Tremolo for Funk Piano Solos

Video Transcript

Hi. My name is Jonathon Wilson on behalf of Expert Village.com. We're learning to play an advanced funk groove on the piano. And so far, we've looked at a nice little groove with the bass line and some coping patterns. And we've added some ways to add variety into that groove. We've built places where we can have holds that are just sort of empty. Now we want to fill those holds up with some easy little right hand solo patterns. We're going to talk a little bit about the kinds of techniques that you can use to play over a funk groove like this. You know this whole thing is a solo in the context that we're doing it. But these are little sections that sound more like a piano solo. We're going to start with a real classic lick, it's actually a blues lick, but it works great over this funk groove. It's just a tremolo between the 5 and the flat 7 in our C chord, that would be between G and B-flat. I'm sure you've heard this a million times. Every blues player in the world plays this lick. But it's a great place to start because it's not very hard and it sounds great. We'll do it very slowly over the metronome. With a tremolo, it's hard to play slowly. I'm going to intentionally play it kind of slowly. When you do it up to speed, you'll want to get this to be a nice little shake. You'll see what I mean when we do it full speed. Here it is slowly. Okay, so some things to keep in mind when you're doing this, just in terms of technique, when you do a tremolo like this, it's not about your fingers. It's definitely not something where you're sitting there pressing the muscles of your fingers back and forth in order to get this tremolo to happen. It's definitely more of a wrist action. Think of turning a doorknob if you can. You kind of want to kind of stiffen your fingers in to position. It doesn't really matter which fingers you use. I like to leave my thumb and my third or fourth or second. You can really get away with anything. But the trick is, to sort of get them into position and then just turn that wrist, okay, so that you've got a nice, that's the motion you want. You can sort of get a nice tremolo going there that's very relaxed and your arm and fingers won't get tired if you learn that technique. Okay? So let?s try it up to speed over the bass line, with the drums. All together, it's going to sound like this. Okay. It's really not very complicated. The whole trick to that is getting that nice fluid wrist action going that let's you do the tremolo without a lot of work. It should almost play itself if you're doing it correctly. Next time, we're going to talk about some other variations you can use with your right hand for solo patterns. We're going to borrow some chapters from guitar players.

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