How to Play Chords With Melody on Piano

We students typically learn songs with the left hand playing harmony, and right hand playing melody. While that approach is fine to begin with, at some point the right hand should start participating in creating harmonic content. It is something you do already, if you play more elaborate arrangements of pop songs, or intermediate arrangements of jazz tunes. In this post, I provide a few free, relatively short YouTube videos that may be helpful to you in beginning to utilize your right hand more for harmony.

Bill Hilton on the 7 superpowers of adult piano learners.

In his video, ‘The 7 Superpowers of Adult Piano Learners,” Bill explains that traditional music teaching methods tend to be oriented around the learning needs of younger students, that such teaching methods may not be appropriate for adults, and he explains the “superpowers“ that adult music students possess, which can make learning music a markedly different process than it is for younger, pre-adult students. I list those Superpowers below, along with the respective time signatures in the video.

Jazz Band Generation Y Covers Nirvana On the Spot

Jazz artists are fascinating because they can adapt almost any genre of music to jazz. For example, many of the jazz tunes that we know today as “jazz standards” began life as pop songs from the 1930s - 50s, and many of those were originally from musicals.

In this Musora video, drummer Ulysses Owens, Jr. and his jazz band Generation Y “jazzified” the Nirvana grunge pop song, Heart Shaped Box, in real time, by by making the rhythm swing, adding syncopation, modifying the simple pop chord progressions to make them more harmonically interesting, and, of course, improvising over the chord progressions.

Funki G on How to Use the iRealPro App

iRealPro is one of the most widely used tools for playing jazz, because it provides the chord changes for hundreds of jazz tunes. In this video, I will take you on a trip around the iRealPro app one step at a time.

A great day in harlem is an iconic photograph of many of the most important jazz musicians of the day

How to convert MP3 audio and YouTube video to MuseScore sheet music notation using Klangio Piano2Notes

Dave Frank Piano - a lesson in improvisation: flow-phrase-breathe

Dave created the Dave Frank School of Jazz, and has also created hundreds of videos on his YouTube channel, including master classes on specific topics, such as improvisation.

Dave’s view is that learning to improvise is, broadly speaking, a two part process. In the first part of the process, we learn musical elements, e.g., chords, voicings, scales, arpeggiation, extensions, chromaticism, musical phrase variation, how phrases relate, etc. In the second part, we learn improvisation concepts, e.g., elements of phrasing, moving toward actually making music. Naturally, working on those two parts of the process overlap in time.

Miles Davis changed the world

Bill Hilton piano instruction books are available now on Jazzikology.com