All language subtitles for The BEST Way to Learn Piano as a Music Producer

Let me know if this sounds familiar at all.

You've been learning piano for a few months

and you've kinda kept it separate from your music making

until you get good enough at piano

to be able to use it to make music.

Then one day you're making music

and you've made a sick drum track

and you're like, fuck, I need some chords

but I don't really wanna sample anymore

because I've been practicing piano.

How hard could this beat?

You see the keyboard in the corner of your eye,

you move towards it, your hands descend upon the keys

and bullshit.

Hang on, chords were a little bit ambitious

for the first time.

Let's just try a quick melody in the right hand.

Bullshit.

Everything you do sounds terrible.

You have no idea where to start,

and you end up deciding, fuck it,

this whole piano thing, it's gonna take years,

and you quit.

That was me every three months for like three or four years.

And one of my favorite producer YouTubers

just committed to learning the piano,

and I can see this becoming him if he's not careful.

And it's not because we just need to work a bit harder.

Merry fucking Christmas.

It's simply because the traditional techniques

used to learn piano

great for people who want to learn to play other people's songs but absolutely

terrible for people who want to learn to make their own. For that we need something

different and I think I found it. This is Bob. He's been playing piano for 15

years and he sounds like this. Now by contrast about the most impressive thing

that I can play is this. Now to be fair to myself I've only been learning piano

on and off for a few years but I don't think that's the biggest difference

between us. If you asked Bob to write a song on the piano, he'd probably shit himself,

but if you instead asked him to learn this, he could probably do that in a couple hours.

Now if you gave me a week to learn that, I don't even think I'd be able to do it, but

it only took me a few hours to write this. And this. And this. And this.

but look at all the time you wasted riding your ride in your

and that's just down to exactly how we learned to play the piano. bobs classically trained which

means that every bit of effort he put in every week for like 10 plus years was all going towards

the goal of playing really difficult pieces written by great composers really really well

And I did the exact same thing. I learned violin for 10 years, but despite 10 years of practice,

I can't write a melody on my violin for shit. When I want a string part, I literally write it

on piano, then I'll go get my violin and record it in later. Now, since 90% of people just want

to learn how to play their favorite songs, 90% of tutorials are just going to teach that skill

set. It explains why it's so easy for people like us to get lost in the sea of tutorials,

learning things that we don't even need. It explains why it's so easy for people like us

to quit after a few months because we're just not getting what we need out of these tutorials.

I've tried learning keys in the past, you know, I went and got a little course online, followed it

for a week or two, and then I gave up. Now I would love to be able to play as well as Bobcann.

I really would, but if I could only choose one, I know what's more important to me.

What's more important to me is being able to sit down and write the chords which fit perfectly

with that drum loop that I've made, or to sit down and capture a feeling of nostalgia that I have,

or to sit down and listen to a Frank Ocean song, hear the chords, understand why they work,

and then transplant it into my music. In my opinion, most of the battle as an artist is

knowing what to play, and if we never develop the skill, we're gonna sit down at the piano

with all the piano chops in the world and have no idea what to play. And somehow, we still expect

to, even though all we've ever done is listen to someone else who tells us what notes to play.

And to do that, we need a methodology that's gonna teach us the language of music,

not just how to read out something someone else has written but fuck me a methodology that teaches

language and syntax and all the technical shit that's gotta sound technical and super soul crushing

right? Actually no. No it doesn't. It's jazz. Now I know what you're thinking oh my god I've heard

jazz is super difficult I'm never gonna be able to play that relax I'm not a jazz musician. What

I'm gonna talk about is the absolute basics it's all I've needed to make the best music I've ever

made. If you weren't thinking that you're probably thinking,

Sir, I like pop music, I fucking hate jazz. Relax. In the same way you can divide

classical music and classical training as like a method for learning an

instrument, we're going to divide the sound of jazz and the jazz methodology

and way of learning an instrument into two separate things. The method is what

we are going to focus on. Now why is the jazz method the solution to all my

problems? Well, before jazz was invented in the late

19th century, pretty much the only way to learn an instrument was through classical

training which had one clear goal. Get good enough to be able to read and play the stuff

that all dead white guys had written hundreds of years ago. The musician was just the vessel

through which the composer was heard. And it kind of mirrored the times, like this was

the time of kings and queens and shit. Like you were just an atom in the world of a monarch

and as a musician an atom in the world of a composer. Fast forward to when jazz came out

and it wasn't just the sound of it that caused riots, it was the fact that the musicians

were literally making shit up as they went and not relying on what composers had written.

to mention that it was black people making this also music.

Since the musicians understood the language of what they were playing, they didn't have

to rely on the composers, and for the first time in western music history, the musicians

were the composers.

Now this is perfect for us producers and artists because it means that we don't need to reinvent

the wheel when we're trying to learn the piano.

We can just take the basic foundations of the jazz method and apply it to any type of music

that we like.

It can help us understand why the chords and melodies in a specific genre or from a specific

to sound the way they do and then help us to write stuff like that. There's an

entire side of YouTube with musicians who talk about this shit all the time but

I think one of the reasons that the producers have a lot of the time never

heard of this is because everyone's so petrified of music theory and spoilers

if you want to make it to the promised land you're gonna have to learn some

music theory. Okay so if the first half of this video is to try and convince you

of this approach I want the second half to be to try and clarify what it

actually looks like by showing you the skills that you'll want to work towards

in this approach. They'll take a while to master but as soon as you get on the path towards developing

them I think you'll approach music completely differently. I want you to kind of treat this

video like a glossary of like where you want to get to and then find resources around it to get you

there. Just quickly I'm not a piano teacher and I'm not going to teach you piano. This is just

the approach that's helped an artist and producer make the best music of his life. All right let's

do it. Part zero, foundations. I'm not even going to call it part one because these are foundational

and you're probably going to learn them anyway and you can't skip them, so let's get straight in.

So I'm going to split it into two parts. You've got your basic piano skills and then you've got

your basic music theory. For basic piano skills, these are basically the things that you are going

to learn anyway from piano or like a beginner piano course. You should be comfortable doing

things like playing a major scale in a few different keys, playing the triads in each of those keys

with a maybe with a bass note in the left hand and then maybe a few inversions and maybe even a

a couple of little basic songs.

Basically what I'm saying is I want you to get to a point

where you've been at the piano for a few weeks

or a few months and it doesn't feel completely foreign to you.

Now as for the basic music theory stuff,

people tend to skip it and you can kind of get away

with that if you're just gonna play other people's songs

but if you wanna make your own, you just can't.

End of story.

I'll link Andrew Huang's 30 minute video

where he goes over all the basic stuff for music theory.

That's pretty much got everything

but I just wanna highlight three key areas

that I think are most important for us going forward.

The first one's the major scale.

It's the most basic thing in music,

and everything builds off it.

So you need to understand it at a pretty good level.

So things like scale degrees,

the distance between each of the scale degrees,

and then for example, if I asked you

like what scale starts on the sixth scale degree,

you would need to instantly be able

to answer that pretty easily.

The second one is the diatonic triads

in the major scale.

So that's just basically knowing what quality

each chord is at each different scale degree.

So that'd be major, minor, or half diminished.

And you probably wanna know why.

So the third one is slightly optional,

But once you get to the first actual skill in this video,

you're probably gonna need it anyway.

And that's basic functional harmony.

And what I mean by that is just knowing

what each of the different chords

in from the different scale degrees,

what they feel like and where they generally wanna pull.

So for example, this is a little bit crude,

but knowing that the five chord

pretty much always wants to pull to the one chord

or knowing that the six chord feels like an alternative home

to the one chord, just slightly sadder and like minor.

Obviously, huge generalizations

But you get the idea.

Now, I might have said a lot of words

that you have no idea what they mean.

And that's okay.

This video and me saying those words

is so that you can look them up and learn as you progress.

So moving on from the basics, in my opinion,

the traditional method of learning to play

other people's songs requires two skills.

First is piano dexterity,

which is physically the ability to move your fingers

where you want to move them.

And then second one is the ability to read.

So knowing that this is supposed to sound like this.

So if we instead want to be able to make our own music, we've got to remove that second

skill and replace it with two new skills.

The first skill allows us to listen and get ideas from other people's music, and the second

skill allows us to use those ideas to make our own music.

So I did this segment before, but I did it with a Billie Eilish song, the top song on

the charts.

And then realised that it's definitely copyrighted.

So instead I've gone onto YouTube and found just the first no copyright music thing I

I could hear it and I have never heard it before.

I'm gonna press play and we'll see if we can work out the chords.

I

yeah it's it's kind of funny it was that song because i've heard that song before i

swear it's not copyright free but we'll see, won't we? So what i did there is just worked

out the basic triads but given a bit more time i could probably do it with the melodies and

more complex stuff and there are people who are so much better at this than me but i think that

the basic triads and being able to do it like that is all you need to completely transform

the way you make music. If you can identify what the different chord changes are in music you like,

you can start to transplant that into your own music. And it's also a snowball effect, like

as soon as you start being able to do this, every time you're listening to music, you'll be able

to listen for those changes, and you'll just continually get better and better and better.

And even if your actual piano playing is lagging behind, if you can hear what's going on in music

that you like, you can still kind of do the same thing with MIDI. I just can't overstate how important

of a skill this was for me to learn. In literally five years of making music, this was the single

biggest paradigm shift I've ever had, and it only took me a few weeks to get started. I just

didn't know it existed at the beginning. If you have no idea how to write a good chord progression

and have no idea how anyone does it, you need this skill. If you can already understand some

chord theory, but you hate the chord progressions you write, you need this skill. And if you are

a whiz on the piano who can play incredible pieces but still can't write for shit, you need this skill.

Okay, so we've done some listening, we've got some cool musical ideas.

How do we make something with it?

["I'm a

never have been able to come up with those ideas without just flowing on the piano.

I'm seriously hesitant to tell you like how I do this because I'm not very good

and basic jazz improv lessons are probably a way better place to start

but basically all I'm trying to do there is hit chord tones which means in my right hand I'm trying

kind of hit a third, a fifth, or a seventh,

or sometimes the root of whatever chord

I'm playing in my left hand,

or whatever chord is already being played

by like a backing track or something.

After you've watched some of those basic tutorials,

you could get started by using a jazz backing track,

or you could go and find your favorite song,

transcribe the chords, because you've now got that skill,

and then improvise over it with your right hand.

You could also do the other way,

and then transcribe the melody,

and then improvise some chords underneath it.

That's slightly different as well.

And if you start to improv even a little bit,

you might just look up and realize,

holy shit, this is exactly why I wanted

to learn the piano in the first place.

You're here, you just gotta keep going.

Now I get it, those are two really big skills

and they can seem super scary right now,

but if you've already committed to learning the piano,

you've probably already accepted

that it's gonna take a lot of time and a lot of effort.

All this is doing is shifting what you are focusing on

during that effort.

And at least for me, shifting focus towards these skills

rather than just learning a bunch of songs

has taken the exact same amount of effort,

but it's completely changed the way that I make music.

And because they're skills,

it means that if you follow the traditional piano learning path,

you're not just gonna magically one day be good at them.

You've got to have practiced them.

So you might as well start now.

So where does jazz come back into all of this?

Well, apart from those two skills being fundamental to it,

I'd kinda say that as soon as you can,

I default towards searching for basic jazz piano tutorials

rather than just the basic piano tutorials.

And I think that that's because that they will waste

a lot less of your time

because everything they do is gonna be focused

around getting to a point which is kinda like this.

When LJ tried to learn guitar,

obviously he had to start with some basic chords.

One, two, three.

But since he liked slightly spicier chords,

there was no way these were ever gonna work in his music.

All right, that sounds wack.

And I'm sure it made him feel like it was gonna have

to be years until he was actually able to play

anything that he would use in his music.

And I don't think it has to be that way.

So what does my piano practice routine look like?

This year it's comprised of two parts.

So I've had the technique part

and then I've had the songs part.

The technique part I've taken

from this one super long video by Piano with Johnny.

It's been a godsend because I've just been able

to work through all the 12 keys

and get really good at the basics of jazz piano

if you can even call it that.

The fact that it's focused on shell voicing seventh chords

has been an absolute game changer

because it means that I can actually use them in my music

because they sound quite good.

And the second part, which has been songs,

I've basically been transcribing

some basic jazz standards by ear

and checking my transcription with people online.

I thought it'd be a lot harder to,

and it's been okay, I've been going all right so far.

And then I've been practicing doing some improv

over the sections which are built for improv.

So yeah, this is a very niche video,

but I've made it because if it can reach

that one person who needs it most,

it could be the absolute game changer

that they need for their music.

But maybe you've gotten to the end of this video

realized you don't actually need help with chords and melodies you actually need to make your drums

hit a bit better um if that's you i've made a video on what i think is the biggest thing holding

back beginner producers from making amazing drums just click it i'll put it somewhere here nice i

want to one take this i want to one take this that was the take let's go