We all aspire to be blues and jazz masters at the piano, but there are some easy blues piano tricks that every pianist should know which can instantly give your playing that authentic blues sound. The masters – pianists like Wynton Kelly, Oscar Peterson, Otis Spann, Dr. John, etc. – all knew how to use…
In Part 1 of our article on advanced reharmonization we discussed two tips for understanding how to get started with chord substitution. Here in Part 2 we’ll go further with some study of advanced reharmonization using Gershwin’s “Summertime” by discussing some common chord progressions as well as the idea of tritone substitutions. Advanced Reharmonization Tip…
Advanced reharmonization is fancy jazz-speak for expressing a pretty simple idea – changing the chords. Yeah, that’s it. Advanced reharmonization just simply means that we’re going to take the original chords to a song and change them to something different. So what about that is “advanced”? Well, we don’t want to just randomly select different…
In Part 1 of our article “Gig Tips for Pianists” we discussed some very important aspects of gigging, including where to find gigs, selecting repertoire, and general etiquette pointers. Here we’ll discuss some more gig tips that cover a range of topics. Gig Tips #4: Gear Gear – meaning keyboards, synths, controllers, amps, all that…
This article is going to focus on a variety of gig tips for musicians, but primarily pianists. Over the years I’ve gotten many different questions from students and advancing musicians about gigging, being a professional musician, music business, and the ins-and-outs of finding work and performing. I’ll attempt to answer some of those questions here.…
Rootless chord voicings are an essential aspect of jazz and blues playing and usually thought of as an advanced concept. But the most challenging aspect of rootless chord voicings is simply the practice that they require. This is good news because you don’t need to know a lot of theory or a ton of tunes…
In this article we’ll look at a very important blues piano tip – displacing the beat. Actually, this is not just a blues piano tip but a general piano tip because it can be applied to all types of music, as well as music composition. “Displacing the beat” refers to taking a musical lick or…
Have you ever listened to the climax of a great bluesy piano solo, when the pianist is playing big piano chords with two hands, and wondered “how is he getting that sound? What is he playing?” In this article we’re going to show you how you can build big piano chords with two hands. But…
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