| When I first started playing piano, I looked everywhere | | | | After all, here was something that was pretty easy to |
| for information to help me play what I felt. And, much | | | | do. And it didn't require a lot of experience. Just |
| to my disappointment, I was left floundering in the | | | | knowledge of a few chords. |
| library aisles. | | | | So what's the easy piano improvisation strategy here? |
| One of things I'm good at is just knowing if something | | | | Simple. You have to find the right kind of limits that will |
| works or not. In fact, I can look at a book and within a | | | | set your playing free. |
| few minutes, determine if it has anything useful in it. | | | | You see, the problem for most students is not that |
| It just so happens that during my library visit, I ran | | | | they can't improvise. It's that there are way too many |
| across a small book, barely 60 pages or so. This book | | | | choices to begin with. By playing a few chords within a |
| contained nothing but chord progressions laid out over | | | | set framework, I learned that I didn't need a lot of |
| small 4 and 8-bar phrases. The goal of the book was | | | | material to begin creating my own music. |
| to get you to play these chord changes and develop a | | | | A great example of this is the lesson "Reflections in |
| sense of structure. | | | | Water." Here you have 4 open position chords to play. |
| Well, it was brilliant. They say good things come in | | | | The chords are played in a certain order and music is |
| small packages and this was pure gold to me. I took | | | | made. It really doesn't have to be anymore |
| the book home and started to play through the chord | | | | complicated than that. |
| changes. | | | | |