Yes. This is what being in control of chords and patterns, bringing it back to a fairly basic, but really wonderful piano arrangement means. John Legend is of course a master of the pop-meets-soul-piano-song, and uses the exact methods of playing Pop/Chord/Pattern piano from ‘Hack the Piano‘ to build his beautiful piano songs with. So, for ... Read more
And what an absolute magical track this is. As we've seen quite a few times already, Chris Martin (singer and pianist of Coldplay) really knows how to put his chords and patterns to good use. He is a truly marvellous example of a Pop-Pianist.
This new song of theirs, yet again holds a wonderful (and quite extensive, 14 different chords/voicings for just the verse) chord progression using really nice voicings and inversions and a hauntingly beautiful broken-chord pattern.
5 easy chords (just triads with a few inversions used, nothing too advanced here), a killer guitar-strum transformed into a piano pattern and a melodic hook + left hand 'comping' that will seriously challenge and improve your technical skills and voicing-knowledge.
This week I have a very nice one for all you up-tempo lovers, blues-piano style lovers, Motown-feel lovers and Northern-soul fans out there.
John Newman, the up and coming rising star (his first hit "Love me again", has already topped the English charts at peak position no. 1, click here for my lesson featuring that song if you missed it earlier), is about to officially release his second single: 'Cheating' in the first week of October 2013.
However, the official music video on youtube has already reached an outrageous 2 million views in just over three weeks time.
Want to be the first to play this song, even before it is officially released? Well, I got just the thing for you right here! :).
Here is my gift, my free manifesto, written and freely downloadable especially for all of you that:
Many of you like her, probably just as many of you don't. However, she's big and she knows how to make her hits.
This lesson teaches those of you that do like her how to play her current biggest hit. For the rest of you it's still a nice exercise of stripping down a monster production and building it back up to a fuller piano-part (chorus).
Yes, we've indeed already been quite funky a few times in the last few weeks, right?
Thing is, this tune just got me noddin' my head right away, the very first time I heard it. As I saw quite a few people around me doing the same whenever this song sounded, I figured the interest for learning how to play it might be quite high.
As there are no keys (piano) in the original, I also thought it might be another fun example / exercise of how to make a piano song out of a non-piano song, copying bass lines (left hand) and harmony parts (in this case a rhythm/funk guitar, right hand).
Super sweet, silky yet jumpy, very nice progression and of course: what a vocal track (not the "lalala", that's a sample, the actual singer. Nice).
Also, as you might have guessed (why else would I put it up??) it's another good, no wait, great example of:
This week is sort of a 'primer', as I decided to try something new: split up the tutorial.
This week our good friend and super-talented singer-songwriter Tom Odell shows us exactly what can be accomplished on the piano, using chord- and pattern-knowlegde. He truly is another perfect example of somebody that really knows how to put chords and patterns to good use in his music. Both for creating and performing his beautiful songs. ... Read more
Here's a very neat trick to find ANY major and minor chord, extracted and compressed from some of Hack the Piano’s new content.
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