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Saturday, July 02, 2005
Playing The Piano Using Chord Symbols Instead of Being Tied To The Written Sheet Music
Playing The Piano Using Chord Symbols Instead of Being Tied To The Written Sheet Music: "Playing The Piano Using Chord Symbols Instead of Being Tied To The Written Sheet Music
Piano improvising and arranging is an art but definitely not a science. There aren't any steadfast rules for creating an arrangement, nothing to dictate the limitless potential of your imagination. Musicians learn to arrange by simply arranging � and improvise by improvising -- over and over again. It's a big game of trial and error. But it�s also a scientific method: you keep the experiments that work, and abandon those that don�t work.
That being said, there are a few things that can help you in the knowledge of piano improvization. Don't think of these as rules, but rather points on a roadmap guiding you through the vast world of arrangement and improvisation possibilities.
- The first step, of course, is to learn as much as you can about chords and how they work. Once you get a handle on piano chords and the chord symbols that represent them, you can then learn how to break those chords up in various patterns.
- Learn several different chording patterns, such as open voicing, arpeggios, upward inversions, western bass, Alberti bass, swing bass or boogie bass. This course guides you through these techniques, in addition to others, and teaches you to understand when they're the most appropriate.
- Learn some right hand fillers, like octaves (and the multitude of harmonic possibilities associated with octaves), tremelos, grace notes, twangs, runs, and turnarounds. Again, this course teaches you these fills and several others.
- Study pre-arranged sheet music. Your local music shop will have tons of music books containing several arrangements; read and play through these in detail. Seeing wha"
