Hi All!

What’s up?

This week I have another massively popular song for you, requested to be ‘tutorialized’ a zillion times.

It’s piano-based, thus hopefully easy to grasp and recognise. It’s chord / pattern based (as is all music) and although it’s not too hard to play, there are quite a few neat examples of throwing in some different basic patterns and combine them with nice chord voicings.

Many of you course followers will recognise patterns learned in the course, put to actual use here in a mega-hit song. Very nice.

 

Pink – Give me a reason.

 

 

A few extra notes:

 

• Pattern 1, used over the Em chord is derived from the ‘all eighth-beat’ pattern: The first three eighth-beats are played on Em, then the fourth eighth-beat, the voicing is changed to D and then to A/C#.

 

See (and hear) how good it works to, in stead of playing all eighth-beats on the same chord, change chord ‘somewhere in between’ (like here on the fourth beat). We’ve also seen this ‘trick’ used in the piano part of last weeks tutorial for Rihanna’s ‘Stay’.

 

• Pattern 2, the extra ‘a’ note that is played on top of the A/C# chord, is a great example of how to put the ‘chord – next inversion’-pattern to good use.

 

I just wanted to add, that playing a single note from a chord, as is done on both the first D chord and the first G/B chord, is of course derived from that pattern.

A certain accent in time is chosen for the ‘a’ note on the A/C# chord (the fourth quarter, or second eighth-beat that the A/C# chord is played) and then that same accent in time is used to play the single notes ‘d’ and ‘b’ on these next two chords.

This is a great example of how to create a piano-part, by ‘transferring’ a pattern to the next chord(s): repeating the same pattern on another chord / voicing.

 

• Trying to see single notes as a ‘string’ that form a (broken) chord again (as explained around 5:10 over the single notes that form a ‘G add9’) is another example of how convenient understanding chords and playing with a chord-approach is. (another post about this here). It’s a great way of approaching single notes, for many reasons, remembrance being a major one.

 

Alright! As always: if there’s anything you want to add / ask / say don’t forget to LEAVE A COMMENT below this post.

Have fun!

Cheers, Coen.

Questions? Remarks? Show me how you play this song! Please leave a comment below!
I’m also very curious which tutorial you’d like to see next!

All skills, tricks, tips, techniques and knowledge from this- and all other lessons @ this website are taken and can be learnt from my book / course ‘Hack the Piano‘ – The unconventional shortcut method to truly understand music and the piano.