7 tricks that will make you sound good at piano

this video is sponsored by my new piano course available now at artmaster.com tricks at the piano seven little things you can do which will make it sound to let you know what you're doing seven little things that will just add that sense of flourish and finesse to your piano playing and what I just did there at the beginning is the first one what I might call a black note glissando the black notes of the piano happen to be what's called a pentatonic scale they're either an E flat minor pentatonic scale if you treat E flat as your root note or they're 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 that it's been simplified is that the semitones have been removed from the scale meaning that the smallest interval you can get in a pentatonic scale isn't a semitone but a tone that interval for example between E flat and d flat which as you can hear although sounding dissonant doesn't sound harmonious it's not a horrible Clash if anything it's quite a nice sense of tension a semitone for comparison would be that it's a quite obvious clash in the notes so pentatonic scales are therefore like a foolproof scale because there's no semitones in them there's no way that we can Clash even if we play all of the notes of the scale uh in a massive sort of flurry like that we can just move our hand up and down the black notes and get some interesting sounding music now you might have noticed when I've been doing this sort of black note glissando thing I end by striking this E flat note here and as I said before the pentatonic scale of the black notes can either 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 chaotically moving down the black notes is to sort of conclude it and anchor it with the root note and of course any Boomtown Rats fans watching will have already clocked that this black note glissando idea is used at the beginning of I Don't Like Mondays foreign now in a similar vein to that first one you're probably familiar with the fact that the white notes of the piano are a C major scale if we go up the windows of the piano we get a C major scale so trick number two on this list is white note glissandos just like we had black note Sandos we now have our white notebooks handle but with this one [Music] I prefer to go up I think it's a bit easier to handle the fact that the semitones are going to clash as we slide over them and the reason I think up is better for that is because as we get higher on the piano the sense of dissonance we get between two notes of semitone apart is less obvious if I do a semitone up here it doesn't sound too bad versus down here we can really hear that dissonance [Music] so as you can see I'm playing the Cassandra in a very particular way though where I'm making sure to always resolve onto the note C at the end [Music] to make it sound more logical when an intentional we're not just moving randomly around the scale and ending up on any old node we have a clear conclusion because we end on C and if you recognized that type of glissando I'm pretty sure it was used on Louis Armstrong's version of Le'Veon Rose [Music] as you can see I'm no longer in my familiar backdrop and that's because I'm back in Prague again making a course for you guys previously I was making a music theory course which was something I'd been requested many times to make and now I'm making a course on piano playing how to play the piano for beginners if you're somebody who's always been interested in learning how to play the piano maybe you play a different instrument like guitar it's a great course to introduce you to your first few songs and with each song that we learn we'll also be picking up ideas and techniques like chords and scales and arpeggios so if that sounds good to you do consider checking out the links Down Below in the description about my new piano for beginners course available at artmaster.com foreign [Music] so the next trick on our list is far more subtle than these big elaborate the Sandos we've been doing it's what you could call Grace notes so just then I was playing Hey Jude and you might have noticed that I was adding in 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 rather than going straight for the a I would slide off of the black note just to the left of it foreign there onto the D I was meant to play a d but instead I slid onto it from the d flat this is a really subtle way of adding a bit of character to the melody set you play I think it actually sounds far more like a vocalist would sing it where they're not just aiming for the pure note that's in the melody the sort of approaching that note from another note sliding onto it and one of the easiest ways to do it is when you're sliding from a black note onto a white note so like here with this c a I can go see a flat onto a but so quick so subtle that you don't really hear that black note there you just sort of hear that we've come up into the a 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 that's about a semitone or a tone below the destination and then resolve onto the main Melody note is called an Aki acachora and I actually talked about them recently in this video so do check that out if you haven't caught it so far we've had blackout glissandos we've had white note Los Santos and we've had Grace notes but our fourth trick is this [Music] it's a sound that's quite familiar to anyone who's listened to classical music at the piano it sounds really impressive but it's not actually that complicated it's the same thing moved in consecutive octaves up the piano [Music] it's just an arpeggio a chord in this case C major but voiced with c e g and another C on the top foreign [Music] now of course this one is difficult at first if you're not used to playing the piano having that fluidity of your hand moving across the piano like that that is a skill that will require practice but the thing that makes this a trick a simple thing to do is that you're just playing the same chord over and over again so although the end result is quite an impressive and acrobatic movement it's the same thing getting repeated over and over again and as I said you can apply it to any chord you like so no matter what key you're in what chord progression you're playing you can make use of this to add a bit of flourish to what you're playing foreign [Music] is chromatic scales just moving every note on the piano every black and white note in succession now this once again like the previous one is something that if you're new to piano is difficult you know getting that motion fluid and reliable takes time but why I think this is a trick is 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 with chromatic scales they're not in a key because they're using every single note they are every chromatic scale I guess the only defining factor is where you start so the practice you've put into moving between all 12 notes of the piano [Music] can be used in all 12 Keys it doesn't matter what key the song's in now I think one of the important things to stop this just sounding like random moving up and down the piano is thinking about where you're going to wind up it's that destination end your chromatic scale on a chord tone on one of the notes in the chord that you're playing and then it will sound logical and tasteful [Music] foreign [Music] but as long as I made sure that the chromatic scale ended on a note that's in the E flat major chord it sounded like it all belonged together [Music] foreign there is what's called a pedal tone or a pedal point the left hand was staying on sea throughout regardless of what chord I was playing in the right hand was playing a C chord but then when I moved to a B flat chord I still played the C in the left hand when I moved to an F chord I still play the CNF hand E flat chord c in the left hand this is my sixth trick on the list it's pedal point and basically what you can do is throw any chord in the right hand over a continuous left hand note and it will sort of bind together it will work even if it's something quite removed from the key like this F sharp because it got that we've got this consistent root note pulling the whole thing together sounds like a really interesting sophisticated chord [Music] so there I was just playing a C chord going up different inversions then I was playing NF sharp chord going up different inversions and then the C chord again sounds really dramatic sounds like something from a film score or something it's just two chords over a consistent note and once again at a Common Thread throughout all of these tricks the way that makes it sound really intentional when and uh well thought out is that it resolves back at the end to the tonic chord so in this example I'm using C as my pedal point [Music] so when I go to the F sharp sounds really wild but as long as I resolve back to C at the end it sounds like we're back home and that the whole thing was always going to wind up home it sounds intentional even though I'm just jamming random chords around the piano [Music] foreign [Music] this is our seventh and final trick we're going to look at today I wonder if you noticed what I was doing there I was playing a arpeggio I started on the C minor chord I was playing an arpeggio that went from the bottom note to the middle note to the top note and then I used the trick which is that after I play the arpeggio for four rotations I then moved one of the notes didn't matter which note it was one note to the left or right so in my example I went and took the C at the bottom of our chord and moved it one note to the left onto the B which gave us this chord that chord happens to be a b augmented chord the beauty of this trick is you don't need to know that and as 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 semitone just randomly then on my next chord move it down semitone again still apply to my arpeggio figure then I moved the top the top note down onto the F sharp there and I'm winding up with all these interesting chords all these interesting sounds all I'm ever doing is moving one of the notes in the chord by a semitone I'm not planning this chord progression out really I'm not thinking actively about what chord I'm going to be playing but because with each chord movement only one note in the chord is getting moved and it's only getting moved by a semitone we naturally wind up with a chord progression that's not only cohesive as like as in the chords work together but because we're moving one note a semitone it's still voice-led in a really satisfying way none of the three notes in the chord are wildly jumping around in unpredictable ways we're always getting a very smooth and subtle motion without really having to apply much thought to it and we can wind up with some really interesting chord progressions some really wild and unusual choices but they always work together foreign [Music] tricks my seven suggestions for sounding like you are much more competent piano player than you actually are you might not know how to play piano at all you might actually be quite a skilled player but having this little tricks in Your Arsenal is a good way to just add that bit of flourish to your playing um particularly in those moments when maybe you do want to show off a bit it's just an easy way to pull some tricks out of the bag so to finish off and leave you now today I'm going to try and blend all of these different techniques into one song which might be quite interesting but let's just see how we get on with that [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music]

Channel: David Bennett Piano

Views: 192,764

Keywords: piano, arpeggio, semitone, chromatic, scales, pentatonic, black notes, hacks, easy, tricks, music theory

Id: dYY14xjWvkI

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2023