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Pop Keyboard Sing and Play
Singing and playing your favourite songs on the keyboard is a very useful skill that you should develop. It allows you to be able to perform the songs that you love to sing, and also gives you the ability to sing your own song compositions and accompany yourself on the keyboard! This makes it easier for budding songwriters to write new and wonderful songs just by utilizing various sing and play techniques for the song genres that they write.
Before you can sing and play well on the keyboard, you would need to understand and master the following points:
- Chords and Chord Progressions
- Playing Patterns
- Coordination of Sing and Play
- Dynamics and Feel
Basically, a chord is a group of 3 notes. The most basic chord would be a major chord, which is made up of the 1st, 3rd and 5th note of the major scale. The most common major chord would be the C major chord, which is made up of C, E and G notes on the keyboard or piano. We might also commonly refer to these notes as Doh, Mi and Soh when using the solfege scale.
A chord progression is a series of chords in consecutive succession that create a certain musical effect or allow our song melodies to stand out. A chord progression can consist of both major and minor chords, or even consist of more exotic chords like augmented or diminished chords, or even 6th or 7th chords too.
Once we are familiar with chords and chord progressions, we would have to decide what sort of a playing pattern would be suitable for which type of song. For example, a straightforward playing pattern (Left hand playing the bass note and Right hand playing the chord regularly every beat) would be suitable for most ballad songs, whereas a more rhythmic pattern would be suitable for uptempo songs with more groove.
Of course, it is sing AND play, so we would have to coordinate our singing with our playing. This is where our playing takes a back seat to our singing, since we would sing the lyrics or melody of the song, and we play the background accompaniment to support the melody, using the appropriate chords for that song
Finally, we would need to vary the dynamics or the LOUD and the SOFT when we sing and play, so as to achieve the desired effect in our audience. For example, during the chorus, we usually sing and play louder since it is the most exciting part of the song, whereas during the ending part of the song, we tend to play softer since we need to wrap the entire song up nicely.
These 4 points are only the basic points for Pop Keyboard Sing and Play, and serve as a summary guide to the complete set of skills one would learn when one undergoes a Pop Keyboard Sing and Play Programme.
Learn Other Lesson
- Pop Singing or Pop Vocals
- Pop Songwriting (coming soon...)
- Music Arrangement (coming soon...)