If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Every piano player, amateur or pro, has their own piano playing posture. What many fail to realize is how each posture could trigger a very different effect in our playing.
Here’s a paragraph from Hal Galper in his book Forward [...]
Did a wedding gig in Penang, Malaysia recently. Had a wonderful line up, blessed with some wonderful talented musicians on stage. Here’s a youtube clip of us doing the famous Grover Washington Jr tune, just the two of us.
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One of my aim, when performing [...]
Chick Corea’s Humpty Dumpty piano solo transcription and lead sheet, with examples of polyrhythm application.
Chick Corea’s Humpty Dumpty is an interesting and challenging tune the play, mainly because of two reasons:
The harmony changes in the tune breaks away from the normal 2-5-1 progression that we expect.
The length of the tune is actually 18 bars, giving [...]
Polyrhythm is when we have two or more rhythms existing simultaneously. The most commonly used polyrhythms are the “two on three” and “three on two”. Shown below are two examples of polyrhythms.
Figure 1
Figure 2
In figure 1, the left hand is clearly playing the basic pulse of a 3/4 time. The right hand however is playing [...]
Sixteenth notes are often neglected by many when improvising over a swing beat.
Observe how pianist David Newton demonstrates the use of sixteenth notes in his solo, at 3m33s of this video.
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The basic rhythm for a swing beat is as shown in diagram 1 below
Diagram [...]
Transcription of Chick Corea’s solo piano playing of Jazz Salsa tune Armando’s Rhumba
Chick Corea did a nice solo piano version of his own composition called Armando’s Rhumba on Legends of Jazz. Here is the youtube video :
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Here’s the transcription of the video from roughly [...]
Jazz Piano Improvisation video and lead sheet of latin tune Mambo Influenciado
Mambo Influenciado is a nice and catchy latin tune written by the great Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes. I first came across this song when listening to the Klazz Brothers performing together with cuba percussions.
Here’s the video of the Klazz Brothers doing their version [...]
For many years, pianists had never paid attention to any “piano” instrument that is unreal, until recent years. With the introduction of well designed digital pianos, many piano learners have opted to own an electric-powered piano prior to spending thousands dollars on a real wooden piano.
I can see the trend is moving towards “virtual”. Most [...]
I hope I won’t offend anyone when I said this - most of the best pianists are self-taught!
Rewsnat is a good example. I think he would say the same thing to me too. We don’t consider ourself as the best. But we do play the piano better than 95% of the population (probably higher). Most [...]
I wrote about a virtual piano application for PC users before. But the download link doesn’t work anymore, probably because the creator doesn’t support the software anymore.
Here is another virtual piano for you to try - PianoFX Studio 4.0 from Tanseon Systems is an advanced Piano Chords music keyboard Synthesizer for the Personal Computer. You [...]