Thu, 10/06/2011 - 09:09
If you write songs on piano, which pop songs did you learn to play first that put you on the path to write songs on the piano? Did you start with Elton John songs, Motown, Beatles? It's hard to go from piano lessons with scales, sight reading and Bach to songwriting piano. Any tips on how to go about this?
Thu, 10/06/2011 - 14:21
#2
I was always interested in playing music by ear. My favourite thing was playing familiar tunes and music from movies. Finding the accompaniment was a fascinating and a very inspiring task. In a way this was a starting point for improvising cords and background parts for the melodies. Then I just was playing my pieces and trying to imagine how I would develop them from a particular place. It started off as a trying to find the style of a particular composer and moving onto composing something my way. With my students we often improvise on the piano, we start off with the subject i.e. Halloween, going for playing some intervals in 3 octaves which create a special effect, some ghost like sounds, etc. I found a wonderful inspiring book to use - Progressive Guide to melodic Jazz improvisation by Jeffery Wilson who created fantastic modules for improvisations. Great fun!
Thu, 10/06/2011 - 14:58
#3
Great thread! I did a few songs this 50/90 that were mainly piano/vocal. Piano was my first instrument, but it's been years since I've played it in performance. My 50/90 guitar/vocal and banjo/vocal songs were usually instrument and voice in one take - it's very difficult for me to do that with piano.
I started playing because of two people - my great-grandfather and Elton John. Great-granddad was classically trained and a church organist, but he loved all kinds of music. Once I got good enough, I would play Billy Joel, Scott Joplin, and 12-bar blues for him.
The only Elton John song I really learned properly was "Daniel," but he was an early hero. Then I learned just about every song on "The Stranger" by Billy Joel. I agree with Nancy about books of arrangements in the '70s being hit-or-miss, and since in the books the piano was the main instrument, often you were playing the melody instead of what the pianist actually did as part of a group.
The first song in which I thought of piano as a performing instrument was "Imagine," then maybe "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Then "Factory" by Bruce Springsteen. Simple yet effective chords to sing along with.
Often, I write a song on guitar, then think that it might sound good on piano. Because I don't practice much, the songs tend to be simple, but I try to get as much out of 3 and 4 chords as I can.
Nadia - I dig the improv idea you do with your students of playing to a subject. You have me thinking of ideas right now!
Thu, 10/06/2011 - 15:52
#4
Hi Chip, it is such fun to improvise! And it encourages more practice too as students can feel the need of all the scales, arpeggios, chords progressions etc. They learn the notes better that way too so even at the starting point of learning the first notes we improvise. One of my students has a dog and we made up a piece about her dog getting famous and being invited to BBC where they put on his CD with the dog's singing!
Those C, D and B were leaned at no time 
Near to Christmas I bring my book of Christmas songs with just the melodies and chords written at the top and many students improvise the accompaniment and change the chords to suit the melodies better. Then we create our own Christmas songs. There is so much the piano can offer. It's a fantastic instrument! It was interesting to hear from one of my students how she came from school feeling angry, ran upstairs to her room, set at the piano and started to play something grumpy. When she finished playing her mum entered the room and asked: "Feeling better now?" and my student replied "Yes". Music can give us so much! improvisations give us a chance to unlock so much hidden inside us, give us the sense of freedom and enjoyment...
Thu, 10/06/2011 - 16:31
#5
Rock covers played by early Beatles. I went out and bought Money (Gordy-Bradford) sheet music and was so furious that the sheet, carefully read, sounded nothing like the song, that I started to listen and do it by ear. A local rock band wanted me in on organ--parents would neverneverneverNEVER have permitted--and taught me twelve bar blues and sixteen bar turnarounds, which was the start of improvisation. A counterculture madman showed me the tricks of basic blues piano licks--simple, but the ear has real difficulty working it out...
But most of my pop was regurgitated folk or occasionally Simon & Garfunkel, "Great SOngs of the SIxties" compendium which I still possess, and mainly hack acoustic guitar and voice. I did write isntrumental, but didn't actually realise I could songwrite until ten years ago, when the ill-fated but cruelly gorgeous 'The Internet Opera' just...happened, all 2.5 hours of it. And that was over 30 years AFTER all the preceding!
Sometimes, you have to be told, and retold, and retold, and ordered to ignore parental warping, and told again "yes, you CAN be creative. You ARE creative. You MUST stretch and find where your creative passion and abilities lie. And no, there is NO SUCH THING AS BAD MUSIC: just different tastes, and often, poor technical application of a golden creative idea."
I had a Billie Holiday songbook that had good, not-too-difficult pop/jazz piano arrangements of songs like Georgia on My Mind, God Bless the Child, Sophisticated Lady. That was the best early influence for me. I also had books of current (70s) pop hits, where the piano arrangements were hit or miss. The ones written by piano-based singer-songwriters seemed to be the best - e.g., Carole King, Christine McVie. When the sheet music wasn't so good (either because the rhythmic feel didn't match or because it was a bad piano arrangement of a guitar-based song) I used the guitar-tab chords as a guide and figured the rest out by ear.
I'd recommend listening to and analyzing piano-based songs you like. What's the left hand doing -- a bass line, arpeggios, chords? What's the right hand doing -- melody, chords, accents? How do the two hands interact rhythmically and harmonically? How does the piano part interact with the vocal melody? Try doing this by ear and with sheet music.
I'd also recommend extending your knowledge of chords. If you had piano lessons with scales, maybe you learned major and minor triads and their inversions. You have 88 keys to play with, though, so take advantage of that breadth and spread those chords as widely as both hands can reach. Try a C and G on the left hand and an E a tenth above on the right, for instance. Or the lowest G with the highest two Cs and the E between them. Experiment with permutations in all the octaves and see which ones you like. Then try doing this with more complex chords.
That should get you started, anyway.