7 tricks that will make you sound good at piano

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piano

course available now on artmaster.com

piano

tricks

seven little things you can do that

will

make

it

sound

so you know what you are doing seven little things that

will

add that feeling of flourish and delicacy in your way to play the piano and what I just did at the beginning is the first thing I could call a quarter note glissando the quarter notes on the piano turn out to be what is called a pentatonic scale or they are a pentatonic in E flat minor scale if you treat E flat as your root note or are an F sharp major pentatonic scale if you treat F sharp as your root note now, if you've seen my video on pentonic scales, you'll know that a pentatonic scale is a slightly simplified form of a major scale or a minor scale and the way it has been simplified is that the semitones have been removed from the scale, meaning that the smallest interval you can get in a pentatonic scale is not a semitone but a tone of that interval. for example, between E flat and D flat which, as you can hear, although it

sound

s dissonant it does not sound harmonious, it is not a horrible clash, in any case, it is a quite pleasant sensation of tension, a semitone to compare would be that it is quite a clash obvious in the notes.

So the pentatonic scales are therefore like an infallible scale because there are no semitones in them, there is no way we can collide even if we play all the notes of the scale, in a kind of massive burst like that, we can just move our hand up and down the quarter notes and get some interesting sounding music. Now you might have noticed that when I've been doing this kind of quarter note glissando, I end up playing this E flat note here and like I said before, the quarter note pentatonic scale can be an E flat minor pentatonic or an F-sharp major pentatonic, so a

good

way to

make

it sound like you're not just moving chaotically down the quarter notes is to conclude it and anchor it with the root note and, of course, any Boomtown Rats fans Those watching will have already noticed that this quarter note glissando idea is used at the beginning of I Don't Like Mondays abroad, now in a similar vein to the first;

You're probably familiar with the fact that the white notes on the piano are a C major scale, if we go up through the windows of the piano we get a C major scale, so trick number two on this list is white note glissandos. , just as we had the black note Sandos, now we have the handle of our white notebooks, but with this one. I prefer to go up, I think it's a little bit easier to deal with the fact that the semitones are going to collide as we slide over them and the reason I think up is better because as we go up on the piano, the feeling of dissonance the difference between two semitone notes is less obvious if I make a semitone up here it doesn't sound that bad versus down here we can actually hear that dissonance, so as you can see, I'm playing Cassandra in a very particular way. although I make sure to always resolve to the C note at the end to make it sound more logical, when we intentionally don't move randomly around the scale and end up at any old node, we have a clear conclusion because it ends in C and if you recognized that type of glissando, I'm pretty sure it was used in Louis Armstrong's version of Le'Veon Rose.

As you can see, I am no longer in my familiar context and that is because I am back in Prague. again doing a course for you, previously I was doing a music theory course which was something I had been asked many times to do and now I am doing a course on how to play the piano for beginners if you are anyone who has always been interested in learning to play the piano? Maybe you play a different instrument like the guitar. It is a great course to introduce you to your first songs and with each song we learn we will also collect ideas and techniques such as chords. and scales and arpeggios, so if that sounds

good

to you, consider checking out the links below in the description of my new beginner piano course available on artmaster.com overseas, so the next trick on our list it's much more subtle than these big, elaborate Sandos that we've been making are what you might call grace notes, so right at that moment I was playing Hey Jude and you may have noticed that I was adding these little grace notes.

I wasn't starting on the note I wanted when I would play. the a, for example, there that second note, instead of going straight to the a, I would slide off the quarter note just to the left of it towards the D. I was meant to play a d, but instead I I slid from D flat. It's a really subtle way to add a little character to the tune you play. I think it actually sounds a lot more like it's sung by a vocalist, where they're not just aiming for the pure note that's in the melody, the kind of approach to that. note of another note by sliding over it and one of the easiest ways to do it is when you slide from a quarter note to a white note, so here with this c a I can see a flat in a but so fast and so subtle that it really doesn't you hear that quarter note there, you just hear that we've reached the it's like a very subtle movement by the way, the technical name for this type of grace note this note where we start on a non-chord note which is about a semitone or one tone below the destination and then resolves to the main melody note is called Aki acachora and I actually talked about them recently in this video so check it out if you haven't caught it by now.

We've had blackout glissandos, we've had white notes from Los Santos, and we've had notes from Grace, but our fourth trick is this: It's a pretty familiar sound to anyone who's heard classical music on the piano. It sounds really impressive, but it's not. In reality, that's how complicated the same thing is when moved in consecutive octaves towards the piano, it's just an arpeggio, a chord in this case of C major but expressed with C, G, and another C on the foreign top. Now, of course, this one is tough at first if you're not. Being used to playing the piano, having that fluidity of your hand moving across the piano like that, is a skill that will take practice, but what makes this trick simple to do is that you are simply playing the same chord over and over again. time. again, so although the end result is a pretty impressive and acrobatic move, it's the same thing that's repeated over and over again, and like I said, you can apply it to any chord you want, no matter what key you're in and what chord progression you are playing, you can make use of this to add a bit of flourish to what you are playing.

Foreign chromatic scales simply move each note on the piano, each black and white note in succession. Now, once again, like the previous one, it is something that If you are new to the piano, it is difficult, you know that achieving that fluid and reliable movement takes time, but I think this is a trick because, unlike most scales like, for example, C major, we can only use the C major scale if we're in the key of C major, so if you're playing a song that's not in C major, that skill isn't really useful, but the thing is that with chromatic scales they are not in a key because they use each note, they are all chromatic. scale I guess the only defining factor is where you start, so the practice you've put in moving between the 12 notes of the piano can be used in all 12 keys, it doesn't matter what key the song is in now, I think one of the things important to prevent this from sounding randomly moving up and down the piano is to think about where you are going to end up is that destiny to end your chromatic scale on a chord tone in one of the notes of the chord you are playing and then it will sound strange logical and tasteful, but as long as I make sure the chromatic scale ends on a note that is in the E-flat major chord, it will sound like everything belongs at the same time, there is what is called a pedal tone or a point pedal. the left hand stayed in the sea no matter what chord I was playing, the right hand was playing a C chord, but then when I went to a B flat chord, I still played the C in the left hand when I went to a B flat chord.

Fa. I still play the CNF E flat c chord in my left hand. This is my sixth trick on the list, it's the pedal point and basically what you can do is throw any chord in the right hand over a continuous note in the left hand and it will sort of put them together it will work even if it's something quite far from the key like this F sharp because we have this consistent root note that ties everything together sounds like a really interesting fancy chord, so there I was just playing a C the chord went up in different inversions, then I was playing the NF sharp chord went up in different inversions and then the C chord again sounds really dramatic, it sounds like something out of a movie score or something, it's just two chords on one consistent note and once again on a common thread throughout.

All of these

tricks

, the way it sounds really intentional and well thought out is that it resolves to the end of the tonic chord, so in this example I'm using C as my pedal point, so when I go to F sharp it sounds really wild, but as long as it goes back to C at the end it sounds like we're back home and everything was always going to end up at home it sounds intentional even though I'm just playing random chords around the foreign piano this is our seventh and final trick what we will see today.

I wonder if you noticed what I was doing there? He was playing an arpeggio. I started with the C minor chord. He was playing an arpeggio that went from the bottom note. from the middle note to the top note and then I used the trick which is that after playing the arpeggio for four rotations I moved one of the notes, it didn't matter which note it was a note to the left or to the right, so in my Por For example, I took the C at the end of our chord and moved it one note to the left to the B, which gave us this chord.

That chord turns out to be an augmented B chord. The beauty of this trick is that you don't need to know it. that and while I was playing it I wasn't thinking in those terms, I was just thinking we started with that chord and then I moved this note down a random semitone and then on my next chord, I moved the semitone down again, it still applies to my arpeggio. figure then I moved the top note down to the F sharp there and I'm ending up with all these interesting chords, all these interesting sounds, all I do is move one of the notes of the chord by a semitone.

I'm not really planning this chord progression, I'm not actively thinking about what chord I'm going to play, but because with each chord movement it only moves one note in the chord and it only moves one semitone we naturally wind it up. We created a chord progression that is not only cohesive, the chords work together, but because we are moving one note per semitone, it is still voice led in a really satisfying way, none of the three notes in the chord jumps wildly. In unpredictable ways, we always get a very smooth, subtle movement without having to think about it too much and we can end up with some really interesting chord progressions, some really wacky and unusual choices, but they always work together.

Strange tricks. My Seven Tips for Sounding like you're a much more competent pianist than you really are. You may not know how to play the piano at all. You may actually be a pretty skilled performer, but having these little tricks in your arsenal is a good way to add a little flourish. to your game, um, particularly in those moments where you might want to show off a little bit, it's just an easy way to pull a few tricks out of the bag, so to finish up and leave you now, today I'm going to try to combine all of these different techniques. in a song, which can be quite interesting, but let's see how we get along with that foreign appreciation.