The Art of Comping Piano Chords

Video Transcript

Now we want to go a little bit more over the art of comping, and playing with the combos and assigning yourself different roles. You really have three main parts of harmony. You have your bass, you have your chords, and you have your melody line on top. Or so on if you have a horn player, whatever you're playing with. You can ... and it's really the balance between these three things, and you really want to, if you're not playing with a bass player, you want to make sure you really keep the bass root in there, in your chords. Or really try to voice your chords so you can hear that progression, or you really outline the three and the five and the seven. And really have strong bass movement, and you can always play bass left hand and chords right hand as well, doesn't sound as hip on some pianos. It depends on the piano you have, or if you have a Rhodes or an organ, it sounds very hip. Keyboards too. And then when you're doing something, like if you're playing with, say you're playing piano and you're playing with a guitarist, you don't want to have, if you're playing really busy and a lot of chords, he's going to be playing chords too, and it's just all these different rhythms are going to clash and make a huge cluster. So what you want to do is have one person hold like long tones or organ notes, and then the other person, you can do that just between your two hands too, have one hand hold long notes, and your other hand do hits. Another option is to play the notes in between, like, say your sax player just does a huge line and he just gave a space, put a chord in there, then he does a line again, then he has a space, put a chord in there, so, really listen in and try to fit in as logically as you can the instruments that you're playing.

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