Piano lessons Video Overview - "Piano and Keyboard Salsa, Ch. 1"

Transcript from this piano lesson below:

"Salsa Piano Lessons" (Chap. 1) : In the first chapter of this very popular piano lessons series, we're going to add some "south of the border" spice to your keyboard playing! You'll learn specific piano chord voicings and rhythmic patterns that some of the great Salsa keyboard players have made famous.

In addition, we'll explore some of the concepts that crossover between piano blues and piano salsa styles. Check out the video - you'll be amazed at some of the similarities between both styles, as well as one major difference that sets them apart.

[piano music playing ]

Oh yeah, we're going south of the border today, into the Caribbean. I'm' going to show you how to mix-up some musical salsa and add it to your piano music to give it a wonderful Latin flavor. This is really fun stuff! We're going to have some tricks for your right hand and some tricks for your left hand. All very interesting spices to add to your musical tool box. You're going to have a great time with this! I certainly have.

[Video Playing]

You maybe wondering - "What are the similarities and differences between Latin music and the Blues music that we've been studying on the piano?"

There are a lot of similarities, but there's lots of differences too. Let's look at some of the things that are similar. Probably the most obvious is some of the chord voicings or chord shapes that I used to play the piano music. Now the rhythm is quite different, right? We'll look at that in a second. Here's a familiar chord shape from the blues, remember this...

Watch the Video Version of this piano lesson (top of this page)

[ Video Playing ]

That chord shape is in the context of the blues. Now let's use it again but let's go a little different direction with it for Latin music on the piano.

[ Piano Lesson Video Playing ]

We went a little different direction with our thumb there and the underlying piano rhythm was really different. We're going to talk about that in a minute, but the chord shape is similar. One of the things that I'm going to do for consistency sake in this piano lesson is that I'm going to use these Latin rhythms and we're going to play them over the same chords that we used in the blues. So if you haven't studied the blues piano lessons, you need to back up and look at our blues piano course. But if you remember from your studies it was 12 bars or 12 measures of chords, right? So we're going to use those chords but with a Latin feel.

So we've looked at the similarity and that's the chord shape. That's one of the similarities. Now let's look at the foundational differences between the Latin music blues music on the piano.

To highlight the main differences between blues and Latin music, let's talk about the underlying rhythm. If you haven't noticed yet when we played the blues, it has a swing feel to it like this...

[ piano music playing here ]

Listen to the underlying beat. It's kind of shuffling along. It kind of swings. That's what makes the blues come alive. All that shuffling really pushes the blues down the road. Now the pulse of Latin music is very different from the blues. In fact it has a very straight pulse. It's seems like it would be less interesting, but something happens in the magic of Latin music that brings it to life and brings that special spice out, it sounds like this:

[ piano music playing here ]

The pulse of this underlying rhythm that you're hearing on the piano is very straight - like a train coming down he track... You hear how straight that is? But it's very, very nice!

In the beginning of this piano lesson I told you that I'm going to play Latin rhythmic patterns over the framework of the 12-bar blues. Here's the 12 bar blues pattern -

[ piano music playing here ]

I'm going to show you exactly how to play that in a few seconds, but first let me show you how it sounds over the chords of the 12-bar blues on the piano. Here we go!

[ Video Playing ]

Once again I just want to remind you these are the chords that we used to play through the 12 bar blues. Now we're not going to play with the blues style, instead, we're working on Latin styles. But let's use the same basic chords or song form, just to give us the structure that we can work over. Let's look at the very first piano chords.

[ Video Playing ]

We're not going to use the train sound - although that might be cool in some musical applications. However, we're not going to use the train voicing as a piano comp chord. We're going to use a voicing like this for C minor 7. Or I should say this is one of the voicings I'm going to teach you for C minor 7. The dominant 7 is on the bottom this time, here is the minor 3rd, here's the 5th up on top. We've got a mystery note right up here - this D on the piano keyboard. It really fights with that E flat. Do you hear that? Musically that's called "dissonance". Those dissonant notes would really make you mad if that's all you heard!

But listen how that dissonance sounds within the context of this chord... it sounds really nice. It adds something. Here's a trick that I'm going to give you, a tip that I always give my piano lesson students: Once you wrap your brain around this concept, you'll really start moving ahead. I always tell them, "It takes a little ugly to make something really beautiful." Isn't that a strange statement? We could just play the C minor chord and that would be very cool right, right? It would be a C minor chord but if you throw a little ugly in there, it can be really beautiful.

[ piano music playing here ]

It's kind of the difference between a computer drawn picture that's exactly perfect compared with the same picture that an artist draws by hand. Even though the artist's picture may not be as mathematically perfect as the computer picture, it's much more beautiful. It's the same in music. I want to teach you to throw in some ugly stuff, or some dissonant stuff - some things that fight on the keyboard! But it all sounds really good in the right context.

That's just a little philosophical highlight, but I want you to start thinking that way. It will change the way you play piano. So anyway, we have the dominant 7th, the minor 3rd, the 5th on top and then the D in the middle, the D is the 9th. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9, right? If you were super quick you may have noticed that this D down here is the second of the chord... (fade)

[ Video Playing ]

Thanks for joining us today. this has just been a very short sample from the piano lesson titled "Salsa for Piano and Keyboard Chapter 1".