Rhythmic Piano

One new thing that's been going on is that I've been exploring the piano as a rhythm instrument, as you can see by the very basic blues I've been posting (I've also been working on some more intricate composed pieces, but they're copyrighted so obviously I can't post them).

I'm finding that this rhythmic piano practice has been really awesome for cultivating my physical/kinesthetic/rhythmic relationship to the instrument, to where I sometimes feel like I'm dancing with the piano. It's also bringing out subtler issues with my sense of timing in general, getting the music to swing nicely, that whole thing about playing sub-beats which are not evenly subdivided like when you're playing straight 4/4 time.

This is something I had also been working on in my Irish music, where a standard double jig (in 6/8 time) has 3 unevenly-weighted sub-beats to each of the two beats per measure. it takes lots of careful listening and imitation of good traditional players to get it that uneven beat subdivision to sound authentic. Now on piano, I'm exploring the whole issue of playing with different amounts of swing, seeing what sounds better with which part of which tune, and also just working to control my degree of swing -- I tend to want to swing too much, or not at all, so I need to work on those subtler gradations.

I've also been doing some pure rhythm practice, working out of _The Rhythm Bible_ by Dan Fox (I wonder if that's the same Dan Fox that arranged the Beatles songbook for easy piano I just bought...). When I was working from this in the fall, I was working on the basic rhythms in the front section, but this time I've started working on the first section on syncopation. I'm not sure why, but I find syncopation to be great fun. As I mentioned in another post, I've been working by tapping a steady rhythm in the left hand and the syncopated pattern from the book in the right.

What I want to do at some point is to get the rhythm book in the same location as the piano, and work on turning some of these syncopated patterns into little snatches of (laborious) semi-improvisation (what notes might fit this rhythm?). But my habit is to do my rhythmic practice sitting in my comfy chair in my sunny nook, and my DP lives upstairs in my room, where I can practice in peace & privacy.