Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Runs & Fills piano playing

We've all heard pianists who build us drool with melodic jealousy when they amuse oneself, using a utensil case filled of lighting-quick runs and skilled fills that be obsessed or in ownership of us clamoring representing more.
I satisfactorily call to mind hearing Errol Garner frolic "I'll Remember April" when I was circular 14. I had no concept a piano could be played be fond of that, and I was unqualifiedly fascinated close all the absorbing and exciting runs and fills he added to his improvisation of those standards.
If you&'re anything approve of me, you would heat to learn how to "crowd up the null and invalid spaces" with flake fragments, chords, fragmented chords, and so on. Techniques such as 8th note runs, 16th note runs, 32nd note runs, triplet fills, and numerous combinations thereof -- some so fleet you can't regular perceive which notes are being played. Techniques such as "cascading waterfall runs", the fabled "pro straddles", the alcoholic "tremolo-fired runs" and lots more. Learning how to "material it up" with runs and fills would certainly grip your piano playing to the next even.
After listening to countless pianists in all genres, I compiled a listing of six types of runs and fills that they frequently employ:
1. "Cocktail" runs --The lightning armada runs second-hand beside the big "display" pianists. One Slang mitt runs, two paw runs, ajar-octave runs, tremolo-blasted runs, cascading waterfall runs and more. Made famous next to such names as Eddy Duchin, Carman Caballero, Liberace, etc., but also cast-off tastefully close to multitudinous others, such as Roger Williams and myriad "burst" piano players.
2. Embellishments -- Mordents, inverted mordents, trills, turns, tremolos, elegance notes, glissandos, etc. These are the "artfulness" techniques that current your piano playing eminence and gracefulness. Virtually NO layman piano players make put into practice or operation of these, so the pianist that learns these is putting herself or himself in a degree customarily quiet championing trained pianists.
3. Piano tricks -- How to assemble your piano sound oriental, or construct it note appreciate a drum or a music container? A bell? Latin? Country?
4. Evangelistic runs -- These are the octave runs and fillers old alongside the big genuineness pianists of over and contemporary such as Rudy Atwood and other evangelistic piano players.
5. Jazz & blues runs -- Using the "blues imbrication" up and down the keyboard, depressed note-crunches, slides, etc. These runs are extremely utilitarian not lone in jazz and R & B, but also in "jet fact" (I detest to practise that name because it sounds racist, but people utilize it to relate a decided class of certainty music, so I reluctantly exercise the name...but single in that faculty of the talk), fusion, and abundant stone-explode songs. 6. Fillers in abundance -- Filling up an unfilled amount with a coin-melody; creating an intro; creating an ending; developing "turnarounds", and chromatic fillers, fillers based on the Dorian and Lydian scales and other "church manner" scales shabby by of the period jazz and fusion artists.
It is heady for any pianist to drawing himself or herself playing those LIGHTNING FAST runs up the keyboard and risk in down in interval for the next chord, or playing CASCADING RUNS down the keyboard for a WATERFALL of wonderful sounds, to condition nothing of using mordents, inverted mordents, trills, turns, tremolos, suppleness notes, glissandos, fillers in great amount or numbers or amounts, cocktail-piano runs, added to gospel-category runs as sufficiently as "blues runs" based on the blues scale!
Is it quality the action to learn some or all of these techniques? It certainly has been for me, but every pianist desire own to erect that judgment for himself or herself.

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