Learning to accompany airs on piano / keyboards

[bradhurley]

Glad you like Brid Cranitch -- the fact that you appreciate her subtlety and picked up on her use of silence makes me feel like you'll be a sensitive accompanist. Silence is such a very powerful form of expression in music (I'm not talking about John Cage here), and I think she uses it to exceptional advantage. She adds where the piano can add something musically, and where it doesn't add she restrains herself. I honestly didn't think piano accompaniment could work for Irish airs until I heard this recording, which a friend recommended to me some years back. (This recording also has perhaps the most enjoyable version of Danny Boy I've ever heard, played straight without the usual bathos, and a few chords on the piano that add just the right touch of old-fashioned schmaltz.)

[cunparis]

Glad you like Brid Cranitch -- the fact that you appreciate her subtlety and picked up on her use of silence makes me feel like you'll be a sensitive accompanist....

I studied the first tune on the CD - An Raibh Tú Ag An gCarraig? for several hours, learning the melody and then trying to play it on my flute and then studying what the piano was doing and then trying to mimic it on piano.

It came down to figuring out the chords she used and there were two that I could hear, Em w/o 3rd & D. They are played pretty full, for example sometimes E B in left hand and E B in right hand. She plays some just as a block chord, and some (most?) as arpeggios, sometimes going up and a few times going down. It was very simple.. at least it sounded simple. But I'm a beginner at piano so it was not so simple for me.

I made a crude recording of what I came up with today. This is just to mark my progress, I need to spend a lot more work on this tune. And I need to study the other tunes and get a better idea of what she is doing. And the flute.. I've only been playing it for 3 1/2 weeks but I'm trying to force myself to always play flute instead of reverting back to whistle in order to make better progress. I ran out of breath quite a lot which kind of ruins it, but the main goal was to practice the piano part.

Comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated. if I had to give myself one comment it would be this: I did too many arpeggios and I need to come up with some more variety and probably more silence (use a block chord instead of arpeggio would do both).

I'm really digging this CD.

http://www.box.com/s/e7d7b3d8731c6ffc710e

[MTGuru]

There's a jazz piano chording technique sometimes called 3/7 voicing. It involves basically focusing on the 3 and 7 tones of the prevailing Dom7/Maj7 chords to suggest a voicing, then filling in the root and/or extensions for coloration. Drop voicing can give a similar effect. Bucky Pizzarelli advocates something equivalent on guitar with his 3-note/3-string formations.

If you're a piano duffer like me, you have a tendency to attack chording with big block chord formations which can be way too dense for accompanying a light melody. The 3/7 or Drop approach forces you to open up your chords with a sparser sound and give the melody room to breathe.

Of course, you can't always apply jazz techniques directly, since modal ITM harmonies are not grounded in the whole Dom7 jazz approach. But open voicing also works with triads, or 1-5 "modal" chords with suspensions and 6/9 extensions. So it's worth experimenting with.

http://www.outsideshore.com/primer/prim ... rdVoicings