Step up a “Ladder” to Build a New Tune

by Scott Houston

For those of you who have never seen my TV show, nor know anything about the style of piano playing I teach, here is my life’s work in a nutshell: to get as many warm bodies as humanly possible off the sidelines and into the game of recreational music making on keyboard instruments. I do that by eliminating one of the biggest bottlenecks beginning players face, which is becoming a good enough note reader to play interesting sounding music using fully-notated, traditional grand staff scores.

Instead, I espouse using the type of notation that pros use when playing all styles of nonclassical music—lead sheets. Lead sheets consist only of a single note melody line in the treble clef, with chord symbols above the staff. They give you the important things you need to know about a tune, the melody and the harmony, yet they do it while tossing aside about 90% of the difficulty of reading fully notated sheet music. Only one note at a time, no bass clef to worry about—you get the picture.

However, removing most of the notation also removes an arranger’s explicit directions on how to play the tune. The reality is that, in most nonclassical sheet music, an arranger (not the composer) put in the notes you see. They probably used the information found in a lead sheet (or they figured out their own lead sheet by ear) to tell them the “DNA” (melody and harmony) of the song. They then “fleshed out” that information to their own liking and explicitly notated it in the full grand staff notation typical of piano sheet music.

The beauty of reading lead sheets as opposed to fully notated sheet music is that you are free to make your own arrangement of a tune. It turns the exercise more into creating your own version of a tune and less into reproducing someone else’s idea of a tune.

But aye, there’s the rub … what to create? For many people addicted to playing only what is written, stepping into the abyss of “make it up yourself” is terribly daunting.

My suggestion is to use what I call a “ladder” approach to build a nice version of a tune. It is the way I approach teaching tunes on my 1-on-1 Series DVDs and it has helped thousands of people get started in this style.

Although it is way beyond the scope of this article to get into those steps in detail, hopefully slicing up the entire task of playing a tune into more definable goals will give you a mental “ladder” of your own to begin climbing.
Have fun!