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Actually Christmas songs are an interesting vehicle for reharmonization. I’ll try to post a couple examples.
There is, by the way, a “Real Book” of Christmas songs published by Hal Leonard that is pretty good.
Angelo – You’re close. I believe you’re referring to polychords. Suds discusses them in the Advanced Resources section. His essay is classic Sudnow but if you spend a little time working through it with a piano in front of you it should make sense (intellectually and aurally).
Angelo – do you have a specific song in mind? What’s “very short”?
Obviously you could look at different voicing for a verse or two. Or, if your skill level allows, improvising a new melody line. Most popular songs are short – 32 bars, AABA, and the A sections are usually pretty similar harmonically. So trying to create a 10-minute solo piano version of “Misty” is difficult for many people (and their audiences).
That being said, there’s nothing to stop you from experimenting with tempo, voicing, melody, and musical “attitude” to see what you can create from that short song form.
(M)elody note. You don’t have to pay too much attention in the beginning to the ‘fractions’ that spell out the chords. Learning that notation will help you do your own voicings, which is covered in the third lesson in the video seminar: “Learning to voice”.
To begin with just learn “Misty” from the dots. Feel free to learn about the fractions but you don’t need them to use the dot format.
‘All the rest is a distraction. When you find your own individual “rhythm” for the course, let NOBODY else distract you. It is a colossal waste of time to go running off in some direction that promises faster results or tells you that you are not doing it right because it takes a long time to find your way back to that original rhythm you had going through it yourself.’
Couldn’t agree more. There is more than one path but wandering off looking for the ‘magic pill’ is fruitless. This is not a chore of understanding, it’s a chore of doing.
Hi Tony – thanks for the interesting post.
I don’t know that I ever digitized the original 12-cassette course. I probably should, just for posterity’s sake if nothing else. To some people Suds was sort of an acquired taste. His asides were often fascinating but often irrelevant to the chore of learning to play songs. He went through at least two edits of the recorded course himself. My edit was mostly rearranging things and cleaning up some editing snafus but I still took out some things I thought were redundant or disconnected from the thread of the narrative.
The issue with the additional dot songs was that Wendy (his widow) and I decided we’d secure the legal rights to use the songs in the course and the dot songbook. It turned out to be a giant headache and unreasonably expensive in the context of the course. I still think that the quicker people get to doing their own voicings the better, but that’s a topic for another time.
Some of what David recorded on topics related to the course I just transcribed and added to the “Resources” section of the web site. That allowed me to add some visual aids and make the material easier to come back to when it might be of more use to people – including voicing drills. Some of the visual aids I created myself because I thought the originals were too complicated or they just didn’t exist.
Within the Basic Resources are a number of useful bits of information, most of which Tony refers to above.
If you have an “Advanced” membership, this resources include the Audio Letters that Tony mentions, David’s “Chats” on various topics and, at the moment, two of his Song of the Month recordings. (I’ve been lazy about adding the rest of them.)
My personal bias is that too many students got distracted by all the “stuff” to the neglect of just sitting down and practicing consistently and with care. The long slope of the initial learning curve just serves to convince all but the most stubborn that they can’t really learn this piano thing.
That being said, I agree with Tony’s quote about learning more than one song at once – it does help relieve some monotony. On my too full plate is dreaming up a way to create dot song information in a way that doesn’t create copyright issues. It will make for a more difficult translation by students, but maybe that’s not all bad. We’ll see. Thanks Tony.
Hi Karl,
The rest of the time you should be working on learning the dot song version of ‘Misty’. Careful, slow repetition is the key. It will seem like you’re not making any progress for a long time. You just have to be patient. Your brain will want to micromanage everything your hands do to begin with. Eventually your hands will learn on their own and start keeping your brain from meddling with everything. I know that sounds odd but it’s true. Check out Barry Green’s “The Inner Game of Music” for a more detailed look at the role of your active mind in mucking things up.
As far as dealing with chords, that should all be explained in the “Learning to Voice Songs” section in the Weekend Seminar. When you’re just starting on “Misty” none of that particularly matters but I will say that curiosity and trying things that may not explicitly be laid out for you is an important part of the learning process. Look at the sheet music format and follow your curiosity – or ignore the sheet music until you have “Misty” pretty well in hand. Either way can work but you still have to follow David’s practice routine. Just make certain when you sit down that you know which mode you’re in – practice or exploring. Both are important.
Everyone’s specific path is a little different. But if you’ve never played piano before you can expect to hear “Misty” a lot over the next few months. Give yourself a break if you’re getting burned out but there’s no shortcut to getting all those repetitions in.
You can (should) use the sustain pedal to hold on to the full chord sound but try to keep a light touch on the pedal.
Hi Speeen,
The parentheses around the note to the right of the chord diagram tell you when to play the full chord (both hands), then fill in the melody to get to the next chord. Typically you’re playing a chord on beat 1 and 3, although there are exceptions. Which is the same thing you’ll do when you get to voicing on your own. The lead sheet can put that in context of the entire song but it may just be confusing at this point.
The assumption is that you know, basically, how the song goes. Might be helpful to listen to David’s recording.
If this isn’t clear just ask again and we’ll figure it out.
Thanks Tony. I put the Caruso book on my Christmas list.
You might have been the one who pointed me toward the Tim Richards book on Blues Improvisation. Very good book but my problem is still carving out the time to work on stuff.Hi Angelo,
Seems I remember working through ‘Willow…’. I’ll have to dig it up again.My project to build a practice workshop has rather stalled out but hopefully I’ll resurrect it again next year.
Thanks for posting.
As far as ‘piano heroes’, it’s difficult to single people out, there are just too many. My list would probably change every time I wrote it down. But here are a few favorites:
Ellis Marsalis – his trio work is impeccable. You can hear where his kids got their chops.
Chick Corea – years ago I got to shake his hand (that’s how close I was to the stage), still a transcendental evening for me.
Brad Mehldau – lovely and inspired
Danilo Perez – perhaps the most fun you can have at the piano (or nearby) and a generous spiritThanks Tony. Great songs all.
For those of you out there looking for new songs to work on it’s certainly gotten easier to hear songs you may not know – even relatively obscure ones – in this world of YouTube. But I certainly encourage you to buy recordings too (‘support the arts’).I’ll mention again that Ted Gioia’s “The Jazz Standards” is a wonderful book full of insights into the great American standards. To take the first title on Jim Haskin’s list, Ira and George Gershwin’s ‘A Foggy Day’, Gioia writes:
“…it features one of the composer’s most inspired melodies, especially noteworthy for the quirky final bars… The contrast with the preceding buildup…could hardly be starker. This passage also forces the form beyond the 32 bars that listeners may have been expecting. If I hadn’t heard the unimpeachable results, I would have doubted that such a dramatic change in temperament…at the finish of a song could work so well.”
I think many new students underestimate the amount of time this effort takes. Tony has mentioned many times about the value of going back to Sudnow’s seminar and listening to what he says more carefully. The tasks required of you aren’t difficult but to sustain the effort over a long period of time without getting distracted is more difficult.
Because I had to repeatedly listen to all of David’s recordings during the creation of the new seminar, I came to realize two things: first, it’s quite motivating just to listen to Suds and second, after all these years I still am reminded of something I’d forgotten every time I listen to David. And I’ve listened to him a lot.
Sometimes the simplicity of the Method deceives people. Playing the piano, even in this relatively narrow subset, is still a very big skill.
I also agree that ‘motivation’ is the key. Providing you’re staying focused on the tasks at hand.
I’ll have more to say about motivation on that thread.
David H:
With the goal of voicing on the fly from fakebooks, are you recommending that we voice:a)various chord/melody note clusters and keep them in mind;
and/or
b) focus on “patterns” of clusters found in songs?Thanks again
I don’t think it’s any more complicated than just voicing a lot of songs. With perhaps one caveat: Write down your fractions. To begin with write all of them, as they become more familiar and you feel you ‘know’ the voicing just by looking at the chord name then change to just writing down ones you don’t know or you’ve changed in some way that you’re not very familiar with.
Eventually you’ll discover that even with new voicings you’ll get them in place under your hands, take a good look at the shape and then in some magical sort of way your hands ‘remember’ the new shape after only one or two passes through the song.
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