What's That Sound, Charlie Brown?

Tue, 12/19/2017 - 10:25am
Written by ArtistWorks

Linus, Lucy, Charlie, Snoopy- gather round! ArtistWorks Jazz Piano instructor, George Whitty, has a seasonal tune that'll be music to your cartoon ears. 

George is getting his ArtistWorks school into the holiday spirit by teaching a familiar beat: The Charlie Brown Theme Song.

Lick Of The Month!

Wed, 07/27/2016 - 5:49pm
Written by GeorgeWhitty
Topics: jazz piano

Time for another lick of the month to add to your vocabulary!  This one is set over an F7 chord and is kind of a unique example of a very specific thing, something we talk about in our lessons if you've gotten that far.  Here's the lick;  play it over an F in the root (or add in our F7 guide tones, A and Eb) and have a listen.  Pretty convoluted ine, with a lot of notes that are outside of an F7 scale.  See if you can figure out what's going on with it;  sounds more or less like classic bebop, no?:

 

 

See it?  What the deal is with this month's lick is that it's made up of nothing but approach patterns, something that's actually amazingly easy to do.  It starts out on a G, then the next 3 notes approach the Eb on beat 3 (this is our double-chromatic from above to chromatic to below app. pattern), the next 3 target the C (double chromatic from below to note from above), the next 3 target the A on beat 3 of bar 2 (chromatic from above to double-chromatic from below) and the next 3 notes target the F in bar 3 (chromatic from below to double-chromatic from above).  So we've used all 4 of our approach patterns to build a nice little curvy line without using any other material.  Have fun, pick some notes to target and create a line like this of your own!

Best Digital Piano Sound

Wed, 10/21/2015 - 10:46am
Written by GeorgeWhitty
I have been in the trenches with digital pianos since I bought my first Ensoniq Mirage in, I think, 1986.  It featured a whopping FOUR SECONDS of memory and had some screwy little 8-bit floating point sampling scheme.  It was kind of awful, but Mitch Forman sure played the crap out of it!  Things evolved;  in the ‘90s I played the Emu Proformance piano module, which was actually really great for what it was:  a 2 megabyte (approximately 12 seconds of stereo samples, I think) module that played pretty well.  Then came the Gigapiano, this giant 650 meg piano sample in Gigastudio, the big PC-based sampler;  couldn’t play jazz on it but boy did it sound like a Thomas Newman score with the sustain pedal down. 
 
I was never a fan of the Ivory pianos until they released the Italian Grand;  I heard it at the NAMM show and bought it on the spot.