Are you scared to start using improvisation in your piano teaching? I’ve totally been there. 7 or 8 years ago I had basically never sat down at the piano without a piece of paper in front of my face. It would not have even occurred to me. But then I discovered improvisation. I found out…
piano improvisation
How to Host a Creativity Showcase Recital
When you’re teaching improvisation and composition in your piano studio, shouldn’t your performance opportunities reflect that? Often the creative stuff gets left out of recitals but shouldn’t we show off those skills too? I believe we should. Every year I host a creativity showcase recital and in this article I want to give you some…
Exploring Scales and the Circle of Fifths with Improvisation
Improvisation is one of the best ways to teach students about keys, scales and chord patterns. In fact, I believe in teaching scales through improvisation first – before fingering, before metronomes, before checklists. Let me show you how I do it. It was years into practising scales when I finally understood what they were for….
CKQC039: Simple but effective solo improvisation for beginners
This is another pattern from Forrest Kinney’s fabulous Create First 1. Every pattern in these books has a duet and a corresponding solo version. I like to start with the duet so my student can get a feel for the improvisation and explore a little, and then we work on the solo improvisation. This…
CKQC032: ‘Sunrise’ and ‘Moonrise’ improvisation solos for beginners
These two patterns are the very first ones in Create First Book 1. Both the duet and solo options are simple and beautiful. Although we always do improvisation at my studio from the beginning, I’ve been working to get my students to do more improvisation solos. Several of my students even did solo improv at…
CKQC012: Simple and effective piano improvisation for beginners
As an experiment during our overlapping piano buddy time, I’ve been simplifying some of the improvisation accompaniments from Create First by Forrest Kinney. This has worked out really, really well and it’s quite easy to adapt for any student level. In this video, you’ll see the bare bones arrangement of ‘For the Joy’ that I’ve…
Improvise Your Way to Melodic Minor Scales Success
I think the clue to why I think improvisation is the route to success is in the name…melodic minor scales. Am I right? What are scales for if not for creating melodies? If your answer was for teaching discipline, then you should probably hop off here. Nothing wrong with discipline but that’s not the primary…