Stops & Glissandos in Funk Piano

Video Transcript

Hi. My name is Jonathon Wilson on behalf of expertvillage.com. We're learning how to play an advanced funk groove on the piano. Last time, we looked at a pretty dramatic variation on the rhythms and patterns that we have built on in the first few lessons. This time, let's do something a little bit simpler. In the 70's, a lot of funk bands had a horn section and it was really common for the horn section to just hit a big chord on the downbeat and then do what's called a fall, where they all sort of play the note and then drop down to basically random notes, but they fall down. And you can kind of simulate the same thing on the piano with a glissando, which is where you play a chord and then slide down the keys. This works great in the context of our funk groove, as long as you put it in kind of in the right place. You're playing along and then you want to just have a big break. You can hit a chord with both hands and then gliss down with that right hand. Subtlety, you don't want to slide through this thing with a lot of weight. It's a light kind of thing. You do that and it's a great place to just build a hold or to add a place where we can put in some little solo patterns, which we'll get to later. So let's just look at some real simple examples of this. Slowly, with the metronome, so you can kind of hear how they work. Alright, not much to that, it's pretty easy to do. Some things to keep in mind, there's a variety of techniques you can use when you're doing that glissando. Some people play the chord with their right hand and use the nail of their thumb to sort of slide down the keys like that. Other people, myself included, I tend to play the chord with my right hand and then use the face, the left face of my pointer finger, and sort of slide across the keys that way. I'll tell you what though, if you get pretty aggressive with that, I've definitely bled on some piano keys doing that one, especially if the keys are sharp. So be careful. But find a technique that works for yourself. I like this one because I've got more control over how hard I hit the keys as I'm sliding down. Work it out; you'll find something that works. Okay, so now, let's hear that same thing, over the drums, kind of a normal groove. We'll just play our grove and then throw in some of those hits on the downbeat with sort of right hand glissandos. It sounds like this. Okay. So that's really, really not very complicated as long as you master the glissando technique and get that nice and subtle. It's just a great way that you can put in a complete break and add in a little bit of texture that's sort of unique and sounds a little bit different with that glissando. If you're playing in front of live people, those things are always crowd-pleasers, everybody likes to see somebody slide down the piano. So, those are great techniques to use and will lead us nicely into some of the things we're going to talk about next, which are right hand solo patterns. Those holds that we lead with our glissandos are great places to add little right hand solo licks in the big spaces that we're leaving. So we'll do that next.

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