4 Easy Piano Tricks To Sound Like A Pro

hi I'm David Bennett I'm a piano player and I make videos on YouTube about music theory and today we're going to look at four tricks four little things we can do at the piano that make us sound like pros even if we're not a pro these four tricks will suddenly bring our playing to the next level all of these black notes just will always sound good together it doesn't matter if I hit them chaotically like this or if I'm more careful and navigate around them as long as I just play Black notes as you can hear I can't really hit a wrong note and that's because the black notes happen to give us what's called the pentatonic scale the pentatonic scale is a simpler form of the major or minor scale we only have five notes instead of the full seven hence pentatonic Penta meaning five 1 2 3 4 5 and then it repeats the thing about a pentatonic scale is that there's no semmit tones there's no opportunity to hit a wrong note basically even if I hit these two notes which are really close to each other yes there's a sense of tension there's a sense of rub between those two notes but there's not an unpleasant sound unlike when you hit a semitone so that's what makes the pentatonic scale sort of foolproof because it doesn't matter how I hit these notes they will always sound good they they can't Clash I can't make them Clash so our second trick that we're going to use is what's called a pedal tone and this is when we have a consistent note in the left hand our pedal tone that's happening in the left hand for example C I'm going to play as an octave C and C together but you could just play single C that's the pedal tone what we basically have to do here is play any chord we like over the top pedaling through consistently playing C no matter what happens in the right hand so of course if we're playing a C chord it's quite natural to have C in the in the left hand there but we can go to any chord we like so I could play a G chord over the C like that or an F chord c again what about E flat chord all over this consistent C in the left hand d flat chord c here it suddenly sounds so harmonically sophisticated all I'm doing is playing random chords in the right hand random major and minor chords a consistent C and this just glues the whole thing together creates this sort of sense of um almost like a tension as well because obviously some of the chords like C major here will match the pedal tone really nicely some like d flat will create tension but the great thing about this trick is we don't have to really think too much about what we're doing we don't have to think about okay which chord will work here even something like g flat sounds pretty intense and dramatic but as long as we then move somewhere else it all kind of works sounds quite cinematic actually it's quite a common trick in cinematic [Music] music so that was the pedal tone and the next trick is actually kind of related to that it's what we call an inverted pedal tone sounds sophisticated sounds complex but it really isn't it's the same idea of a consistent repeating note but instead of being in the base area it's in the higher resistance of the piano that's the inverted element of it so literally the same idea is applying again we're going to have a consistent note C so I'm going to keep playing C in the right hand playing it with this regular rhythm like this and then the left hand is going to add some chords going to add them in the middle range of the piano simply because if I add chords down here could sound a little bit too thick right there sounds quite dense I'm going to put it around here instead it sounds a bit sweeter just going through a few different chords here this is an A minor chord in my left hand F chord I'm going to go up to a G chord in my left hand but the whole time my right hand has just been sticking on that C D Minor with each different chord we go to it's almost like we hear a different context a different sort of shade of this consistent even though the note's not changing the context is changing so our last trick is what we call Grace notes now a Grace note is a really small fleeting note that happens before the main note I could just play c e and G like that or I could do this sort of a blink and you miss it moment really but it's suddenly added another dimension to what I'm doing what I'm doing here is adding in a Grace note the grace not note being this E flat so what I'm actually playing is is this c e flat and G but immediately allowing my middle finger to slip down from the E flat note to the note that we actually need in the chord but that tiny little moment adds so much character to what I'm playing one of the easiest ways to do it is when you're playing a chord like C or maybe G or F where the middle note should be on a white note but has a black note to its left and that gives us a great opportunity to use the same finger to just slide between the two you can really accentuate it and let it drag out a bit or you can make it so fast that you barely even notice it's happened but you don't have to do it there you can use it in any setting so for example if I had a d flat chord like this the middle note hasn't got a black note next to it the note above is also a white note but I can still do a Grace note here but now it involves two fingers instead of the one and that can be a slightly more fiddly thing to get the hang off there's something very simple and straightforward about falling from a black note onto a white note but now let's look at how we can apply that to a Melody instead which one of the things I really like about Grace notes is the way that a singer would perform a Melody a vocalist is that they wouldn't necessarily just play the notes requested of them they're going to be kind of sliding into War sort of approaching the notes from other places so rather than Landing immediately on the first note of the melody here for example on a they might kind of slide into it from the note below like that coming off the black note below they're adding that Grace note in without even thinking about it and when you do that with your piano playing you add that vocal almost lyrical quality to you're [Music] playing without the Grace notes versus [Music] with sort of thing where you don't want to overdo it you don't want to have a Grace note on every single note you play in A Melody because it might get a bit much but it's something you learn to sort of pepper in as you go to add expressivity to the Melodies that you play so those were four easy ways that you can sound like a better piano player four little tricks you can add to your repertoire that you can pull out in any situation really and just take your playing to the next level and impress everyone who's watching comment below let me know what your favorite trick was and I'll see you next [Music] time

Channel: Pianote

Views: 104,541

Keywords: pianote, how to play piano, beginner piano lesson, easy piano, piano tutorial, piano hacks, online piano lesson, free piano lessons, improvisation piano tutorial, pentatonic scale piano, pedal notes, online piano lessons, piano exercises, intermediate piano lessons, beginner piano lessons, piano scales, how to play piano for beginners, grace notes piano, piano improvisation techniques, pedal notes piano, david bennett piano, david bennett music theory

Id: QWBVbPg6cak

Length: 7min 53sec (473 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2023