Piano Lesson - The Piano is a Drum Set

Too many pianists seem to have forgotten that their instrument is classified as part of the percussion family. They spend so much energy and focus on the minute details, such as which note goes where, that they lose (or never get) the visceral connection with their instrument, the relaxed physicality that drummers have.

It’s no mystery why drummers tend to make the best jazz pianists. Listen to the great Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba. He was originally a drummer, and you can always hear it in his playing. To be able to spontaneously craft beautiful melodies on the piano while functioning also as a percussionist is just one of the many tightropes you must learn to walk as a musician.

In the following metaphor I have used absolutes to make appoint strongly. I’ve minimized the important of individual notes in favor of the larger elements of rhythm and shape. Certainly this is an injustice to a more complex truth. Undeniably, tension and release, occurring as one melody note moves to the next, is a vital and emotional part of music.

However, much of the emotional content in music is to be found in its larger elements: the rhythms and the contours of the line as opposed to the individual notes.

If you want to express your emotions freely, you need to be able to focus your attention on those elements. And you can only do that when the smaller, mechanical tasks have been “hard-wired” into your hands. For instance, shifting scales as the harmony changes is not a creative act. It is largely a bookkeeping issue that should be delegated to your hands – it should become automatic.

In order to thoroughly program your hands to handle the mechanical aspects of playing, you need to spend years focusing on them – working out note-choice, fingering, and technique minutiae. And you need to know theory: the task of analyzing a tune for scale-choice (another non-creative act) should feel automatic. But all of this disciplined detail work is a means to an end, and you’ll progress much more quickly if you have a clear image of that end.

Image an odd-looking keyboard with keys, just two touch-sensitive drumheads where the keys used to be.

The drumheads are digital and there is also a built-in computer that can instantly analyze chord to determine the most appropriate improvising scales. You simply insert a card that has a recording of your style of playing, so the computer can adjust its scale analysis to match your style.

Before you play, you insert the sheet music into the data slot. During your solo you tap rhythms on the right drumhead, shifting your right and left to indicate higher or lower pitch. While your right hand is busy tapping, you comp on the other drumhead with your left hand –again, just by tapping the rhythm you want. The computer selects one of your favorite voicings for each chord. Your only concern is the rhythm.

Playing this piano is almost as easy as playing a set of bongo drums. You can express your rhythmic impulses freely through the instrument without the usual complications of being in the right key, making transitions from scale to scale, or searching for the right voicing.

Do you want to buy this piano? Sorry, it hasn’t been invented yet!The point of this metaphor is to get you to envision what being a pianist is like after you’ve learned all your theory, scales, voicings, and other structure thoroughly. It’s a way for you to imagine the physical, loose, big-movement, conductor-like, drummer-like way of being at the instrument. It’s to help you keep that end vision in mind so that you don’t end up boxing yourself in. And it’s to remind you that the piano is a percussion instrument.