You are neither too young nor too old to play piano and compose. If you think otherwise, get that fairy tale out of your head.

A few geniuses began at age 3 and burned out in middle age. Gustave Mahler, a modern symphonic artist and Jazz Guitarist legend Wes Montgomery didn’t start serious composing until they were well in their 30′s. Verdi was still going strong at 87. Some of the great pop, jazz, and rock music of our time has been written by musicians who consider the age of 25 as over the hill.

Conclusion: forget about age.

What about music theory? Does it have anything to do with playing the piano and composing a piece of music?

Sounds come first. Theory books and systems tag along behind, explaining in words what you’ve already experienced by ear.

Composing is a hot creative act. Studying theory is a cool analytical act.

Theory explains what is going on in a piece of music. It shows us the machinery that makes the music tick. Training in theory helps sharpen our understanding, and helps the player and composer organize his or her musical materials.

Absorb theory for what it has to offer. But watch out for the trap of rules. In the early stages of playing piano and writing music, rules can be helpful disciplines to help focus our thinking. But given too much importance, rules become handcuffs; break them if you know what you’re doing.

Use your good ears to break through the endless blanket of sound that surrounds our lives.

Direct you hearing. Sharpen your perception. Isolate sounds. Listen, and make yourself aware of your sound-world.

A painting, a statue, and a building have a certain kind of life. All of their parts exist at the same time. But music is like a movie or a stage play: it unrolls slowly, bit by bit. A movie begins, continues, and ends before your eyes. Music does the same for your ears. Your piano playing and compositions live and breathe.

Guidelines for Playing Piano By Ear to Write Music

Begin your sketches with a simple, basic idea: a sound you like, a group of pitches, an interesting harmony, and attractive rhythm pattern, an idea for lyrics, and so on.

Next step: think out a number of possibilities for developing, expanding, exploiting, and contrasting your basic idea.

For example:

1. A group of pitches can be played forward, backward, upsidedown, or with its order rearranged.

2. You can keep the overall shape of a pitch group (the way it moves up and down), but change it by opening up or tightening the distance (interval) from one note to the next.

3. The same pitch group can be varied by changing its speed, meter, or rhythm… or by changing its color through changes of instrumental register (high vs. low).

4. A rhythmic idea, no matter how simple, can be stretched, tightened up, fragmented, or transformed into a repeated figure

5. A rhythmic idea can be applied to differnet pitch groups, or used to give movement to your favorite chord progression.

6. A harmony can be intensified by adding color tones (7th, 9th, added 6th, suspended tones, etc.); or softened by subtracting chord tones; or given a refreshed sound by the way you voice the harmony on the piano.

Try to keep a relaxed attitude toward you study of piano, and an open mind about new ideas that almost always turn up while you’re experiementing with your sketches.

Above all, don’t lock yourself into one way of thinking. After a certain point, a piece may have its own ideas about the way it should deveop; don’t try to force it into a cookie mold!

Let it grow and breathe.

Copyright 2005 RAW Productions

Ron Worthy is a Music Educator, Songwriter and Performer. To learn more Trick of the Trade, go to: http://www.mrronsmusic.com and http://www.playpianotonight.com

Rarely is a chord played with its tones contained in a single octave, the root on the bottom, the third in the middle, and the fifth on the top.

Usually chords are voiced!

This basically means that the positions of a chord’s tones are scattered over the keyboard. The tones may be altered, doubled, added to, missing, and so forth.

There are a great variety of possibilities available in voicing chords. Voicing chords properly is an art within itself. Using the correct voicing techniques in your playing will give your improvisation a hip, mature and full sound. Chords played in root position just does not seem to do the job when playing Jazz, Rock, Pop, Blues, Gospel and Smooth Jazz piano.

Learning and mastering good voice leading techniques in your playing is not difficult if you just follow some simple rules.

1. The most important notes in any chord is the 3rd and the 7th. The 3rd of the chord defines whether the chord is a major or minor chord. The 7th of the chord will define whether the chord is a dominant or major chord. Usually the bass player will play the root and fifth. The root and fifth are not essential tones and can be completely left our from your chord progressions. If you must use the root and fifth try using it in your right hand, not your left. You should add your color tones in your right hand.

2. When you are taking a solo and not comping (accompanying) for another soloist you should play your chord voicings in your left hand, so that the right hand can be free to improvise, do fills, double the left hand, add extensions, etc.

3. The range of your voicings is also very important. A good rule of thumb to remember when voicing your chords, is to always try to voice your chords around middle C. Keeping your voicings around middle C will sound full and clear. Limits of approximately an octave above or below will assure best results by preventing the voicing from assuming a quality of thinness or muddiness.

Ron Worthy is a Music Educator, Songwriter and Performer. He offers online piano instruction for all ages at: http://www.mrronsmusic.com/playpiano.htm

Shell voicings are simple but functional.

They make use of the root and either the third of the seventh any chord. Sometimes referred to as shell voicings, these are commonly used as left-hand accompaniment in the piano stylings of Bud Powell, Horace Silver, Sonny Clark, and others who play primarily in the be-bop idiom.

With only two notes, they are harmonically incomplete; however, they do convey enough information to supplement many right hand melodies or improvised lines, especially those in the be-bop style where melodies are crafted to clearly outline the harmony.

Most Jazz pianists play these kind of voicings in a relatively sparse and percussive manner on medium or up-tempo tunes.

Shell voicings are most effective when the top note (played by the thumb) falls between D below middle C and the D next to middle C. These voicings are particularly useful in support an improvised line played in the middle range of the keyboard, which is stylistically typical of be-bop playing. If your melody or improvisation should dip lower and conflict with a voicing, here are some options:

1. Break the voice leading and pick the other inversion (e.g. Root- 3rd instead of Root-7th) which falls in a lower register;

2. For that moment play only the root, a Root-5th, or nothing at all in the left hand; or

3. Play the entire melody up an octave.

When you apply shell voicings to tunes, it is OK to break voice leading occasionally in order to select the inversion which best complements a given melody note (i.e. does not double it.) Since the voicings are likely to be somewhat rhythmically detached from each other, voice leading with shell voicings is not as critical as with other voicings. Nonetheless, it is still always best to avoid breaking voice leading within ii-V and ii-V-I progressions.

Always remember that any Root-3rd structure may be expanded into a Root-10th which sounds fuller.

Whether or not you are able to use a tenth in place of a 3rd depends upon the size of your left hand and spatial distance the 10th covers on the keyboard.

Physically, minor 10ths are easier to reach than major 10ths. In a ii-V progression, it is more natural to close in from a Root-10th voicing to a Root-7th, rather than expanding from a Root-7th to a Root-10th.

You just have to experiment to decide which tenth intervals fit your hands. But always STOP IMMEDIATELY if you experience any hint of pain in stretching a tenth or, for that matter, while playing anything on the piano.

Copyright 2005 RAW Productions

Ron Worthy is a Music Educator, Songwriter and Performer. To learn more about shell voicings, please visit: http://www.mrronsmusic.com and http://www.playpianotonight.com