Piano Improvisation - Making Your Playing Sound Fuller

Recently on my website I was asked the question, “How can I make my playing more full?”

Now let me clarify that when I use the term full I'm talking about fullness of ideas. As in we want to have enough moves and tricks in our playing so that you can get through progression ten times, 20 or 30 times without sounding repetitive and mechanical. Full doesn’t mean playing more notes in a bar because that just leaves the messiness. And if you're in a band or playing for a church or if you're playing for a youth band or whatever you're playing for, if you play too many notes in a bar then other musicians can’t be heard or they can’t get in they can’t perform their solos and you interfere with the vocalist and the singers and everybody gets upset and soon you'll find yourself out of the band.

So, fullness means a diverse range of ideas. So as I demonstrate this I want you to listen to the way I contrast that but then I leave space after that. The space is there to ensure that my runs don’t just take over. So I run and a little bit of space. Similar to speech you have pauses when you finish a sentence. So runs and space, followed by more runs a bit more space. And when I say space I'm not talking about devoid of notes. I'm talking about playing accord, just sustaining it letting that sound hold. Because the idea is, if you can play some really, really cool notes and the best notes for that moment, if you can play if you can pick and choose those notes then you really don’t need to clutter it out with the whole bunch of other notes that just detracts from the nice notes that you just played. So less is very often more. Play less but make the notes that you play really, really count.

I’ll play a progression in the key of G starting on A minor. I’ll keep it very simple stuff and then we’d build up and bursts of notes. Sustain chords and sustain again. Notice how I contrast the fast notes with these long chords to create contrast. To me that’s playing in a full way. If I just played full literally by adding more notes it will sound like this. Some of you might actually find that quite nice but to me that doesn’t work so well in a band unless I'm doing a pianist because we want space. Space where singers can sing, space where other musicians to get in.

Now earlier I mentioned making notes count. What do I mean by that? I mean when I'm playing A minor for example, I try to aim for key notes. And I’ll cover this in another video, but I'm aiming for D which is the 7th, I'm aiming for the F sharp which is the 2nd and if I can create a nice effect using few notes then I really don’t need to fill it with a whole bunch of other notes.




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