The Art of Comping Piano Chords

Video Transcript

Now we want to talk about comping a little bit more, as playing with big bands, and larger ensembles. And a good way to think about it is like, Count Basie ran his own orchestra, and the way he approached the piano is he played very lightly but he played in between the horns, 'cause how's he going to compete with a saxophone section, a trombone section and a trumpet section. Well, if he plays in between, everybody will hear the notes in between, and then he has this contrast. Horns, piano, horns, piano. So we play very light and in between. Like, I'll give you an example. So see how sparse I am. I'm giving a lot of room for the horns. So, by leaving space and really leaving room for the other parts of the band, especially if it's a larger band, it really gives a lot of leeway and helps to bring your own personal voice into the forefront, but not take away from the other instruments. Also if you're playing piano and you're playing say with a guitarist, and you don't want to be hitting too much, if you hit a lot of rhythms like....and all these syncopations, he's going to be doing syncopations too, so it's really going to throw you off. So you want to take more of an organist's approach where you just hold down color tones, and just hold them, and let one person worry about hitting different rhythms, and one person worry about just pedaling different line tones. So, that's a couple simple ideas for approaching music when you're playing with an ensemble.

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