Piano Improvisation - Playing music that is not written using the simplest of techniques

1. Class Intro: Friends, my name is Dan Trombley. Today, we're going to learn all about the art of improvising on the piano. It's a bit of a niche that I've carved out for myself for the past 40 years of playing the piano. It wasn't necessarily something that was taught to me, but it's something that I take great pleasure in teaching to other students. It's never as difficult as it seems, and it's incredibly rewarding to be able to just sit down at the piano and play something like this. Mm. Just to give you a little demonstration of the style of piano that we're going to be focusing on. I'll be providing backing tracks of various genres that you'll be able to practice with because I feel like it's a lot easier and it's a lot more fun playing along with pre recorded material. In terms of class projects, I thought it would be really cool. If you feel comfortable filming yourself, playing along with some of these backing tracks and we can post and share and comment and create an amazing community. Can't wait to get started with you. Let's do this together. Cheers. 2. Using the 5 finger position: The main trick with improvisation is to keep it very, very simple, especially when you're new to it. Less is always more. If you try to do too much, you're going to get frustrated, and it's going to be very challenging for you. So let me give you a quick little demonstration using the backing track, and then I'm going to break down and tell you exactly what's going on. H. Very, very simple. Okay? Leave lots of space, lots of rests. It's a conversation that you're having. Just like in a conversation with a person, you're not going to have just non stop dialogue. You're going to pause. You're going to think about the next thing that you're going to say. Space is incredibly important when we're talking about improvisation. Now let's break it down. Show you exactly what the notes are that we're talking about. We're going to only focus on just the white keys for now. I go to keep it very, very simple. We're in the key of C major. Here's middle C right here in the piano. We're going to eventually work our way up to full octave, which is eight keys, from one C to the next C. But just to keep it very, very simple for now, we're going to focus only on the first five notes because that way we can just focus on having our hand in one position, not moving it, keeping it very, very simple. We're just going to line up with your thumb on middle C, all your other fingers on the other keys from C to G, and then don't move your hand. Okay, very important. Just keep your hand on top of those keys. In the left hand, it's up to you depending on your comfort level. We're basically going to move from a C cord, up to and F chord. Okay? We call that like a one, four progression because C is the first note of the scale. F is the fourth note. So one, four, and then one. Okay, that's all we're doing going from C to F B to C. Okay. Now, depending on your comfort level, you can add just a single note in the left hand. Eventually, we're going to turn those into cords, but we're not there yet. So let's keep it very, very simple. If you want to just focus just on the right hand on its own, just leave left hand out and you can just the right hand with the backing track. Okay? Let's turn that backing track again. All right. And I'll just use just with my right hand for now. I'll see how that goes. A. As you can see, kept it very, very simple. Very simple. Less is always more. Just you're trying to come up with little ideas, little melodies. If you can sing those ideas before you start or if you can hear them in your head, that's the best thing to do, but very, very simple, short little idea. Pause, wait, listen to the music, come back in, and then you can add to it. All right. Let's take that same thing now. We're going to expand a bit on it now with our left hand. Okay. So now we're talking about charts. C chords and scales will be provided to you so you can follow along. But in the basic idea of it, we're going to play a C chord. All right. So you're going to line up Finger five on C. Finger three on E, and Finger one on G. There is your or the beautiful gorgeous C major chord. Okay, so that's your first chord. As you can see, it's going to sound a lot more full now. We're filling out the space in between. Okay. Then our four chord would be based around fourth no, which is F. We'd have F, A and C. Now, in piano, I like to refer to our left hand as being very, very lazy. So moving from here all the way up to here, we don't like to do that. That's way too much of a move. So we're going to use what's called a chord inversion. All right. The root position, this is what we call the root position when we play it in its original form with the root of the chord on the bottom. If we take this C and we move it down here to the bottom of the cord, we still have an F, A and a C. But now check this out. We can go from C. To F, and our hand barely has to move. Just to show you again, here's the root position ord, F A and C. We're just going to invert that chord, move that top c to the bottom. We're still playing the same three notes, F A and C. We're just changing the order. Now we have an F chord. Now our fifth finger can be anchored on the C, and we're just moving the upper two notes. Look how easy that is. Okay? You might want to practice just doing that on its own. Okay? And again, because we're just learning to improvise, this might be a little bit advanced, so you just have to kind of implement these things kind of one at a time. So let's ren it with the backing track again. This time, I'm going to be changing the cords with my left hand. Let's try this out. A. A. There you have it, my friends. Keep it very, very simple. If you find that the left hand is a little bit too much, you can practice just the left hand on its own with the backing track. You can use just single notes in the left hand, just the single root notes, or you can just leave the left hand out completely and just focus on the right hand. The key takeaways is focus on that five finger position from C to G. Then as you start to feel comfortable just doing that on its own, you can start to get a little left hand in the little bit at a time. Small baby steps. 3. Using full scale and expanding chord progression: Now we move on to the next step. So first lesson, we were talking about this five finger position from C to G in the right hand. And we went from single notes, C and F, the 14 progression in the left hand to a C and F chord. Okay So I' going to do two things now. We're going to expand this five finger position all the way up to the full scale, which is from a C to the next C. On octave scale. I'm just using the one right in the middle of the piano, but any one c to another C is another octave. Okay, so we're going to use the full octave. Typically, you're going to want to become very familiar with whatever key you're in. So for in C major, you want to be familiar with the scale and there's specific fingering that's involved. That is one, two, three, and then you tuck your thumb underneath to the F, and that way, you can go all the way up. So one, two, three, tuck your thumb underneath to the F, and then you can get all the way up to the next seat, the octave. Right? That's one thing we're going to do. We're going to expand our improvisation scale. With our left hand, we're going to add a new chord. That's we've realized that this is a C chord. This is an F chord. That's a one chord and a four quord. Now we're going to add our five chord, which is based on g. And the notes will be G, B and D. Our left hand is very lazy. So we want very, very little movement. We already used a cord inversion for F. We're going to do the same thing for G. Here's our G cord, G B and D. We're going to take the D. We're going to move it down. Then we're going to take it one step further. We're going to move the B down. Still have the same three notes, G, B, D. Let's go over that one more time. Take your D, move it down. Then take your B, move that down. It's like Jing. Backwards Jo. We still the same three nodes, G, B and D, and there's your G chord. There's lots of different ways of playing this left hand G chord, but we're going to start with that. Our or progression is become one, four, and then eventually to five. If you can learn these three chords, and this progression, you can play pretty much anything. All right. Let's try it with the backing track and we'll take it from there. A. So again, keeping it very, very simple, building these beautiful little small melodies, okay? If you're having trouble with the left hand again, just keep it out or use single notes, C F and G, and then just focus on that right hand, especially now that we've kind of expanded the region of the scale from five notes to a eight keys. Let's take it one more time, and this time, I'll just just do some right hand. I'll try to keep the left hand out, to show you exactly what I'm doing. Sometimes you come up with a collection of two or three notes that sound good. Go ahead and repeat those notes. You'll hear that in improvisation all the time, particularly in jazz and blues, come up with a good collection and notes. They like it. Feel free to repeat it. Again, lots and lots of space. Let's just take just the right hand now. Now, we'll just do just a left hand as an exercise just on its own. Oh. So there you have it. Now, one really good thing about doing that left hand exercise on its own is you can start to experiment with different rhythms, as you become a little bit more comfortable. There's no right or wrong way of playing different rhythms in the left hand. The trick is to do it when you find a little bit of space. So when you're playing a little phrase in the right hand, you have a little gap in time, feel free to kind of experiment with that rhythm a little bit. So it's almost like you're doing both things at the same time, but you're not. And then when you're maybe holding a note or resting in the right hand, then you're slipping in some chords, then you start to do it more naturally, but you have to kind of work at it. Also, feel free to experiment with not playing all three notes at the same time. You can break the or in half. You can play one node, the upper two notes. There's really no right or wrong. So let's experiment with a few different rhythms. Again, we'll just keep going with the left hand and give you some ideas. So that'll give you an idea of some different rhythms you can do and again, it depends on the style of music. Now, we're going to take both hands again. This time, I want should really focus on when I take a pause or a break in the right hand, either by holding it out and extending it out, by taking a rest, and then filling in some of those left hand. Let's try that. O. As you can see, when you create space with one hand, you can fill in with the other and vice versa. It's almost like a little cat and mouse game between the left and the right hand. But it's a really good way of becoming more comfortable filling in that space. I would keep the left hand very, very simple initially. I would just play whole notes. So you're just holding it for a whole bar like four beats, and then just focus on the right hand. Like I said, leave the left hand out completely and just focus on the right hand. Again, as you become more comfortable, as you practice more, you can start to get more of those chords and more of those rhythmic variations in the left hand and start to create some really interesting things. 4. Minor chord progression, natural minor & blues scales: You don't always want to be playing in a major key. It often depends on the style of music that you want to play. General rule of thumb is that if you want to play a song that's kind of happy in nature, you're going to want to pick a major key. In which case, we could use something like the C major scale. If you want something that's a little bit maybe more mysterious, then you're going to want to use a minor key. So every major key has a minor key that goes with it. Without boring you with too much theory in the reference materials, I've included the circle of fifths. You don't necessarily have to commit it to memory. You can just maybe print it off, have it handy. Keep it on your desktop. And it's just a quick reference that you can look up, and for instance, and you can see that C major and A minor go together, their relatives. Okay, so what does that mean? That means that a C major scale, which we've already talked about is from one c to the next highest C, that is a C major scale. The natural minor that goes with it is A. We call it natural minor. There's our A right there. A, A, and check it out. They're all white keys. They're basically the exact same scale. C major and a natural minor are identical scales. It's just we're starting on the A. Now when we're slowing, we're going to be focusing on this natural minor scale from this A to this A. Okay. We're also going to have to change up the or progressions. All right. So we're still going to do a one, four, five progression, but now because we're in the key of A, one is going to be right there. Okay, one is going to be A. Here's our four is a D, and five is an E. It's still a one, four, five. It's just that we've changed keys now. So our root note is A. Okay. So just like we did before, We can build our chords. A, C and E. That is an A minor chord. That would be your one chord. Okay? Next up would be the D. D F and A. But remember what we talked about in the other lesson, our left hand is very, very lazy. We don't want this is way too much movement, way too much movement. It's hard enough to to focus on the right hand and what you're going to play without your left hand bouncing all over the place. So we're going to find an inversion. We're going to take this high A and move it down low. We still have D F, and A, same three notes. We're not changing the notes, we're just changing the order of the notes. Now we have A, and then our D is right there, like we did with the C or where we can anchor our fifth finger and go back and forth. To start off with, you're probably going to want to maybe just get used to that. Okay. And then the last chord that we want to add to that is the E chord, which is one, two, three, four, five. There you go. Number five. E, G, and B. Same thing. We're going to take the B and move it down. And then we're going to take the G and move it down. We still have the same three notes, E, G and B. Let's do that again. EGB. Here's our root position. When we play our art in its root position. It's always starting with the lowest note. We're going to take the B, move it down, and then we're going to take the G and move it down. Now we have the 145 quarts, A minor, D minor and E minor. Then we're going to be using the natural minor scale? A natural minor scale. Same thing, it's all white keys. You can't go wrong. Any white key is going to be just fine in there. All right, so I got a funky backing track. Let's run with the backing track. I think the backing tracks are fun to play with. I tried to change up the genre of this one. This one's kind of like a funky kind of reggae kind of track. So this will be in the key of A minor. It's going to fall that one, four, five quarter progression. So let me run it through you one time, and then I'll switch camera angles, and we'll see what's going on here. Why don't we change up with this camera angle? Okay, so as you can see, I was still just using all just white keys. You cannot play a wrong note. That's the biggest thing I want to emphasize. If you're using the scales that I've provided to you, you're only using white keys. There's no such thing as a wrong note. You cannot play a wrong note. It is a fail safe foolproof method. You can see, I started to try to incorporate some of the syncopated kind of rhythm that we talked about from the previous lesson just to make it a interesting. That rhythm will always be dictated by whatever style of music that you're playing. This is because as kind of funky reggae, you get that sort of thing. Let me switch to the overhead view and let's run it again. A A. As you can see, you cannot go wrong, any white key. You can play single notes, the AD and the E. You can leave the left hand out altogether, just focus on the right hand. You can practice just only doing the left hand with the backing track. That's a really a good way of kind of getting used to the core progressions. And change it up by adding a blues scale to your. If you can learn your major scales, your natural minor scales, and your blues scales in multiple keys, you can play pretty much anything. So that's why I'm focusing on those three scales. So we're going to be looking at the A minor blues scale. Again, this will all be provided in your reference material. But let's look at it. We're going to skip a couple of notes here. We're going to go up from A to C to D, Then we have an E flat, E, G and A. If I were play those all at the same time, those are our notes. This is the first time that we've introduced a black note. This is commonly referred to as the flat fifth. One, two, three, four, five. E is our fifth note of the scale. If we flatten it, play one key lower, there it is. That's often referred to as a flat fifth. Now you're going to have a very different sound. Let me play the natural minor scale. Now, let me play the blue scale. Very, very different, different sound. Okay, so let's run the track again. Mm. Okay, so I started to kind of, like embellish a little bit, have a little bit of fun, but I can promise you that the only keys that I were using were from the A minor blues scale. Let me show you a couple of tricks. This might be a little bit more advanced, but you can kind of have some fun with it. So with that flat fifth, really common thing that Blues musicians do is they slide off that key up to the fifth. Now, you can do this with two fingers. You can do it with one finger. I like to use my index finger and slide off it, and that way I can get my fifth finger up to the octive. That is such a buy blues sound. Or you can you can get up to the G there. You can start to more than one key at the same time. As you get a little bit more comfortable with improvisation, but for now, you could just focus on just using your index finger. And sliding off of that key. And the faster you're able to play these scales. Okay, the more kind of cool it's going to sound, you have to start slow. If I was starting from the beginning, I would learn the C major scale, the A natural minor, and the A minor blue scale, which is what we're playing right now. And I would play it consistently and then increased continue to increase speed, and then you can have lots of fun with it. 5. Using unpredictable chord progressions: If we only stick within the confines of say our one, four, five core progression. Eventually, you're going to get very bored of that. It's a very, very good place to start, but you don't want to get stuck in that box. You want to start to expand out of that box. We're going to go back to the key of C major. This time, I'm going to really really push the boundaries of expanding getting away from that one, four, five core progression, which can just start to sound dull. I'm still only going to be using the C major scale. Any white key, any white key. You can start to kind of expand beyond the octaves. Okay? So you're really kind of any white key on the piano, is going to work just fine if you're in the key of C major. And I'm going to show you a little trick in the left hand that you can do. If you're a guitar player, this might make a little bit more sense to you. But let me show you. We'll start with that. Up until now, we've been talking about kind of our three note chords. We also refer to those as triads and piano, okay? So our basic C. Chord, my particular style of playing, and I'm not sure why I did this, but I can tell you that it is quite effective and it's a tool that you can use in the left hand to make it even simpler. Okay? What I do, instead of playing these kind of, you know, block kind of closed chords, we would call them, I stretch my hand out. I play the octaves. Okay? And then I add the fifth in the middle. Okay. This is basically like a power chord on a guitar. You get your octaves with the fifth. Okay? You have to stretch your hand out a little bit more, but this is just kind of the style that I've learned to play with. The cool thing about this is because the third of the chord is not being played. This can be major or minor. It's basically both, which is really cool. So it's an incredibly flexible chord. That you can use over a major or minor. Just like we talked about in the last video or pegate the chord. So I use this all the time. Okay? It kind of just creates a much simpler kind of sound, and then I can do more with my right hand. The other thing that's kind of cool about it is if I'm playing a low chord, say, like a F chord. Way down here in the lower reaches of the piano. Starts to sound really muddy. We call those the muddy frequencies. It's really hard to hear that chord. Okay? It doesn't sound great. But if I take that F chord and I play it more like this, still an F chord, but because I'm playing some higher notes, it sounds a lot better. It sounds a lot cleaner. Okay. It's going to sound better in like a recording. Let me play the difference again. So here's like, kind of like that closed position versus springing out and adding the same notes. Still very much an F chord, but I've spread it out. Not saying you have to play it this way. I'm just trying to give you a little tricks and tips that you can use incorporate. Okay? So I'm going to play something for you here, and we're going to try to really move around with the chords and deviate from that one, four, five chord progression. Sounds really fancy. I promise you, it is not. I'm literally only still playing white keys. Those were all white keys. Can go wrong. F the key of C major, any white key on the piano. And I was playing that just as we talked about the octo with the fifth in the middle, in the left hand, sometimes peg in those chords. So I was moving around all over the place. Let's talk about some of these chords. We started in like a C chord. You got your basic C F. And Gs. But then I also went down. I found our D chord. We had an A chord. These are just all octaves with the fifths in the middle. Now instead of having a 145, C F g, we're all over the place. We got a two quord. We get a six We can go down to the five at that point in time if we want. Now, your listener is probably expecting you to go to the fourth. Okay, the F, so maybe we're going to go down to the second again. Maybe they're thinking you're going to go back to the fourth, you're going to go to a third, and E. Okay? There's no rules whatsoever. And I think the key thing is, you want to try to keep your listener guessing, okay? You want to avoid being predictable. And part of that is just experimenting and playing whatever you want. And whatever sounds good. If you're wondering about the numbers that I'm referring to, it's literally just if you take your scale, C major scale, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Okay. Whatever chord, I'm basing the notes on, is just the number of the scale. On chord. Why? Because one is the first note of the C major scale. A two chord. Is the second note. So on aside, here's a three chord. That's a very simplified version of chords, and there's like a gazillion different chords, and a gazillion different chord combinations and added notes and stained notes and augmented and diminished. Basically, we're just trying to get you sitting at the piano and playing without music and just enjoying it and kind of getting lost in it. Okay? So we can kind of add those things one or time. Let me give you another example. I'll try to move it around again. M. I'm not really trying to go in a specific order. I'm just playing chords that I think sound good literally by just moving. You can just play single notes in the left hand, and it'll still sound good, and that was only playing white keys on the piano. Deviating from our pre established chord progressions is a highly effective way of making your improvisations sounding predict, less boring, but you just have to experiment. 6. Putting it All Together: Putting it all together. Okay? We're going to take all the things that we've learned all the lessons, and we're going to try to put it all together into some kind of cohesive performance. Okay? So let's just go over some of the key things that we've learned about. We've learned about kind of block chords. Our pegated arts playing the one a t. We've talked about major to minor. We've talked about major seventh quarts. We talked about playing octa with fifths in the middle. We've got our major scale, natural minor. And blue scale, okay? And we've talked about deviating from the strict one, four, five chord progressions. Okay? So I'm just going to kind of move things around, and we're going to try to incorporate all those different things, and we'll see how they sound. Okay. So what did we have going on there? We had major versus minor. We had our pegated cords. We had kind of unpredictable chord progressions. We had our major scale. We had our natural minor scale, and we had our blues scale. So the only black key that we were using was that remember we need that flat fifth one, two, three, four, five. There's the flat fifth. Okay? That was the only black key that we were using. Also, that F major minor. So we had maybe an A flat in there as well. Okay. So tons of different ways that you can approach any kind of improvisation. Okay? So that's kind of like our major kind of core progression. Let's see if we can go back to the minor, and I'll try to move those around a little bit, too, and we'll see how that sounds. I'll incorporate some of those same tools and tricks. Okay. So that was kind of like more based on using an A natural minor scale and a minor blues scale. Okay. But as you can see in the left hand, I was doing the same thing. I was doing the octa with a fifth in the middle. Again, you can play just individual root notes in the left hand. I was using all black keys on the piano. So Um, again, there's really no right or wrong when it comes to playing in these keys, whether it's C major, A minor, if you're using white keys, you cannot go wrong. So I would start with those keys, become really familiar, comfortable with incorporating some left hand with that. Once you feel like you're in a good spot and you feel comfortable with those keys, then we can expand upon those keys. And start to move across our circle of fifths, where we add sharps and we add flats and we play in some more challenging keys. But it all starts with C major A minor. So feel free to record yourself either in a video or an audio, playing along with some of these backing tracks, using the methods that we've incorporated in these videos. I'd love to listen to what you've come up with, and I'd love to be able to provide you feedback, and I hope that this is at least given you some confidence that you can sit down and you can play the piano, and you can do this And it's not difficult. It's just time consuming, and there's no substitute for practice. My final bit of advice is to find a player. It could be a piano player. It could be a saxophone player, it could be a guitarist. That's of a style that you can aspire towards. So I love Oscar Peterson. I'm a massive Oscar Peterson fan. I think he's the greatest jazz piano player of all time, one of the greatest piano players of all time. But I could never even come close to his level of playing ever. It's just it's way beyond my skill set. So as much as I love listening to his music, it's not a good starting point for me because it's so much more advanced than my skill set. You're better to find players that are better than you, but are playing at a level and a style that you can aspire towards and you can come closer. For me, it was a few different ones. There was Chuck Lavell, which I'm just a massive fan. There's Res Winans from Double trouble, and there is Bruce Hornsby. Bruce Hornsby, I have made a mission of trying to emulate his style of playing, so much so that when I am performing, people who are familiar with Bruce Hornsby's music will recognize that sound, which is a huge complement. Does it mean that I'm as good as Bruce Hornsby? No, I will never be as good as Bruce Hornsby. He is incredible. But his playing style is something that was a little bit closer to my playing style that I can emulate and I can push towards. Will I ever reach his level of expertise? No. The guy is phenomenal. But my best advice to you is to find a player that's of a similar style, and it's a little bit closer to your wheel house that you can aspire towards without just being such an overwhelming thing that you can never get close to. So if you were a guitarist, you know, I wouldn't say, go and aspire to be Eddie Van Halen. You're going to want to bring that down and find somebody that has more of a kind of a lyrical melodic style that you can fall along. Thank you so much for coming along with this journey. I'd love to hear what you come up with. This will be the first of many courses that I plan to offer. Thank you so much for your time. Get out there, play, practice, practice, practice, but most importantly, have fun and be fearless.