Michael Pilhofer

Step by Step / Updated 10-27-2023

When the singer needs a good intro, who’s going to play it? The drummer? Probably not. You are. A piano or keyboard intro is a great addition to a song. And it can’t be any old intro — it’s gotta be good. The audience has a tendency to talk between songs, so it’s your job to shut ’em up and announce the start of the new song.

Step by Step / Updated 10-27-2023

The band is building up to the final chord, and it’s time for the big finish. Why not add a little piano or keyboard as a finale? The singer belts the last lyric, and it’s up to you to drop the curtain. Quick! Grab a handful of these finales and you’re sure to receive an encore request.

Step by Step / Updated 10-27-2023

The key to making good, accurate jumps on the piano or keyboard is the same whether the jump is big or small: Maintain a comfortable, balanced hand position as you jump from the starting hand position across the keyboard to your landing destination. Jumping with an overextended pinky and your hand outstretched like the descent of a giant hawk upon its prey is very common. Instead, the image you want to keep in mind is of a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad. A frog starts and lands with its body centered over the lily pad, contracting to the same closed, restful shape. Your hands are frogs. As they jump from one position to another, they should look the same before and after the jump. You can practice this skill with every exercise.

Step by Step / Updated 10-27-2023

You can use the pedal on the piano or keyboard to achieve different effects with your musical sound and add a whole new dimension to your playing. Give these exercises a try for some practice.

Step by Step / Updated 10-27-2023

To expand your piano expertise, you should try some broken chord exercises. Broken-chord patterns are common in accompaniment figures and can help make you a well-rounded player. Check out these four patterns found in a wide range of styles.

Article / Updated 10-25-2023

If there’s one particular music style that embraces all that the piano can do, it’s jazz. Celebrated by many as America’s greatest art form, jazz is king when it comes to interesting chord harmonies, changing rhythms, and improvisation. Legendary jazz pianists like Bill Evans, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, and many others have taken these elements and added them to classic songs to make them a little more jazzy. The true spirit of jazz has always been improvisation, which makes identifying the actual construction of jazz most difficult. The goal in jazz is to create a new interpretation of an established piece (called a standard), or to build on an established piece of music by changing the melody, harmonies, or even the time signature. It’s almost like the point of jazz is to break away from form. The closest way to define how jazz is constructed is to take the basic idea behind blues vocalizations — the call-and-response vocals — and replace the voices with the various instruments that make up the jazz sound: brass, bass, percussion (including piano), and wind instruments, along with the more recent inclusion, the electric guitar. In Dixieland jazz, for example, musicians take turns playing the lead melody on their instruments while the others improvise countermelodies, or contrasting secondary melodies, that follow along in the background. The one predictable element of music in the jazz genre — excluding free jazz, where no real discernible rules exist but jazz instrumentation is used — is the rhythm. All jazz music, with the exception of free jazz, uses clear, regular meter and strongly pulsed rhythms that can be heard throughout the music. Jazzing it up All the legendary jazz pianists use tried-and-true musical tricks from time to time to freshen things up. Borrow these tricks yourself: Chord substitutions Swing rhythm Syncopation Knowledge of scales Knowledge of chords Nickname like Duke, Bird, or Cool Cat It’s up to you It’s time to be creative. Improvisation is perhaps the most important element of jazz music. It can be literal improvisation, where you (the performer) make up your own rhythms and riffs, or implied improvisation, where the music is originally written in a way that just sounds improvised. The easiest way to improvise is by changing the rhythm of a melody. For example, take the simple quarter-note melody of “Yankee Doodle” and transform it into a swingin’ jazz tune by adding swing eighth notes, syncopation, and a well-placed rest now and then to keep things cool. Listen to "Yankee Doodle" swings in Book IV, Chapter 2, Audio Track 94. Substituting chords Few jazz compositions use the standard major and minor chords throughout. In fact, few jazz pianists play the original chords written in a song. Instead, they break the rules and substitute new chords to liven up otherwise simple melodies. Check out this the well-known children’s song “Merrily We Roll Along.” As you play it, notice the simple chord progression of C-G7-C. Even “Merrily We Roll Along” can sound not-so-childish with the use of chord substitution. The idea is to find a more interesting chord progression from I to V7 to I. Try the following options: Use major scale tones for chord roots. Move up the scale from C to G7, building triads on each successive scale note. Use black and white keys for new chord roots. Move up in half-steps, building chords on each new root note. Move up in fourths. Start a chord pattern in measure 2 by playing an Em7, then move up a fourth and build a seventh chord on each new root note.

Article / Updated 02-10-2023

How can you expand your keyboard music with features already included? Modern arrangers have a number of other cool features that help your playing sound fuller and fancier without any extra work on your part. Adding harmony to your melodies Block chords is a style of playing right hand melodies where the melody is harmonized with additional notes below it to form full chord voicings, using smooth voice-leading. Organ players often use this technique, as did jazz pianist George Shearing, and it’s popular in jazz and dance big-band arranging within their sax section writing. And you can too; it’s just a button-push away. Look on your front panel for a button labeled Ensemble (Korg), Harmony/Echo (Yamaha), or Melody Intelligence (Roland). Turn it on and then try the following: Set up your accompaniment to play. Start the accompaniment with a simple C major chord. Play a single note with your right hand; notice it’s playing a whole chord. Move around to some other notes while keeping the left hand chord the same and listen for how the sound changes. Hold a C note with your right hand and change your left hand chord to an F major. Notice how the melody (right hand) part changes; it’s now adding harmony using notes that match an F chord. Change your left hand chord to an A minor and hear the change. Your keyboard may have different settings for the type of harmony it creates when using this feature. Read your owner’s manual and explore all the possibilities. Hitting the chord pads Some arrangers offer some buttons called pads or multi pads that you can use to tap out drum beats and trigger sound effects or even phrases of music. This setting is a fun way of adding more sounds and parts to your playing without having to worry about playing the right keys on the keyboard. These chord pads have various names and operate in a variety of ways: Momentary/Hit: Touch the pad and a sound triggers once. This option is good for playing a single drum sound or synth sound effect (such as a zap). Once: A musical phrase plays one time and then stops. You can use this method for something like a harp arpeggio or flamenco guitar strum flourish. Looped: A musical phrase or sound keeps playing endlessly (in time with your accompaniment parts) until you turn it off. This function can add an additional percussion groove or a cool synth arpeggiated phrase (or even trigger the sound of endless audience applause). Each style and rhythm has its own saved settings for the pads, so take some time and explore them.

Article / Updated 11-29-2022

The concept of using auto-accompaniment is simple: You play some notes on the lower range of your keyboard, and that tells the system to start playing some backing music in the key you gave it. You choose the style of music it plays from the choices presented on the front panel. The result is the sound of a full band playing, giving you a professional backing track that you’re in complete control over. How auto-accompaniment works Playing with accompaniment usually means you have a split keyboard, with the lower range (left hand) dedicated to playing notes/chords to trigger the accompaniment and the right hand having a live sound to play your melodies with. Some arrangers and digital pianos have a full-play mode, where you play acoustic piano with two hands and the keyboard uses your two-handed playing to determine the chords. Accompaniment uses styles or rhythms — collections of MIDI-based music tracks that play various instrument sounds to produce the sound of a backing band. They’ve been played and recorded by skilled musicians to faithfully reproduce various musical styles. The unique thing about the accompaniment “engine” is that it can adapt these parts for any chord you give it, changing the notes within the pattern to fit the various root tones and chord qualities in music (major, minor, diminished, augmented, and so on). This adaptability is how auto-accompaniment differs from a prerecorded backing track, which rigidly plays back the exact notes you played to create the part. Starting a pattern playing Simple portable keyboards don’t always have full auto-accompaniment, so look for a button labeled Chords, Accompaniment On/Off, ACMP On/Off, Arranger Mode, and so on. These options indicate that you have full accompaniment parts, not just drums. Here’s how to get a pattern playing: Press the Styles or Rhythm button. Make sure the Chord/Accomp button is on. Play a low C on the keyboard to start the pattern playing. If you feel comfortable, try playing a C triad (C-E-G) instead. If the music doesn’t start, press the Start/Stop or Play button while you play the note or chord. Accompaniment needs you to play a chord to tell the players what key and what chord type you want them to play (C major, F minor, and so on). So if you just press Start/Stop or Play, the drums will start without the rest of the band. With the music playing, select some other patterns and listen to how the music and parts change. For simple models, you can use the + and – buttons to move up or down to the next pattern or to scroll through the available patterns one at a time. Or use the numeric keypad (if available) to directly enter the number of a specific pattern you want. On low-end models, the pattern names may appear on the front panel. On other models, the names are displayed on the screen. Higher-end models present the Styles/Rhythms on multiple buttons, with each button representing a category of styles arranged by musical genre. Listen to various styles being played using a simple C triad in Book VI, Chapter 2, Audio Track 142. Breaking down an accompaniment pattern An accompaniment pattern usually has the following elements: Drums: Drums include the traditional drum kit, with bass drum, snare, hi-hat, cymbals, and so on, playing a beat. Percussion: This element includes things such as tambourine, cowbell, shakers, congas/timbales/bongos, triangle, and other hand percussion, providing extra color to the rhythm. Bass: Bass presents the low notes that play some sort of rhythmic, moving series of notes. It may be an electric, acoustic (upright), or synth bass sound, depending on the style of music. Chordal part(s):Chordal parts are often a keyboard sound and possibly some strummed guitar parts (acoustic or electric). Having a few tracks of this sort is common. Other sustained parts: These options include string, vocal, and synth pad sounds — sustained chords for additional interest and sound variety. Background melodic figures: These can be string lines, brass and woodwind melodies, synth patterns and arpeggiations, and guitar licks. Every part will not always be playing; parts may come in and out depending on a number of settings and factors, such as which variation you’re using and the taste of the pattern programmer. In Book VI, Chapter 2, Audio Track 143 is a style broken down into its separate elements or tracks. Mixing the sound of the band Mixing a musical recording involves adjusting the volume balance of each of the instruments, deciding which speaker they come out of (called panning), and possibly adjusting or changing the effects that are being used. Mid- and higher-priced arrangers give you access to these functions. Taking control of these aspects of your backing band allows you to make the sound exactly the way you want it. How do you know whether your keyboard has this capability? Look for a feature/parameter called the Mixer. Credit: Images courtesy of Korg Italy; Casio America, Inc; and Yamaha Corporation of America A skilled musician/producer has already volume-balanced all the styles and rhythms in your keyboard, so you probably don’t need to make big changes. But two common scenarios require a little adjustment here and there: Slightly increasing or decreasing the volume of a backing instrument: These fixes are small; you’re not trying to redo the whole band mix. Turning off a part: This process is called muting a part or channel. To change the volume of a part (it may be called a Part or a Track), you select it, use the interface controls to increase or decrease the volume parameter value, and then resave the style/rhythm. To turn off a part entirely, you may have two options. If your mixer design has a dedicated Mute parameter, you can use that parameter to turn off the part. If it doesn’t have a Mute, simply turn the part volume all the way down to 00. Again, be sure to resave the Style/Rhythm.

Article / Updated 11-29-2022

Here, you can see the two most common pedaling indications. On your piano, press the pedal down at the “Ped.” sign, and release (pedal up) at the asterisk or at the bracket ending the line. These indications are always shown below the bass staff. The notch in the line indicates where to change the pedal, quickly clearing any sustained sound (pedal up) and resetting the sustain (pedal down). Changing the pedal requires careful attention to clearing the harmony cleanly and completely. Good pedaling is a matter of timing and listening. Your goal is to train your ear to listen for a smooth transition and a clean change from note to note and chord to chord. You don’t want to time your pedaling to match your hands, releasing and then pressing the pedal down as your fingers move from one chord to another; if you do, you’ll hear a gap between chords. This is because you’re lifting both the keys and the pedal together, so the dampers stop the sound when your fingers leave the keys. You need the sustain pedal down at this time. You have to wait to change the pedal so it happens simultaneously with playing the next chord. Your heel should stay on the floor, and your toes can rest on the pedal. Some pedals require more weight and pressure, and foot size and power make a difference. You can use your longer toes plus some of the ball of your foot to press down the pedal, but as always go for comfort and ease. Your ankle is the hinge that allows your foot to move with the least amount of movement and effort. Pedaling shouldn’t affect your general posture, so if you find that you have to shift around or adjust your balance to accommodate pedaling, you may not have started from a good position. Broken-chord pedaling In this exercise for broken-chord pedaling in Book V, Chapter 3, Audio Track 112, you change the pedal on a single note. Block-chord pedaling In this exercise you change going from chord to chord and on any moving lines within the harmony. Listen for smooth transitions!

Article / Updated 11-07-2022

Playing piano can be like having a choir at your fingertips. You have a ten-member group, some are shorter and some are taller, some like to show off and some prefer to blend in, and one or two really don’t take well to being singled out. As the conductor of the fingertip chorale, you have control over how each “voice” in your choir responds to your direction. You can bring up the bass, hush the choir while the soprano has a solo, or lift up every voice for the full-out finale. Here are some exercises to gain command over each finger combination so that when you’re playing two notes together you have the strength and control to balance and blend. These interval exercises also let you scrutinize the many combinations of fingers, intervals, and positions on the keyboard to get to know how each finger responds. Special attention is given to strengthening those fingers that need it the most. Playing seconds with different finger combinations Seconds are any interval combination on adjacent keys, white or black. Because of the keyboard layout, that means a variety of hand and finger positions to work on. Each of these finger combination exercises includes a study for the right hand and the left hand separately. Play through these exercises a few times slowly at first — concentrating on each hand — listening carefully to adjust the balance and timing of each finger combination. Curve your fingers and keep the finger joints firm to play the seconds evenly. Then gradually increase your speed each time you play the exercise. As you increase your speed and accuracy, play these exercises as a series, starting with the right and left hand in the first finger combination, moving on to the right and left hand in the next finger combination, and so on. As you play the seconds with each finger combination, imagine the two fingers moving together as one unit. In the first combination, for example, finger two and finger three move together to strike each interval in a synchronized motion. Finger combination: Two and three Start your 2nd and 3rd fingers. Adjust your attack and your timing to play the seconds evenly while changing hand positions. Listen to the two and three finger combination found in Book V Chapter 1, Audio Track 100. Finger combination: Three and four Try to eliminate excess movement by keeping your hand close to the keyboard. Finger combination: One and two You may find playing the seconds evenly difficult to do with this finger combination. Your first two fingers are such different lengths! Bring your fingertips close together, like you’re forming an “O,” before striking the keys. Finger combination: Four and five Work on building strength in your 4th and 5th fingers by keeping the joints firm to make the accents strong. Playing thirds with different finger combinations These exercises improve your agility as you maneuver both major and minor thirds. The different finger combinations keep all your fingers nimble. Finger combination: One and three Make sure you have a nice, high arch to your hand, and let your fingers hang down and your fingertips lightly touch the keys. Finger combination: Two and four This next exercise is a good one to play with both staccato and legato articulation. Finger combination: Three and five Balance the thirds so the two notes are the same volume. Make sure your thumb stays relaxed and isn’t playing louder than the other fingers. Finger combinations: One and four, two and five, one and five Here’s an exercise for the thirds found in Book V Chapter 1, Audio Track 101. Keep your wrists up high, and lift your fingers up like spider legs, bringing them down evenly in twos. And not too fast — stay relaxed and melt into the keys. Playing fourths with finger combinations Practicing fourths is really good for finger independence. The different finger combinations keep your muscle coordination sharp. Finger combinations: One and four, two and five This one is especially good for the 4th finger. Work on keeping it curved, and prepare it directly above the key that it’s going to strike. Finger combinations: One and three, one and two You’re stretching here. Maintain a good shape in your 5th finger; don’t let it go flat as it reaches to play its note. Help your pinky by letting go of the fourth interval and moving your hand out, arched, toward the pinky. Playing fifths, sixths, and sevenths Your hand is open wider, and you’re moving your hand across the keyboard while maintaining a nice, rounded hand shape. Watch for twisting. Exercise in fifths 12/8 time is counted as 12 eighth notes to a measure, with each eighth note getting one count. Each measure can have a rhythmic pattern of four strong beats, on one, four, seven, and ten, with three eighth notes inside each strong beat. Keep both fingers five and one pointing down into the keys. Exercise in fifths and sixths As you play this exercise, fingers four and five are round, but not stiff. Give these fingers some power and flexibility by bouncing your wrist lightly: “down-up, down-up” as you count “one-and, two-and …” Exercise in fifths, sixths, and sevenths Give this fifths, sixths, and sevenths exercise found in Book V Chapter 1, Audio Track 102 a bluesy, rhythmic feel with a fairly deep wrist bounce on the strong beats in 12/8 time. (That’s one, four, seven, and ten.) Performance piece: “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” This familiar old ballpark favorite, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” found in Book V Chapter 1, Audio Track 103 is arranged with — you guessed it — different interval combinations in each hand. Play each interval pair by using a single, confident hand move.