Hangs in Funk Piano Technique

Video Transcript

Hi. My name is Jonathon Wilson on behalf of Expert Village.com, and we're learning how to play an advanced funk groove on the piano. Last time, we were looking at ways to add some rhythmic variation and surprise by putting in what we were calling stab breaks at the end of our normal groove. We're going to do the same kind of thing, but instead of stab breaks, we're doing something I like to call a hang. Where you're playing along, your little rolling groove that you've got and then all of a sudden you just sort of play this long chord out of nowhere that just sort of hangs there. And I particularly like to put this one half step above wherever you're headed. So, for example, if we're playing C-7 and we're about to play F-7, you can hang on F-sharp 7 to just sort of set there and then it'll kind of settle down into that F-7. And when you're done playing F-7 for a while, you can hang on C-sharp 7, which leads you nicely back into C-7. Okay? Very slowly, I'm just going to play the rolling groove and then examples of the hangs. I'll do both chords just so you can hear how it sounds with the metronome, nice and slowly. This also shows you potential voicing?s that you can use for these particular chords. Okay, so to keep in mind while you're playing this kind of a pattern, you definitely want these hangs to stick out from that rolling groove. Just like the stab breaks that we did last time. We're rolling along in our groove, those hangs should just pop out of nowhere and everything should sort of freeze in terms of motion of your groove. And it just sticks out, it's this great kind of a, it's a hang. It's just like you've thrown a basketball up and then it falls back down and bounces again. That's the kind of mental image you want to have when you play these things. So, let's take a little crack at it, full speed, with the drums and I'll just put in some of these same kind of hangs that we're talking about. Okay. So that's the hang at full speed. A handy little technique. Again, these are things that you can use to add variety into an already just kind of a rolling groove. You're cooking along and you just want to throw in something that is a little bit surprising. This is another example of something that will do that for you.

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