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2-handed Piano

Discussion in 'Tips, Tricks & Talk' started by Rohann van Rensburg, Aug 28, 2018.

  1. #1 Rohann van Rensburg, Aug 28, 2018
    Hey all,

    So Mike has mentioned in a class or two that reducing an orchestral piece to a two-handed playable piece is a bad idea because it generally doesn't represent the simple process used to come up with the original piano piece.

    However, he does play a lot of JW and others on piano, so: how does one get there? Is it a matter of having the piano sketch available, or is one able to reduce a piece to its essence after some practice? I've been transcribing orchestra and piano pieces, but getting my own basic piano sketches fleshed out into a longer, varied piece feels difficult, and it seems as though having access to that "essence" is rather useful in this regard.
     
  2. #2 Mike Verta, Aug 29, 2018
    John's a seasoned, fantastic, session piano player - his ideas are easy to take back to piano because it's clearly where they start. I don't play JW reductions - I play pretty much what he played when he wrote it; which is profoundly different.

    If you are having trouble extending your pieces, it's because you have a limited vocabulary, and/or aren't saying anything with depth to plumb. We can modulate a piece for a week straight with one hand - two hands has nothing to do with it. Two hands gives you some voicing options, but you have access to countless chordal developments with 5 fingers alone. But you have to know those developments/words - that's your vocabulary. And, again, if your thesis statement is, "I like traffic lights," you're going to have a hard time keeping people riveted for any length of time. Knowing which ideas are most develop-worthy is almost impossible to teach, but not to learn, in time.

    If by "fleshing out" you mean orchestrating, you don't want to be doing that anyway - orchestration is not a substitute for development - it's vertical, and is actually ice skating uphill. You still have to go to point one and make the developments musical, and THEN examine them to see the orchestration hidden within.
     
  3. #3 Rohann van Rensburg, Aug 29, 2018
    Last edited: Aug 29, 2018
    Thanks. That makes sense re: Williams. I suppose piano skill makes this much easier to spot? Most of the greats in film and history tended to be piano/keyboard players.

    Re: Extending pieces. Definitely true, my vocabulary is something I'm trying to build daily. I hadn't thought of focusing on chording with one hand, I'll start working with that.

    Regarding vocabulary building:
    What I mean by "fleshing out" is more understanding how the orchestral version, including melody and harmony, was built out from a simpler piano piece without actually getting it under my fingers and playing it. When transcribing it's typically a note at a time, or a stab at a chord/voicing and then filling it out. I can pick out the melody and see what it does over time, and can analyze the harmony and structure, but doing this in reverse for my own piece (piano to orchestra) seems hard to learn without doing some version of "simple piano version" for pieces I'm transcribing.

    For instance, this is what I think of when I think of a complex piano arrangement of a particular piece (just the first minute or so):


    In essence, the melody is quite straight forward, but the song manages to stay interesting without developing the melody a great deal (it goes 45 seconds without really adding variation into the melody, instead just building harmonically and teasing the B-section melody, etc). Some pieces like this that are more simply structured, harmonically driven, or atmospheric, tend to maintain interest without a ton of obvious melodic development, and I find this difficult to visualize when piano writing in an overly simple manner, as i.e. playing the bare-bones melody of this piece for 45 seconds feels rather boring.
     
    Paul T McGraw likes this.
  4. #4 Mike Verta, Aug 30, 2018
    Last edited: Aug 31, 2018
    That's because the bare-bones version of a piece on piano isn't just the melody and/or melody/chords. The bare-bones piano version is just always playing the one essential aspect/element of the piece. For example, let's say you have a melody which starts out melody in right hand with pounding chords in the left hand. But the next section should feel completely different - it adds some soaring string lines on top for a sort-of flying feel. The piano version of this section would drop the left hand chords (even though they'll continue in the final) and switch that left hand to melody while the right hand approximates the soaring string figures on top. Perhaps the player has to pedal tone a bass note or something to help it not feel totally weird.

    The point is that what we're playing/writing is always the focus point, not just the melody or chords. This is how Williams does it - how we all do it, probably. Because we only have two hands. :) At any given point, figures may come in and drop out but so long as we're always capturing the flavor, then we know what it's orchestration should be in the end.
     
    Rohann van Rensburg likes this.
  5. #5 Rohann van Rensburg, Aug 31, 2018
    Ah, right! So the questions is: when you talk about not playing reductions of pieces, do you instead encourage the idea of finding the "essence" of a piece you've transcribed and playing that, or would you avoid this altogether and simply transcribe?

    I'm wondering if not doing this with what I've learned is contributing toward me tending towards always sticking to "melody/chords".
     
  6. #6 Mike Verta, Aug 31, 2018
    I'd avoid it altogether and transcribe, for sure.

    And sticking to "melody/chords" isn't a bad thing - it's a perfectly good place to develop developmental skills. It's just that through transcription (and in other ways) we gain new philosophies and learn new ways of expressing our ideas. If we find ourselves saying "this piece would be interesting if only I could change the sounds up," then it's not inherently an interesting piece.
     
    Rohann van Rensburg likes this.
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