Play Piano With Expression: Use ALL Of Your Abilities In Your Piano Playing!

Here is a transcript of the video in case you would like to follow along:

Good morning. This is Duane and today I’d like to talk about how to play piano with expression using all of your abilities – with your fingers, but with your brain and with your ear, and with your heart, not just with your fingers. Most people just play the piano with their fingers. We all play the piano with our fingers, when we learn to play piano, we have to play the notes of course, but most people stop there. They learn how to read music and they can play. [Duane is playing the piano.] Or whatever. [Duane is playing the piano.] They get good at playing things like that, but they can even play things like this. [Duane is playing the piano.] Or maybe. [Duane is playing the piano.]

If the music blows off the stand, what happens? They’re lost because they don’t understand what the structure of music is and so, in addition to your fingers, you really need your brain and in using your brain, you need to know form of music. The form of music and chords and chord progression, how songs are locked together in various forms and then how chords are made and how chords progress. For example, let’s take a very simple example. Let’s play, say you’re playing Heart and Soul, or maybe Blue Moon. [Duane is playing the piano.]

Remember this. [Duane is playing the piano.] Chord progress. That’s a very common chord progression called 1, 6, 2, 5 that countless songs follow that chord progression. Once you learn it, then you don’t have to relearn it because it applies to lots of songs, for example, I just mentioned Blue Moon and Heart and Soul, they use that very same progression. Not only that, they have the same kinds of forms. Let me just play a little bit of Blue Moon. [Duane is playing the piano.]

The section I just played was eight bars, eight measures. Now, it does it again. [Duane is playing the piano.] Exactly the same eight measures. You have two sections of eight measures. We’ll call the first section A and the next section is A also because it’s the same thing. Now, the middle section is called section B. [Duane is playing the piano.] That’s section B because it’s different then section A. Now we come back to section A. [Duane is playing the piano.]

So on, and we play the last eight measures, so you have A, A, B, A. That’s very easy to learn but most people will go through lives, with their whole lives never knowing and understanding form and it’s so easy because if you just use your brain about form and chord progressions and chord formations, then you can understand music. In other words, if I play this. [Duane is playing the piano.] I don’t have the slightest idea what chords I’m playing, I don’t know if that is C-sharp minor just turned upside down or Moonlight Sonata. [Duane is playing the piano.]

That’s C-sharp minor also and then there’s the five seven chord, in other words, we all need to use our brain in piano playing as well as our fingers. Then we also need to use our ears. There is only three things that a melody can do. Have you ever thought about that? A melody can only go up. [Duane is playing the piano.]

Go higher, or it can go lower or it can stay the same. [Duane is playing the piano.] That’s a melody and it just is made up of moving up and moving down and your ear can be trained to hear those motions very easily and all you need to do is train yourself. There are many courses you can take on ear training and I recommend you do that but you don’t need to, you can sit at home and plunk out. [Duane is playing the piano.] Notes like that and teach yourself that, that’s a second and so anytime you hear that sound, that’s an interval of a second. [Duane is playing the piano.]

Anytime you hear that, tell them it’s an interval of third. [Duane is playing the piano.] That’s an interval of fourth. You can just play those over and over again and get use to the sound of them. [Duane is playing the piano.]

That’s a fifth, that’s a sixth. I used to do that endlessly when I was a teenager learning the different sounds and so pretty soon I could begin to recognize what a sixth was and what a seventh what, and what a fourth was and so on. Once you start integrating your ear what you’re hearing with your brain, what you know about chord progressions and form and music and your fingers, then it starts to make sense. The whole package doesn’t come together until you learn to play piano with your heart. In other words, many people just play it mechanically. [Duane is playing the piano.]

You have a heart, everybody has different feelings and so you ought to learn to express those feelings on the piano through dynamics. [Duane is playing the piano.] Get some expression into your playing through dynamics. You get louder, you get softer, you use the pedal more, you use the pedal less. You get faster, you get slower. Let your heart dictate how the music floats. Yes, fingers are important. You’ve got to have finger dexterity. [Duane is playing the piano.]

To play any kind of music, whether it’s classical or jazz, or whatever. You have to be able to have those chops. But then you have to train your ear too, to hear what you’re playing and you have to know what the guts of music are through chords and chord formations, and intervals, and form and music as we were talking about and then you have to apply your own feelings and your heart to it. If you do that, then you’ll be a complete piano player and I hope that will be your goal in life.

Thanks for being with me and we’ll see you again soon. Bye, bye for now.

Play piano with expression

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