Piano Free

It’s no secret that professional piano players use techniques that amateur piano players don’t. So what else is new? Professional golfers use techniques that amateur golfers don’t use (at least not very well), and pro ball players use techniques that sandlot and weekend athletes don’t use — or again, not very well.

So it’s not surprising that professional piano players have some tricks up their sleeves that the rest of us mortals don’t have. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to emulate the great pianists. We may not pull it off as well as them, but we sure can have a lot of fun trying, and who knows? Maybe a few of us can actually learn these techniques well enough

to win some admiration from our friends, join a group, play for our own enjoyment, or whatever.

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America, the big melting pot, has always been influencing the music of the whole world. It gave birth to many different styles and music traditions. Jazz, Hip-Hop and Blues are the three most known and most popular traditions that also originated in the US.

One of the most famous of musical traditions is that of the Blues. It has also been one of the most influential, paving the way for many other new styles of music. Blues, a distinct style of music, began to emerge around the 1860’s. After the civil war, the newly freed Afro-American people were presented with a new difficulty. They had been removed from the lives that they had previously known and

thrown into a new life, a life of segregation and contempt. The American culture could no longer condone the use of slavery, but it was not ready to accept the new free men and women into their society either. Many had to travel the country in search of work. These people were mostly men and those of whom music appealed to most took up instruments such as the guitar and harmonica because these instruments were cheap and easy to travel with. It was in this setting of a sense of deep segregation that the blues was born.

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Symphony orchestras and opera offer various classic and modern performances as well. However, the modern American listeners prefer the music with their original roots.

It had taken a long time before America developed its own original styles of music. The early settlers brought tot heir new homeland European music. One of the most popular American orchestras played Mozart, Bellini, Weber or Strauss. People sang folk songs, psalms and hymns. They danced polkas and minuets.

In the beginning of the 19th century the minstrel show emerged. It was the first typically American form which included songs, dances, storytelling and banter. The main representative of the minstrel show was Stephen Foster, considered American first great folk composer. Minstrel shows gave rise to musicals which

are so popular in American culture.

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Did you know that music is based on natural “laws” — like gravity — and by learning to understand how those natural laws work we can actually understand what we are doing when we play — we don’t have to be at the mercy of what someone else has written on a piece of music.

How many of these facts do you know about music & piano playing? Test yourself and then check the answers at the bottom of the page:

Did you know that by learning just 3 chords you can play hundreds of songs?

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Piano improvising and arranging is an art but definitely not a science. It is all based on chords and chord progressions. There aren’t any steadfast rules for creating an arrangement, nothing to dictate the limitless potential of your imagination. Musicians learn to arrange by simply arranging and improvise by improvising — over and over again. It’s a big game of trial and error. But it s also a scientific method: you keep the experiments that work, and abandon those that don t work.

That being said, there are a few things that can help you in the knowledge of piano improvization. Don’t think of these as rules, but rather points on a roadmap guiding you through the vast world

of arrangement and improvisation possibilities.

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