Tag: tips and lessons

Don’t Forget Octaves

In the last couple of years I have managed to achieve a noticeable improvement in my overall piano technique by focusing on scale and arpeggio excersizes. One piece of sloppiness remains – octaves. I am often sloppy in RH and worse in LH and I have difficulty doing accurate boogie woogie LH broken octaves. I […]
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Sounds and Scores – Mancini

This is Henry Mancini’s famous book on orchestration. Every musician should own a copy. It has been around for many years in many formats but exists now as a book with accompanying CD. Sometimes I just like listening to the example CD and reading trough the score like it is a very cool story album. […]
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Red Garland Block Chords

Red Garland’s block chords are arguably his most famous stylistic contribution to jazz piano. While overuse tends to make you sound a bit on the loungy side of things and can make you sound like a Garland wannabe (for better or worse), judicious use of this trick can come in handy in a number of […]
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Piano Finger Technique

In order to play piano musically, you need to train your fingers to use the little muscles within the fingers and not the big muscles that run up and down your arm. You want to develop a sense that gravity is working with you to push down a key from the knuckles rather than feeling […]
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Block Chord Piano Lesson

This is a video clip from Dick Hyman’s excellent series of jazz piano instructions. He outlines several useful patterns for playing block chord across the diatonic scale including mixing in a ‘drop 2’ voicing used widely by Barry Harris, Bill Evans and OP. Drop 2 on piano is a port of an orchestration technique for […]
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Making Friends with the Whole Tone Scale

This is an interesting scale that can be both used and abused in jazz and can create an ethereal ‘dreamy/spacey’ quality in soundtrack compositions. Key properties: Six note and Symmetrical (equal degrees between notes) Only two them cover all of the keys. (WT0 and WT1) Impossible to construct either a major or a minor triad […]
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4-note 3/7 rootless voicings

Voicing will go a long way toward defining your sound as a pianist much like a sax player gets known for a certain tone or a vocalist has a certain quality. The 3/7 4-note rootless voicings are an essential mainstay and go a long way in achieving a framework for basic improvisation and other more […]
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Chords 101

People often ask me how to begin to learn to play jazz piano. Unfortunately, even if you are (or were once) a fairly skilled classical player there is no one semester class or latenight video infomercial lesson series that is going to work for this. You need to become somewhat obsessed – listening to a […]
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