Tips on Playing Piano in Eb (E Flat)

Series Summary

Music is a vibrant and necessary part of the human experience—even a salve for the human condition. Since the first sound wave burst forth from the womb of creation, we have come up with ways to write, record and play musical compositions. We’ve invented fancy-sounding Italian names for every musical idea we could imagine, and collected these into a body of knowledge and practice which we call “music theory,” complete with a circle of fifths. Concepts like minor and major, intervals and chords are all fine examples of the way we, as a species, like to catalogue and classify. Yet, improvisation is an instance where we play at the speed of thought, without classification or nomenclature. Very popular among jazz players, improvisation is a great tool to expose one’s true knowledge (or lack thereof) of a particular musical instrument—as well as let go of some of the traditions of the past to allow for new and different modes of creative expression.

In these free jazz piano lessons on video, pianist Ryan Larson teaches us not only how to improve our freestyle technique, but also how to read and write music—since you are only able to improvise with what you know. Keyboard lessons include how to play 5th chords, how to do chord progressions in the key of Eb major, how to use sharps, flats and intervals, how to play bass lines, how to change chord voicings, and how to play different melodies on the piano.

Video Transcript

"So today, we're going to go over some simple melody lines in the key of E flat major. Again, we're really concentrating on our right hand, just reading melodies. If you want to get the chords down, you can search for "E flat major, my first fake book" or, we're going to give reference, as we play through our tune how to find all the different chords we play. But again, we're not going to show you all these chords and the voicing because it will take up too much time and if you spend a little extra time, open a couple extra windows, you'd be able to reference and get this whole tune going rather quickly and rather simply. And we use a lot of the same chords over as well, so you really have to search maybe 6 or 7 chords. And it's good for you anyways, we have to learn all this information and we have to get our chords going as well as our scales. But today, we're really just looking at our melody lines and we're really going to tear them apart and we're going to show you how easy it is to read in pattern and to really, we're going to really simplify it so you can read through any key like a breeze. And we're going to use this information here, and we'll show you how to run through. It looks really complicated now, but we're going to make it so simple and so easy, you'll be doing it in no time."