Current Piano Musings

CP175, a good piano buddy.

This is my piano buddy and good friend. I call my friend Buddy but it's real name is Kawaii CP175, which is much too formal for a friend that I play with so frequently. We usually spend about an hour together early in the morning. I don't feel guilty when I play early in the morning and that's important to me. When it gets past 8am, I just feel that I had better do something productive, like the rest of the people in the world. But when it comes right down to it, I'd rather be playing with Buddy.

Kawaii CP175 is a pretty sophisticated instrument. It is able to morph into just about any musical instrument you can name. It's lots of fun to play with, but I always start with exercises that I think will make me a better player if I get really good at them. So we always play a scale session around the 12 majors, but we do everything we can to make them sound more like riffs than scales. My left hand arpeggios the major chord and lets my right hand have fun with its scale, playing a few notes up and down in short riffs, in trips and quads quarters and making up melody as we go. After a while, I can just close my eyes because my fingers remember what's sharp and flat and when to tuck and when to jump and how far. We go forth from fourth to fourth, starting with B then on to E A D G C F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb, all twelve. I like them all, but the most fun to play have at least two black keys because my fingers seem to be able to do more tricks with them.

Well that's a lot of fun, but I mostly play chords from fake books, so its a good idea to get some practice with all the chords in each major scale. I discovered early on, when working on the key of C, that I could just play a triad up the white keys from middle C to treble C. Those triads turn out to be C Dm, Em F G Am Bdim and C, or to play them in any key you could call them I ii iii IV V vi VIIdim I. (caps are majors and lower case are minors and the Romans get credit for the numbering system).

Unfortunately, when played sequentially these chords don't sound very musical. So when Buddy and I do our chord practice we play them forth from fourth to fourth like this: I, IV, VIIdim, iii, vi, ii, V7, I. In the key of C the chords would be C, F, Bdim, Em, Am, Dm, G7, C.  No black keys there so its not much fun, But in the key of B the chords would be B, E, A#dim, D#m, G#m, C#m, F#7, B. See? Five black keys and much more interesting. If you would like to see which chords we play in each of the twelve keys, go to this web page and paste the following into the chords field: 

I-IV-VIIdim-iii-vi-ii-V7-I

Click [View It] and you will see a table that shows that chord progression in each of the twelve major keys. If you really look at that table, you will see that every major chord appears three times, every minor chord appears three times, every diminished chord appears once and every seventh chord appears once. So when we play the table, we are reinforcing our ability to play the seven chords of a key in all twelve keys. The best part is that this progression sounds very musical because the fourth to fourth progression is the most prevalent progression in music.

To make it even sweeter (and this puts my wife back to sleep), Buddy adds a string section and sometimes an orchestra to back up the piano as we chord our way through the table of keys, using arpeggios and blocks in one hand or the other, softening the minors, strengthening the majors and making music out of nothing at all.

And before we know it, its 8am!