Piano/Keyboard lessons in Celbridge or anywhere in the world
I was practising to create a walking bass line in the left hand on the fly while I comp to Just a Closer Walk With Thee. Oh my, did I sound terrible even when this was my third time over the last two weeks trying to do so. It just occurred to me that creating …
Continue reading “Creating Bass Lines is a Skill in its Own Right”
I remembered a particular lesson with a student advanced in note reading – he’s probably grade 7 or 8 in ABRSM music grade. That lesson focussed on primarily improvisation. I got him to “just play anything” based on a set chord progression. We did a bunch of other things as well. Towards the end of …
I was adding upper neighbouring notes to the melody of When the Saints Go Marching In today. Then I thought, why not go back to the original note after the neighbouring note? Oh, we end up with a mordent played slowly. I was then adding lower neighbouring notes to the melody. And then I went …
I was adding a upper/lower neighbouring note to a quarter note. As I wanted those two notes to take up a quarter note beat, both notes had to be eighth notes. I was sightreading the rhythm and mentally adding neighbouring notes left, right and center. I do the above rather easily as I’m a piano …
I started on an improvement exercise yesterday – use chord tones to improvise over the tune When the Saints Go Marching In and use the same rhythm as the tune. I did it thrice yesterday. Grand. I did it today for three times again. Improvising using chord tones felt more enjoyable today. I tried another …
This is a great resource: Characteristics of Musical Keys (biteyourownelbow.com) From http://www.wmich.edu/mus-theo/courses/keys.html From Christian Schubart’s Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst (1806) translated by Rita Steblin in A History of Key Characteristics in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries. UMI Research Press (1983). C MajorCompletely Pure. Its character is: innocence, simplicity, naïvety, children’s talk. C MinorDeclaration of love …