Piano and Popular Music for guitar

Cranky · August 2023

I’m working a bit at piano, kind of an alibi to work on sight reading but mostly just to get good at piano.

One thing I like about learning music on piano is its linear layout, which brings to light some interesting features of chord structure and, thus, voice leading. Every chord implies another.

This is all regardless of sight reading. You only need to know how to work out major and minor chords on a piano.

I have two specific songs in mind, and it would be cool if people posted some other specific examples of their own.

The song “Transatlanticism” by Death Cab for Cutie is a nice slow song to work through. The main chord progression is: A - C#m - D - F#m. Going by the fingerings that the average guitar player uses, these are 4 very different chords. Ironically, the two closest on guitar (C#m-D) are, on the piano, the farthest apart, but I believe that that’s how it is meant to be played. On piano, the A major (played with the left hand) moves to the C#m simply by dropping the pinky finger down a semitone to the G# (the G# being the root of the C#m chord). Then we move up to the D, played as a standard D-F#-G. But then for the F#m chord the pinky is once again moved down a semitone to the C#. So, while on guitar the most movement is from the A to C#m chords, and then again from the D to F#m, this movement doesn’t do justice to the song’s subtleties.

The chorus moves similarly: D - A - F#m - E. The D chord rooted at D becomes an A rooted at C# (played C#-E-A). The A then becomes an F#m also rooted at C# (played C#-F#-A).

If these progressions were played on piano in the most basic way, with each chord voiced as a 1-3-5, the song would sound both different and boring.

The main chords for “Ana’s Song” by Silverchair are Eb, Cm, Gm. Played with the left hand, the only finger that needs to move throughout the whole progression is the pinky finger from Eb to C to D. Or, alternatively, the thumb’s Bb could move up to the C for the Cm chord, then back down to the Bb while also moving the Eb down to D to form the Gm chord. In either sequence, the middle finger never leaves the G and the other fingers hardly move at all. On the studio recording of the acoustic version, I think the piano uses all of these variations.

So I find all of this fun and interesting and it inspires me to return to the fretboard with that goal in mind: how many different chords can I play in this one spot while hardly moving my fingers? And then: how do these different ways of minimizing movement affect the feel of the song? And then: how can I use the same progression but voiced differently at different parts of a song, like to create a surprisingly large leap between notes compared to the minimalist stuff surrounding it?

viz · August 2023

You are delving into the fantastic world of inversions, which both create movement (or minimise it) and also produce melody lines in the bass. Also if well written they produce melody lines in the middle too. Check out 3-part and 4-part harmony for the ultimate in what we call voicing

Cranky · August 2023

viz said:

You are delving into the fantastic world of inversions, which both create movement (or minimise it) and also produce melody lines in the bass. Also if well written they produce melody lines in the middle too. Check out 3-part and 4-part harmony for the ultimate in what we call voicing

I’m familiar with those harmonies in singing, eg barbershop quartets, or just quartets in general. (My old man was always singing in church quartets.) I can’t imagine being able to play something like that, though, unless I was dubbing/looping. Do you have any particular tunes in mind? Maybe an instrumental “Because” by the Beatles?

Regarding minimal movement, I’ve been working on a bunch of Drop 2 voicings that really make the most of any one position on the board. They also really flush out how much some chords are nearly identical (the substitution chords, I guess), like Em/Cmaj7, Em7/C9, Bdim/G7. What’s interesting now is how playing the same chord voiced differently (particularly when you’ve moved up or down the board a few frets) sounds much more varied than playing two different chords voiced in the same position of the board.

I’m looking forward to mastering these tonal features on keys and fretboard alike. There’s just something uniquely didactic about keys, I wish I’d started years ago.

viz · August 2023

Mainly choral, but you could download some bach choral stuff and play it on the piano - you’d love it.

Cranky · August 2023

viz said:

Mainly choral, but you could download some bach choral stuff and play it on the piano - you’d love it.

I can’t. I grew up around that kinda stuff and I’ve had to block it out. Did I mention that my old man was an unpleasant person?

It’s gotta be modern or orchestral for me. I guess I could just try to play it without listening to it, but that’s pretty tricky.

edit: come to think of it, I listen to a lot of Philip Glass stuff and the most frequent is exactly what you’re talking about: quartet. Specifically I love the Dublin Guitar Quartet playing his Mishima stuff. This sheet music I would buy in a heartbeat.

https://youtu.be/EAWrWURMiv8?feature=shared (Sorry I don’t know how to embed YT vids)

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