hand? Because as musicians we have to educate those that say “classical music” and let them know that classical music is actually music that was written between 1750 and 1825 and each of these periods of music are quite different. It would be essentially the same as calling rap music and country music “radio music”.

If they hear music from Mozart, Haydn, or even the earliest music from Beethoven, they can say that the music they’re listening to is, indeed, “Classical music.” Everything else, needs a different term and it may be our job to find that term.

How about “orchestral music” This takes in to account the fact that listening to this type of music in a concert hall normally includes traditional musical instruments that don’t involves wires, amps, and complicated lighting but what about the music that includes only a solo voice?

How about “art music”? The problem with this name is that it wouldn’t be good for business. Those who listen to this type of music don’t generally want to be known as “artsy” because artsy is sometimes known as “weird”. The music industry doesn’t want that and those who are avid listeners (some with deep wallets for the arts) don’t want the label either.

Seems like we have a problem and this problem is why “classical music” has remained as the term of choice. It’s not factually accurate but it’s safe and it’s well known.

For courses in playing classical music on the piano please go to Classical Music For Beginners And Near-Beginners