Piano Touch – Is There Something More Than Legato & Staccato?

Is it OK to use a playful piano touch once in awhile instead of either legato or staccato?

Good morning. We’ve been doing a series of videos called Good Stuff You Really Ought to Know About Music based on music theory. One of the things you really ought to know about music is the subject of touch, the subject of piano touch. The way you touch the keyboard makes a great difference in the sound. Basically, there’s two ways, but in those two ways there’s many variations. That is a smooth way to play. By the time you’re letting one note up you press the next note down, so there’s just a hair of overlap, or maybe no overlap at all. There’s not much white space between each note. You see that? A smooth touch would be like that, and it is called legato.

A staccato touch would be like this. Now there’s some specific variance to that, and I won’t get into that, but I do want to touch on one thing that is not usually discussed, and that is there is such a thing as a playful touch that’s almost never discussed in music theory because in classical music it’s very seldom used. In popular music and jazz it’s used quite a bit. By quite a bit I don’t mean 50% of the time. I mean maybe 5 or 10% of the time. Most of the time you want to a smooth sound, don’t you?

Sometimes you want to be playful, and you get that by being really … it’s like being sloppy. It’s not quite staccato. It’s not like that but it’s kind of slopping off the keys. I’m slapping off one black key to the white key. I’m also not playing all of the notes together. You should normally play all the notes at the same time, but this time I’m not. I think it’s from the bottom up. See what I’m doing? Let me take that slow now just with the right hand so you can see it. That’s called a turnaround, by the way. When you get to end of the phrase you play some chords to turn around. We’ll take that up another time.

The subject today is touch, so just be aware that you can get a lot of variety in your playing, not only by using all the keyboard, not only by playing soft and loud and always getting softer and louder, but also through the subject of touch: either playing smooth or staccato or having fun like that, like that I just described. A lot of varieties that will make your playing more interesting. That’s just one more thing you really ought to know about music. We’ll see you tomorrow with another idea like that. Bye bye for now.

***For lots more good stuff on piano playing come on over to my website at https://www.playpiano.com and sign up for our free piano tips – “Exciting Piano Chords & Sizzling Chord Progressions!”

Here’s a great little book on chords and chord progressions on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Piano-Chords-Chord-Progressions-Exciting-ebook/dp/B0076OUGDE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404158669&sr=1-1&keywords=piano+chords+duane+shinn

Here is the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFt5gSx2wJA

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