How to Practice Piano for Composers

Unlock Your Piano Composition Potential: Master Essential Music Patterns

Are you ready to accelerate your piano composition skills? Discover a powerful technique used by top musicians to break through creative blocks and write music with greater fluency. This course focuses on learning the top 300 most used musical patterns, the fundamental building blocks of harmony, rhythm, and melody.

Learn to:

• Compose with Confidence: Develop a strong vocabulary of musical patterns to express your ideas more effectively.
• Arrange Fluently: Master the art of arranging, transforming simple patterns into complex and engaging compositions.
• Deconstruct & Emulate: Analyze your favorite music and recreate it with ease, gaining valuable insights into musical structure.
• Overcome Writer's Block: Finally finish those music sketches and bring your musical ideas to life.
• Enhance Your Piano Playing: Improve your overall musicianship and deepen your understanding of music theory.

Who is this course for?

This course is designed for intermediate musicians who have a foundational understanding of music theory and keyboard skills. It builds upon the concepts introduced in my previous course, Music Composition at the Piano, which provides a solid grounding for both beginner and intermediate players.

Why Focus on Patterns?

Professional composers often emphasize the importance of consistent practice and listening to new music. However, a common challenge is overcoming the initial hurdles of writing. It’s often a matter of musical "vocabulary." Just like learning a new language requires mastering words and phrases, composing requires understanding and utilizing fundamental musical patterns.

This course provides you with that essential vocabulary, empowering you to:

• Break through creative barriers
• Write with greater confidence
• Understand the underlying structure of music
• Develop your unique compositional voice

Course Outline: A Deep Dive into Musical Patterns

This comprehensive course is divided into seven modules, covering essential elements of music composition and arrangement:

Part 1: Harmony

• Introduction to harmonic foundations
• Key musical keystones
• Exploring 15-6-4-5 chord progressions
• Analyzing the harmonic language of Einaudi
• Understanding Blues harmony
• Working with Time Signatures
• Stepwise motion in harmony
• The power of musical sequences
• Utilizing Lord Chords
• Exploring Minor 4 Soul
• Understanding 3-6-2-5 chord progressions
• Mastering Secondary Dominants
• Exploring Jazz Blues harmony
• Chord relationships and bitonality

Part 2: Repertoire

• Analyzing musical outlines from existing pieces
• Building a repertoire list for pattern recognition
• Jamming exercises for improvisation
• Transcription techniques for learning from masters
• Creating a personal pattern library
• Analyzing example tunes

Part 3: Voicings

• Introduction to chord inversions
• Closed and open voicings
• Doubling, dropping, and adding notes
• Exploring 3rds, 6ths, and 10ths
• Using grace notes for melodic embellishment
• Harmonizing melodies effectively
• Rootless voicings
• Voice leading principles

Part 4: Accompaniment Patterns

• Introduction to accompaniment styles
• Using block chords
• Broken chords and arpeggiation (Part 1 & 2)
• Alternating chords for rhythmic interest
• Comping techniques
• Stride piano patterns
• Developing strong bass lines

Part 5: Rhythm

• Understanding groove and loops
• Introduction to rhythmic concepts
• Tempo and time signatures
• Strong and weak beats
• Subdivision and rhythmic complexity
• Swing feel
• Embracing imperfection in rhythm
• Accents and dynamics
• Grace notes and ghost notes
• Cross rhythms
• Exploring One Chord Genres

Part 6: Melodic Patterns

• Creating flowing melodic lines
• Utilizing sequences for melodic development
• Exploring pentatonics
• Paired pentatonics
• Multi-scale approaches

Part 7: Putting It All Together

• Integrating all learned patterns
• Practice and composing tips (Part 1, 2 & 3)
• Course conclusion

About Your Instructor:

Jack Vaughan is a composer and online educator, and the founder of Lean Musician. With courses taken by thousands of students across nearly 100 countries, Jack is dedicated to helping musicians write and practice music more effectively.