Posts from — August 2009

 The piano is unique, in that it is the only instrument in the orchestra not tuned by its owner/player. Violinists tune their own violins, as due horn players and even harpists. The piano is the only nstrument where the owner calls in a separate serviceperson to tune it for them. Why is this?

First, every piano has about 240 strings that must be tightened or loosened to the exact pitch, then fixed in position so their pitch holds. This requires turning tuning pins so tight that the tuner must use a long-handled wrench and adjust each pin to a precise point. This is further complicated by the fact that most of the piano’s 88 notes are sounded by striking two or three strings together to form just one note, so those three strings must be in perfect unison with each other.

Finally there is the necessity to tune all the 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths etc. – everything but the octaves – a pre-determined amount sharp or flat, to give the piano the proper “temperament.” This is because the piano is on of the only instruments capable of playing full chords in all keys, and if this temperament, or compromise, was not applied, if every note was instead tuned to it’s pure frequency, many intervals and chords would sound wildly out of tune. We’ll go into detail about why the piano has a tempered scale in a later post.

The bottom line is, tuning a piano correctly is a very special skill set, and takes a long time to learn and get good at, and a fair amount of time spent tuning each piano. Most pianists don’t want to bother learning and perfecting those skills; they’re busy enough just mastering playing the thing! So for somewhere around $100 a pop, they call in the tuner.

Pianos also hold a tremendous amount of tension when tuned up to concert pitch. A fully tuned grand piano carries about 2 tons of tension across its scale. If you’ve ever wondered why pianos are all have that massive heavy plate – cast iron, and usually sprayed gold – inside them, holding the strings, there’s your answer. With 4000 pounds of tension constantly pulling, if there were no iron plate, just a wooden frame, it would be reduced to splinters in a flash.

That same constant 4000 pounds of tension, coupled with fluctuations in the humidity and temperature of whatever room the piano sits in, is the reason why they can rapidly go out of tune. Many piano owners balk at the necessity to tune their piano 2 or even 4 times a year just to keep it in perfect tune. That’s $200-$400 in maintenance costs every year, and that’s without added costs of mechanical adjustments and replacement of worn-out parts, so I can understand their hesitation.

Still, it comes with ownership of any fine piano. It’s sometimes useful to remember that the expensive concert pianos on evey concert stage like Carnegie Hall, are tuned before every performance, not just 3 or 4 times a year. Knowing that these pianos are the finest quality, attended to by only the best piano technicians available, should be a hint that no piano, no matter how expensive or well-tuned, holds a perfect tuning for more than a short time, sometimes as little as several hours of hard play. So having you own instrument tuned once every 4 or 6 months is really no big deal. If your piano is subject to many daily hours of hard practice, or you live in a region where there are big constant changes in the climate and humidity, you will need to tune it even more often.

Next we’ll look at how to choose a tuner, and some of the other tasks, beyond simple tuning, he or she must perform on a semi-regular basis to maintain you piano in top form.
 

 We talked in earlier posts about the simplicity of early Western music, so simple at one ancient point, with just single notes chanted in church, that no chord-playing instruments like the piano were even needed. Even after harmony-based music appeared, and the elements of melody-plus-chord music grew, early music was still restricted to very stringent rules and used only the most conservative chord patterns. Many of the chord and melody choices commonly used in Chopin’s works would have been considered musical heresy in Telemann or Handel’s day, Similarly, the free-form, impressionistic musings composed by Debussy and Ravel, with their purposeful disregard for strict meter and cadence, might have shocked Chopin.

After hundreds of years of this ever-widening musical evolution, a true American art form was born in Jazz, in the early 20th Century. Jazz gave rise to many subset musical forms throughout the 1900s – New Orleans jazz, jazz standards, swing, be-bop, straight-ahead and avant-garde – each one ever more free-form in its definition of what music could be. We’ll look at some of the great eras and types of jazz, and their gifted exponents, in a later post.

But one of the main freedoms and styles jazz gave ultimate permission for, was improvisation. Improvisation simply means you use the written melody and chords as a starting point, but then play other notes and chords not in the original written composition. On piano, you may keep the same chords in your left hand, and simply add extra notes, runs and flourishes to the melody in the right hand. Or, in more experimental jazz forms, you may take license with the whole structure – melody, chords, even meter and tempo, ending up with something that most listeners would be hard-pressed to say still resembles the original.
 

In a lot of swing and straight-ahead jazz, it’s common for the band to play once through the main structure of the song’s chords & melody, as it was originally written, then take off for anywhere from a couple verses to 20 minutes worth of improvisation on that structure. Most of the improvisation is built on the basic blues structures – the 1, 4, 5, 6 chords with lots of added 7ths – that jazz grew out of. But it doesn’t sound anything like the simple blues of Muddy Waters or B. B. King. That’s because it’s only based on those blues structures. Then the improvisers go wild, adding a lot of diminished, augmented and modal sounding chords, with lots of extra 9ths, 11ths and 13ths (both major and minor.) The resulting chords and melody, often with both the natural and sharped-or-flatted form of a note in the same chord, can have a very angular sound, and for some, it’s an acquired taste.

But even straight-ahead blues players like B.B. King and Eric Clapton do a lot of melodic improvising, as do so many accomplished piano players like Errol Garner or Oscar Peterson. The accompanying chords stay close to the original chords, but numerous solos are taken on top of that basic structure, with slow or rapid, leaping or crying strings of notes and flourishes, until these solos become the more interesting and dominant aspects of their versions, over just the plain melody.

Coming off of the recent post about learning to play by ear, improvisation is the obvious next step. Once you can play any modern song, fully knowing its original chord and melodic structure, you are invited to take off on flights of fancy and enter an entirely new musical world. Try keeping the left hand chords the same, but experimenting with "riffs" above the normal melody. Try an upward or downward run of chromatic and other scales, or playing some cool "licks," quick or long combinations of bluesy notes that sound good as a nice flourish.

How do you know which riffs and improvisational choices are good or bad? Well, there are many books available that cover entire libraries of commonly used riffs, licks and solos. And there’s my favorite source, listening to other well-known piano players, either live or on CD, over & over, savoring and learning their improvisational choices, and adding my favorites to my own memory bank.

But in the end, it’s about just experimenting yourself, to your heart’s delight! That’s why it’s called improvisation! Because you are experimenting, technically, you can’t make a "mistake." So don’t be shy, just try tons of different things – different chords, different runs of notes – and see what sounds best to your ear. You might even discover a whole new music form. Either way, you’ll definitely have fun! Set aside some time in every piano practice session for some improvisation. Your playing will grow by leaps & bounds!

As mentioned before, most popular songs are built on the root, dominant and subdominant chords, or the 1, the 5 and the 4 chords, respectively. Some songs have just these three chords in them, and some add just a few others like the 7th, or minor chords built on the 3rd and 6th note of the scale.

So as our first example, we’ll listen to "Silent Night." A very simple song, and a great place to start.

Hopefully, you’ve followed the previous instructions for picking out the melody notes. If not, revisit the last post and use your ear’s memory of all the notes and small or large spaces between the notes (intervals) to hunt down and pick out the correct notes to "Silent Night’s" melody.

The first accompanying chord is the 1 chord, built on the first note of the scale. For this example we’ll say the song is in the key of "C". It fits perfectly under the repeated melody of "Silent Night…holy night". But then when the melody jumps to "all is calm…" you can hear that the accompanying chord also jumps to another chord, the "C" chord no longer matches. Can you tell what chord it jumps to? It jumps to 5 chord, built on the fifth note of the scale, or G, as in G, B, D. It comes back to the "C" or 1 chord for "all is bright…" But then it jumps away from C chord again to accompany the next part, "round young virgin…", but not to the 5 chord, which if you try it, will not fit. Try some of the other chords in the scale to see which one does fit. Eventually you’ll hear that the best match is the 4 chord, built on "F" as F, A and C. It goes back and forth between the 4 chord and the 1 chord a couple times, under "mother &child…holy infant so…tender and mild," then jumps back to the 5 chord on G under "sleep in heavenly…" and the 1 chord for "peace…" Then it ends with one more quick turn-around of the 1-5-1 chords under the repetition of "sleep in heavenly peace."

So "Silent Night" can be played with just 3 accompanying chords, the 1, the 5, and the 4 chords…that’s it!

But what’s really amazing, as you’ll discover, is that that simple structure underpins many modern songs, and the ones it’ not sufficient for need only a few extra chords, and you’re done!

Let’s check that out by looking at the chord structures to a few other popular songs:

"The Music Of The Night"  from Phantom Of The Opera                                                                                                           

    1          5       1                         5

Slowly, gently, night unfurls it’s splendour,

    1          5               4                   5

Grasp it sense it, tremulous and tender

   4                       1                   4                    1

Turn your face away from the garish light of day, turn your

      4                                                  1

Thoughts away from cold unfeeling light

          5                                      1

And listen to the music of the night

"Daniel" by Elton John

    1                                              4

Daniel is travelling tonight on a plane

 5                                           3 maj.       6 min.

I can see the red tail lights heading for Spain

   4              5                          6                  4

I can see Daniel waving goodbye, God it looks like Daniel

    5                                     1

Must be the clouds in my eyes

As you can see, a song as grand as "Music Of The Night" is built primarily on these 1, 4 and 5 chords. Elton John’s "Daniel" adds just two others, the 3 and 6 chords, both which are very common extras in popular 1,4,5 -patterned songs.

Start now, listening to all your favorite songs with a keen ear for picking out the chord patterns you hear. And regularly practice picking out these patterns on your piano. In short order, you will get quite good at finding he correct melody notes and accompanying chords for any popular song…and you’ll be able to declare, "Yes, I can play by ear!"