1st Piano Recording

[GreedylilPig]

Most of my time playing music is spent playing guitar and singing, but for the past two years I've been taking sporadic piano lessons from a good friend of mine and I finally got around to writing a song of my own and recording it. This is my first piano recording and I guess it's also the first recording I've posted that doesn't include any vocals (still working on singing and playing piano at the same time). Anyway, it doesn't have a title. Hope you enjoy.

http://plaza.ufl.edu/bbatson/bbatson-piano.mp3

[Nitro1515]

Well done Brian, I enjoyed it.

[BenPezzner]

That was great. Here are my suggestions.

1) Try and have some sort of melody so the music can tell its story and take the listener places. What you have would be perfect for a background piano part, but since the piano is the only instrument it would be good if there were a melodic voice. It doesn't have to be anything complex. In fact, the simpler, the better. Try and let your left hand take over more of the chords stuff (both the initial chord and the following broken version of the same chord), which will free up your right hand to do something different. You can even switch between background support and melody with your right hand, since the melody will have some inherent breaks and pauses (unless you are Boyd Tinsley and haven't mastered the art of phrases).

2) Try and make your bridge a bit more distinctive. You can do this by switching to the relative minor (three half-steps down from the key the piece is in) and going from there, with a whole new chord progression until it eventually resolves back into the main theme. Or you can do something completely different. I don't know... these aren't rules, merely guidelines to keep it interesting.

3) Chord inversions. Learn them... they are your friends! I noticed that your chords are all played with the root on the bottom. Try playing some inversions of some of the chords to mix it up. It'll definitely make things more interesting, and can even add an extra dimension to that melody in the right hand. It helps to practice cadences and arpeggios in order to master this, but once it is mastered, you'll see and hear why it's such a cool thing to be able to do.

Alright, keep playing!

~ben

[sunglassesatnight]

I enjoy it. I can't offer anything like what Pez has, but keep at it. I want to get a keyboard madly.

[GreedylilPig]

Thanks a lot for the replies so far.

Pez, I really appreciate your advice. You are so much more advanced than I am and I am honored to have you listen. I was fearful that this song would sort of fade into the background and not really captivate the listener; I guess that's something I have to work on and your advice will be helpful for that. Switching to a relative minor and building back into the main theme is something in particular I'm going to focus on, and then on inversions (something I haven't really learned yet). Thanks again.

[BenPezzner]

Hey no problem. Once you've mastered chord inversions it opens up a whole new world of possibilities when it comes to voicings. What do I mean by that? Well once your hand is in position to play a chord (whether it be the three notes of the tritone or the three plus the octave, which is what I do) then you are set at least for that instant in which you are in that key. You don't have to play the same broken-chord pattern over and over again. Once your hand is in position you can play whatever pattern you like... you don't even have to play every single note in the chord.

Try playing the song you just recording again, but instead this time re-learn it using first chord inversion the whole way through (that's my favorite inversion). Once you got that down, then start taking notes out of the pattern and even puting extra ones that aren't in the chord in. Hopefully this makes sense... if it doesn't let me know. Once you've got that down do the same thing but with second inversions. Then finally you can put it all together and switch back and forth between inversions based on where your hand is relative to the closest inversion of the next chord.

One last thing to think about is adding a human aspect to the playing. What do I mean by that? Imagine what a midi file sounds like. The notes come out mechanical - all the same volume, perfectly spaced apart, extremely precise. We want to stay as far away from that as possible. Try changing volumes... getting louder, getting softer, with each phrase, as if the piece is literally breathing. Also, it's ok to mess with the tempo a tad, depending on how exciting it's getting. You can speed it up a bit during the loud and in-your-face parts, or you can relax it a bit during the softer laid back parts.

Well it looks like I've gone ahead and written a novel again. Hopefully that all made sense. One last thing you can do to help with all this is to practice for a little bit each night before you go to bed, and just play in the style of your recording, but instead of being in the mindset of playing a song with a beginning, middle, bridges, choruses, verses, and an ending, just play whatever comes to mind and let it flow. It can last 2 minutes, 5 minutes, a half hour... whatever you feel like at the moment, and you can do crazy things with chords, see which transitions work, which don't, that sort of thing.

Alright, good luck.

Ben

Edit: I just realized that every single suggestion I made in my last two posts is demonstrated in this recording: http://www.benpezzner.com/piano/Piano1.mp3