Pop Piano Teaching – Improvisation Break Throughs

Holistic Teaching in Pop Piano Lessons

The structure and pedagogy within The Maestro Online pop piano lessons continues to evolve. The more videos are created for the online courses in the library, the more the strategy is refined. Ever since discovering the Kodaly philosophy and fusing it with jazz improvisation and pop music, The Maestro Online obsession with teaching methodology has intensified on a weekly basis.

Using Chart hits to Learn Piano: Starting with the Ear

Not all online pop piano or organ pupils are confident singing in front of others, but those who use their voice or bodies to consolidate key concepts gain quicker results. Solfege (the do-re-mi system) is an obvious starting point, but it isn’t the only concept as it’s merely a starting point. Inner hearing, training the mind to hear music in the brain is far more important. Simple exercises can help with this such as omitting particularly pitches or chords and hearing them in your head whilst playing others.

Simultaneous Hearing of Parts – Popular Piano Melody & Bass

An absolute winner, in terms of pupil progress, is the ability to hear two or more things clearly in the mind at the same time (such as bass and melody); this undoubtedly creates a higher level of musicianship. How do you force yourself to hear more than one thing at once? Well, a simple strategy is to play bass and melody whilst singing along with the bass. You can sing along (a) with solfege so that you relate each pitch to the tonic or key note and (b) with absolute pitch names (ABCDEFG) so that younger learners recall the letter names of different notes more quickly. The second level to this strategy is to play the melody and sing the bass part to solfege and letter names without simultaneous playing the left hand or organ pedals. Playing one part while singing another really enables pupils with regards to hearing two parts at once and, more importantly still, means that they notice mistakes in several parts or voices much more quickly.

Piano Chords: Teaching from Chord Progressions

Teaching chord progressions is really key, not just in online pop piano lessons, but also classical piano, organ and vocal/singing improvisation. The use of recurring patterns allows the brain to allocate more resources to creativity. Certain patterns become more routine and are easier to recall.

Pop Piano Improvisation Patterns: Pop Piano Accompaniment

Once the patterns are established then more advanced concepts can rapidly be taught. Popular piano accompaniment styles include the use of inversions, textures, different accompaniment styles (from Alberti Bass to Boogie Woogie, ACDC, Ballads and Arpeggios), added pitches such as 6ths or 7ths, walking basses or blues notes. These Left Hand textures then become routines and the whole piece begins to sound like an established cover version with the student choosing their specific style and creating accompaniments based on their own characters, opinions and emotions.