Building Your Band

A better conversation about music, with David Loftis and Peter Bulanow

Playing from the heart

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With 17 years of piano lessons (most done with really poor teachers, some done with really fantastic teachers), I’m firmly grounded in notes and classical technique. While this provides an excellent foundation for playing well, it’s not a great foundation for playing what is on your heart and mind.

At one time classical technique was rooted in improvisation [citation] but this has long since calcified (perhaps not unlike our faith?). While my piano teacher would tell me which publisher to purchase a specific piece from in order to assure correct fingers are annotated, she would then continue to specify exactly what was to be played at each flourish – precise notes, fingering, and timing. This was never the intent of these flourishes, as each was to be improvised.

Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis duly illustrates this in the baroque recording: In Gabriel’s Garden. While a casual listener could be forgiven for believing this to be one more classical recording, a seasoned ear will be surprised by the note choices. Wynton improvises them, not using Jazz chords as one might fear, but by staying faithful to the expected scale and using anything but the prescribed choices. In doing so, I would argue Wynton is being more faithful to the original than those who would repeat musical orthodoxy.

To break away from notes and the “correct” way to play a piece represents no small undertaking for the trained musician. I’ve now spent more time trying to unlearn notes than I did learning notes, and I continue to work at it.

To make progress, I can recommend two main techniques:

  1. Have a friend start improvising something in an unannounced key. Play along. (I use this as an audition technique).
  2. Start up a music player on random, or better yet use Pandora so you’re potentially hearing unfamiliar songs but in a specified genre. Play along.

You can start by doodling along with one note, then two, then perhaps a full hand, and eventually both hands. The point is this: practicing this unlearning is intentional.

Of course playing from the heart should be predicated on a knowledge of chords. But a knowledge of chords alone won’t tell you what to play.

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of… We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart. – Blaise Pascal

Subdividing

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Up until now, we’ve stuck with the integers of counting. Sure, we’ve counted in 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7… but those are just whole numbers. What about the stuff that goes on between those counts?

Music is divided up either by 2’s or by 3’s, stated as “duples” or “triplets” respectively.

So if we were to count 1 – 2 – 3 – 4, we can count between the numbers using “and” like this –  1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &.  If the numbers were quarter (1/4) notes before, by adding the ands we can count eighth (1/8) notes. And we can subdivide further to sixteenth (1/16) notes by adding something between the “ands”. We count this as 1-e-&-a-2-e-&-a-3-e-&-a-4-e-&-a.

Triplets subdivide the 1-2-3-4 into a “triplet 8th note” by counting 1-&-a-2-&-a-3-&-a-4-&-a.

Laid out graphically this looks like:

Subdividing

All of this follows logically.

Where it gets interesting is with an eighth note swing feel. Technically it’s still a duple, and this is how you would count it, but if you swing the count, it can begin to take on the feel of a triplet.

This is where you get into the “groove”, the space between the notes. Defining how much swing, or how things feel – the human element rarely follows a perfect duple.

The “groove” is one of those things you pretty much need to stick with for an entire song, and everyone needs to agree on – because if you look at the jumble of the grid below, you can see a pretty bad train wreck if you tried to mix the triplet or swing feel with the straight duple feel. The same things happens if you mix other grooves.

TrainWreck

One groove per song keeps everything locked into place and feeling tight.

Piano songs and guitar songs

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In most worship songs, it is pretty obvious when the song is a “piano song” or a “guitar song.” When a song is a piano song, it may have more chord changes (think hymns), and the groove generally derives from the chord structure. Conversely, when a song is a guitar song it may have less chord changes, and the groove derives from the rhythm of the instrument or some lick or hook. This is something you are probably intuitively aware of and consider when arranging the song, but let’s focus on it directly for a moment and consider some implications.

A few years back (maybe before the internet even!) I remember reading a huge interview in Keyboard magazine with Michael Tilson Thomas* in which he talked about composition separate from that of any given instrument. In other words, he didn’t want the physicality of writing at the piano to suggest certain things in the composition. Rather, he wanted to compose independent of any instrument and then later on figure out how to voice it.

Being aware of this dynamic, there is one obvious idea and one less obvious idea we can learn:

The obvious idea is a neat arranging trick. If you have a piano song and you want a fresh arrangement, you can really change it up by arranging it around the guitar. Conversely, if you have a guitar song and you want a fresh arrangement, you can really change it up by arranging it around the piano. This is most famously done by taking hymns generally written at the piano, and making guitar arrangements. An example in the other direction – I was asked to arrange a piano version of one of Chris Joyner’s tunes for a song he wrote on the guitar called “I Believe“.

A less obvious idea is that there is a very real sense that the physicality of our instrument dictates a lot of how we play it. So while we should to play to our instrument’s strengths, we should avoid being limited by that (due to lack of technical skills), or held in a box by that (due to a lack of imagination).

So the former is probably easy enough to understand; we should try to minimize limitations by our technical skills. But the latter is a blind spot. For example, how often do we play monophonic (let alone with just one hand) on the piano? If a simple melody or counter-melody best serves the song, we should play just that (rather than chords) as suggested by our many fingers and all those keys.

Instruments are means to an end. The end is the song. How best can we voice the song?

*famed conductor of San Francisco Orchestra and notable re-interpreter of classic American composers such as Aaron Copland.