Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner - Non Classical HELP ME!!!!!! My piano solos SUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

guys, i really need help with my soloing. i went to berklee. i play in bands, jazz, rock, blues, and my solos suck. and i guys, can't seem to find the right teacher to help me get it together. i mean, i know who i like. i love oscar peterson, kenny werner, keith jarret, chuck leavell, bruce hornsby... all these guys i love but for some reason when i'm on stage, and everyone looks for me to take a solo. the suck. they're not clean, they're not melodic, or phrased will. i just blow some scales. and i need help and guidance. is there ANYTHING out there or ANYONE i can talk to about help here? a book? a teacher? a site? anything? i just want to be a good soloist. i want to be able to burn... why is this so hard? what am i doing wrong?! please help!!!!!

you can contact me directly if you google: charlie hornsby. i have a website, myspace, facebook, etc.

thank you!

I'm running into the same issue. It sucks when you're jamming and then everyone turns to you for a solo and rip something that completely sucks. I'm looking forward to hearing peoples response on this one cause i'd really like to know.

I am pretty much in the same boat, except I did not go to Berklee!

I am learning to play by myself, with the guidance of this fantastic book, "Art of Improvisation" by Bob Taylor, which really gets into the nitty gritty of jazz improv.

I also use Band in a Box to practice at home. I surely helps with the whole stage fright thing!

i think the whole stage fright thing is something that we all go through...even the best pianists deal with it to some degree. i think the trick is learning to make that nervous energy work for you, so it actually enhances your performance. that's easier said than done though :-)

about the soloing: i think simplicity is the way to go when you're starting out. it's tempting to want to play a million eighth notes and flashy lines all the time. and that kind of thing certainly has its place. but, for me, some of the most satisfying solos are the singable ones, the ones built on simple, melodic phrases.

check out this bill evans video. he says some great stuff about simplicity and soloing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEHWaGuurUk

Here's your solution... read the reviews, they ar not kidding:

http://www.amazon.com/Connecting-Ch..._cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

Good solos are pulled off when you start hearing passages that relate to the chord progression and you become confident in your path to pull them off.

1. Get the book Country Riffs for Piano by George Wurbach. The book has all the cool licks that can apply to rock, blues and country. A CD is included to hear all the exercises played the way they are written and the feel. Transpose them to the "rock keys", E-A-D-G-B. It can be more of a challenge to play a great solo over a simple triad progression, I-IV-V than to blow on II-V-I like Autumn Leaves.

2. Learn the solo on the Beatles Get Back tune that the "fifth Beatle Billy Preston played on electric piano. A simple, but very fine solo on 2 chords, A and D. Transpose the solo to the guitar keys.

3. Listen to all the tunes that keyboardist Reese Wynans plays on with Stevie Ray Vaughn. Reese is on youtube, so download the videos, open them in Quicktime Pro, slow them down and learn them note for note.

If you can find a teacher to work with, that's fine too, but really you have to work it out yourself by listening to the tunes and trying to copy what the keyboard players are doing, one note, one bar at a time until you can duplicate it 24-7, awake or asleep.

4. Play pentatonic octaves of I-IV-V up and down the scale in quarter notes, eighth notes and eighth note triplets until it;s smooth with a metronome.

Do these suggestions and you will see successful results in a month with daily practice. The key to all this is listening and then duplicating. Take it a day at a time, have patience and results will come

katt

Well, this is indeed the story of my life at the moment. 3rd year jazz major, play in all sorts of combos, bands, whatevs. Aannddd, yep my solos sound like garbage right now. There was a point this past year where I was creating fantastic solos all the time and my teacher calls that my "singing" voice. Don't really know where it comes from or how to get it back, but I certainly hope that it comes back to me soon.

I should add... a lot of the feedback I see here is "connect the harmony, make sense of the theory, steal some licks, transcribe, listen" etc. I mean I guess I could do more of that that, but at some point it needs to be music created from within me, possibly influenced by some things,right? What I want to do is find that balance. The vocabulary is there, the chord scale relationships are there, the many transcriptions I have done are there, but the art is not. I don't want to get lost in all of the information I can get my hands on, I want to make music, and that I cannot do.

Katt, that's great stuff. thank you. i'll also check out those books. i have been looking for the Reese Wynans and Leavell and Bill Payne footage, i didn't know you could download it from youtube. i'll have to figure that out.

and yes, i should know all the pentatonics, and i don't know those as well as i should.

i hope this thread will continue to yield more conversation, thoughts and ideas.

thank you!

i think the trick too, is isolating HOW TO PRACTICE AND WHAT TO PRACTICE to get better solos.

Dave Salazzo, this bill evans video is genius!!!! thank you!

i did a google search and amazon search for "Country Riffs for Piano by George Wurzbach"... i couldn't find it. anyone have any tips on where to get it?

thanks!

disregard post .... links do not work.

I think you need to take a page from Michael Jackson.
Initially he imitated his favorite singers, but
he wanted to be no. 1, and he realized that if he
imitated others, he'd be just a lesser version
of them. He knew he had to do things differently
if wanted to be King of Pop. Normal people take sleeping
pills. Jackson didn't sleep, and if he did, it was
with anesthesia. No one in the world sleeps by
anesthesia, but no one in the world is as big as
Michael Jackson.

If you imitate your favorite pianists, you'll be
just a lesser version of them. You need to do
things differently if you want to stand out.

Unfortunately, it looks like the riff book by George Wurzbach book is out of print. You can out in a search to Amazon and they me able to find a used copy out there.

We learn to talk by hearing our parents and people around us speak and we pick up the language which is passed on in order to communicate. Music is also a language.

Chick Corea learned to "speak" at the piano by transcribing all of Horace Silver's records and then duplicating it and applying it to his own style. But could you tell the difference between Horace's style and Chicks? To my ears, there is no comparison, they are both unique with the sound they produce. Bill Evans learned every lick Bud Powell played and then developed his own sound.

Why do we play music that is written, pop, classical, etc? Why is it that 10 of the greatest classical pianists that include Glenn Gould, Horowitz, Byron Janis, Richter, Daniel Pollack, and others play the same Chopin Etude, but each interpretation is unique and has an individual sound? They are imitating what the composer wrote down.

To become good at improvisation, you need a path to follow which means listening to records, transcribing, learning licks, getting lessons, copying what others are doing and then let all this knowledge filter in to our own interpretation. As piano players, we are all copying and listening to others to learn how to "speak" the language of music.

So I'm sorry, but I disagree that imitating your favorite pianist will make you a lesser one. Just my opinion and you have yours which is fine too. Imitating all of my influences has made me a better player but not an imitator. We are all going to have "identities" and influences from other pianists to go our own path. We also find teachers to show us things we duplicate in order to learn other approaches to harmony, improvisation, cool licks, etc. JMHO

katt

There is some good stuff here all, thanks for all your input and suggestions.

Two one-word tips:

SING. Not necessarily in public, not during gigs, but for yourself. Learn the words, any words (I made a jump in how much I "got" what Coltrane was doing in his solos when I started learning Jon Hendricks' vocalese version of "Freddie Freeloader"!) Get rhythm-section tracks to tunes you know like the back of your hand and put'em on the in car while you drive around; you'll find yourself starting to sing over'em after a while. This'll free you from thinking about technique as such, and let you focus on what works for you melodically. Listen to Dizzy scat-sing. Nobody ever nominated him for any awards as a vocalist (as far as I know) but you can hear how his solos work, when he sings.

SIMPLIFY. Strip it down. WAY down. Understate. Consider that maybe "burning" and velocity just isn't what your playing is about right now. Don't think Tatum/Peterson, think Monk,think Miles, think Horace Silver, think Basie. Stop playing "Giant Steps", and spend time working on soloing on 12-bar blues. SLOW 12 bar blues. In G.

What exactly do you mean in no. 4?

Gyro,

I think people underestimate just how much great musicians copy other people before they do their own thing. I heard that Ray Brown used to copy from Oscar Pettiford so much that people used to call him ray pettiford. A lot of great players I know can play an entire album worth of transcriptions they learned by ear. One of my teacher is so fluent in the style of stan getz, john coltrane, and lockjaw davis, and as demonstration he played a blues solo in the style of trane, getz, and davis on each chorus.

charliehornsby,

my suggestion is imitate as much as you can...and try to do as much of it by ear without music. For now don't worry about developing your own voice, because as you imitate, you will naturally find your own way of doing things, your voice should naturally emerge.

pick something really easy like, Mile's Solo from Kind of blue album, but learn them completely by ear. Learn it so that you can play it exactly like the record, with all the accents and feel.. you'll start to realize that a good solo is not just good choice of notes, but good feel, dynamic and other things.

I've searched high and low for the George Wurzbach book (and that's Wurzbach with an double dots accent um....) and it's not only out of print but not available in the usual places. You could try the UK sites, I've found some more obscure things for sale there. Anyway, I found his website, and being completely without inhibitions or shame, emailed him and asked him where the book might be found. I'll let you know!