Piano Pilot

So, how does one go about arranging piano music? That’s a good question. And one that can get confusing for most students. They sometimes confuse composing with arranging and with good reason - they’re closely connected. Let’s look at how to arrange a piece of music for piano. Specifically, we’ll look at the lesson piece “Fall Sunrise.”

Fall Sunrise is a contemporary/new age piano piece I wrote to illustrate how ABA form works. The first section is comprised of 4-bars which is repeated twice. The next section (B) is an 8-bar phrase repeated twice and then we come back to our (A) section, which again is repeated twice. So, if we were to “arrange” this so we can see what it

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Ah, broken chords. The sound. The cascading pattern of chordal notes. It’s beautiful. There’s no doubt about it. And this technique is one of the easiest to learn. After all, all you need to do to create it is have a chord under your fingers and be able to “break it up.”

What do I mean by break it up? You’ve probably heard of solid chords. This is when all tones are heard at once. For example, if I finger a C Major triad and play all three keys at once, I’m playing a solid chord. But, if I break this chord up into it’s 3 notes and play them one at a time you get a broken chord.

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I’ll never forget the first time I read the joke “What do you get when you play New Age music backwards.” The answer really cracked me up… “You get New Age music.”

It’s a point that’s well taken. But the people who put down and criticize this style of music are really missing the point. You see, New Age music isn’t about trying to create sophisticated sonatas or perfect preludes.

It’s really about a feeling - a feeling that goes through you, allows you to relax, and perhaps take a breath from the hectic pace of life. It’s about spirit allowing the music to flow through you and transport you to a more peaceful place.

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Most people think you need to learn sophisticated chords and lots of them to play “good” piano music. Wrong! You don’t need to learn 100’s and even thousands of chords you’ll never use. What’s perfect for the beginner and experienced player too is to limit choice!

Just a few chords, a scale to improvise in, and we’re off creating a world of sound! For example, take the lesson “Winter Scene.” Here we have 2 chords played by the left hand. We use a certain pattern to play these chords with and we’ve created a harmonic background. All that’s left to do now is to add in the melody (foreground) and that’s it - an improvisation that can last as long as

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Piano chord charts are used to help you keep track of chord changes. And the cool thing about them is that you can use them for improvisation and composition. Here’s how.

Let’s say you have an 8-bar phrase to play. There are no chord symbols yet so you don’t know what chords you’ll be playing. You just have 8-bars in front of you. The first thing you need to know is the time signature. For our purposes here, we’ll keep it simple and use 3/4 or 4/4 time.

Now let’s select 4/4 time for our 8-bar phrase. Now we know the meter but what about the chords? Here’s where we can jot down chord progressions for either improvisation or composition. For example,

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