Right hand leading in pop piano comps

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A useful technique for pop comping, right hand leading is often overlooked, especially in sheet music reductions. If you're working up your own piano comps from chord progressions, you should find this a very useful technique - it's dead simple, and just involves playing some chord changes slightly ahead of time in the right hand to give a comp a feeling of drive and movement.

It does need a little bit of confidence at the piano keyboard, because your two hands are effectively working out of time with each other, usually by just a fraction of a second (in musical terms, when you use leading the right hand tends to move into the chord change about half a beat ahead of the left, which follows the strict progression. Sometimes it's closer to a quarter of a beat, or if you're playing in a very rubato style, somewhere between the two).

It's a really important technique for quite a lot of of modern pop piano, especially ballad-type stuff at reasonably slow tempi, where chord progressions can feel quite 'ploddy' on the keyboard (and sound the same) unless something is done to give them a bit more movement.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• piano comping
• right hand leading
• pop piano
• piano tutorial

[DJKerr96]

Your great at this. How long have you been playing piano? And are you self taught?

[billhiltonbiz]

@DJKerr96 Thanks! Well, I'm now 37 and I started when I was 8. I had 10 years of classical piano lessons in total (though I didn't work that hard at them - wish I'd worked harder) and picked up most of my improvisation skills playing in bands, starting with my school jazz band when I was 12. That doesn't mean you have to have 30 years' practice to do this stuff - I started to get some decent skills aged 14, and haven't really improved that much since I was 19...!

[Cav3man93]

The variant you showed at the beginning wich was really simple somehow turned out to be very lively.. although still stimple. What else did you do to it? Can you give us some tips on how to make it sound more interesting and unique? Thanks!

[billhiltonbiz]

@Cav3man93 Well, there were a couple of things going on in there apart from the RH lead. For a start, I was extending the chords and playing around with inversions - like the G chord extended up to a B at around 2:16. I also used a split C chord right at the start (very common technique - (E+G) -> C -> (E+G) -> C), and some arpeggiation (e.g., on the F at 2:17 - 2:18). There are typical "country third" type licks on the C chord at 2:19 and the G at 2:24. (tbc)

[billhiltonbiz]

@Cav3man93 ...all classic stuff that I've mostly covered in earlier vids. You can work a lot of it out yourself just by playing little exercises like this over and over (and over and over and over...!) and letting your fingers do some thinking and exploration

[rich2k4]

would you say the best way to learn non classical piano is just to work on chords, scales, and doing rhythms with chord progressions? Also, could you do a video on pedaling, and the proper technique for it?

[billhiltonbiz]

@rich2k4 In short, yes, kind of - though a bit of classical background won't harm either. Focus on learning to read music effectively with two hands, and work on the chords and the scales until they're second nature. Pedalling vid: excellent idea, I'll add it to the list - thanks! :)

[katrad333]

You stopped me in my tracks. That was exactly what I needed to hear, so I watched your video 3 times. I have the theory and I could hear something going on but I didn't realize it was right hand leading. Thanks so much from Katrad in Canada.

[Elishadoublepee1]

your the Roger  Federer of piano. you make it fun and easy. GOD bless you.

[Cav3man93]

@billhiltonbiz thanks :)

[matoatlantis]

I'm learning to play the piano (attending the school too) and your videos are very helpful. Perfect to watch before/during practice. Got your book from amazon, looking forward to it.

thanks again.

[oldepersonne]

i would also like a video on pedalling