You can learn a huge amount about piano and music theory by digging into songs. So in this tutorial we look at a song that can teach us a vast amount about different aspects of playing the piano and musical creativity in general — especially in the areas of piano chords, comping, jazz piano style and how to play around with melodies.

GET THE PDF
I’ve made a PDF to accompany the tutorial. It includes an outline score for the song, some tips and exercises, plus chord diagrams visualised on to a piano keyboard for those of you who aren’t confident music readers. You can download it (for free!) from Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox. Here are the links:

GOOGLE DRIVE: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ea6C...
MS ONEDRIVE: https://1drv.ms/b/s!Alnla1DuJXkzg2irC...
DROPBOX: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dgegfe...

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00:00 Why songbooks are amazing for pianists
01:14 “A Song That Even I Can Sing” - piano and vocal
03:12 Music that sounds complex is often simple
03:26 Key, structure, tonal tightropes
04:41 Vamping
05:14 AABA structure
07:23 Melodic engineering
08:49 The mechanics of swing
10:22 Swing with anticipation and triplets
11:37 Switch off the targeting computer, Luke
11:59 Different types of sheet music, inc piano-vocal score and lead sheets
13:21 Managing rhythmic anticipation on the piano
14:28 Beware beat loss!
16:13 Chord symbols and why you shouldn’t obsess about them
17:18 Chord extensions: the basics
19:13 Omitting notes from complex piano chord extensions
19:42 Rootless chord voicings
20:40 Alternative labels for extended chords (feat. G7sus4)
21:46 Tonal ambiguity in complex chords (more interesting than it sounds)
23:19 Non-diatonic chords: the basics
24:33 Chord substitution and cadences
28:46 Non-diatonic chords add colour and variety
30:42 Chromatic mediant modulation
33:01 The circle of fifths and escaping from the B section
33:53 Passing chords for fixing wonky cadences
34:54 Summaring the B section run-out chords
35:29 Pedal tones are glorious
37:14 All about comping on the piano
37:47 Stride comps
39:35 Exploring your own piano comps
41:15 Thinking about the piano’s sustain pedal
41:53 Make MUSIC on the piano, not random plonking about
42:48 Where to find more stuff on piano chords


IMAGE CREDITS
Pexels/Cottonbro Studio

#piano #chords