Funk Piano Overview

Series Summary

Can you feel the groove? Does that funky beat make you wanna move? Can you hear that far out keyboard man playin’ like he’s on the moon? Don’t you wanna dance? Or are you an uptight cat, always worried about your situation? Free your mind, man, and the rest will follow. Stop thinkin’ so hard and let go. I promise you, that icky sticky funk music is the best medicine for the blues. So get your groove in motion and bust some seams out on the dance floor.

Funk music is defined by its unique ability to blend simple rhythms and repetitive melodies into something bigger. Once the band fires up, the notes take on a life of their own. The bass line works its way into your hips; the drum beat makes you move your feet; the guitar and keyboards take you to some of the funkiest places in the cosmos.

In these free music lessons on video, learn how to play a funk groove on the piano. Get some tips for playing effective bass lines and using rhythm techniques like stab breaks, hangs, stops, and glissandos. Also learn how to play piano solos, with tremolo, double stopping, blues chord progressions, and improvised riffs.

Once you’ve received what the funk has to give, you have to give the groove to somebody else. Watch these short videos and learn how to spread the funk around.

Video Transcript

"Hi. My name is Jonathon Wilson on behalf of Expert Village.com. And in this series, we're going to learn how to play an advanced funk groove on the piano. We're going to learn specific, written out examples of this particular groove. I, myself, personally learn best by seeing exactly how somebody plays a particular pattern. The way chords are voiced. The way fingers are used. Exact notational patterns which I can then use to take and extrapolate and turn into my own thing. So we're going to learn this particular funk groove. We're going to learn the bass line. We're going to learn right hand comping patterns, breaks. Right hand solo patterns. Ways of varying the groove and changing the riff around to make it a little more aggressive. Learn all those things. But to get started, we're going to just do a nice, simple intro lick that lets us get in and out of the tune. So, without further ado, let's get started on that."