Jon Batiste Answers Piano Questions

[mellow jazz melody]

Hello.

[mellow jazz melody]

I'm Jon Batiste.

And I'm here today to answer your questions

from the internet.

[mellow jazz melody]

This is Piano Support.

[mellow jazz melody]

[intense groove music]

Meelkerr,

All major keys are created equal, but Eb is the best.

[upbeat groove music]

That's not a question, but I agree.

It's funny you say that, [plays arpeggio] Meel,

because Eb is my favorite key.

Listen to the way that you can make it moan.

[plays flat chords]

[plays flat mellow melody]

Eb is different from other keys because,

if you want technical explanation, it has three flats.

[plays scale]

But the tonality of Eb, it's a brown shade

that really creates a sense of warmth.

Db feels like Mother Earth,

and then Eb feels like the tree

that's coming from the ground,

so it's the roots that are dug into the soil,

so there's a bit of a aspirational quality to it.

Whereas if you listen to Db,

[plays flat chord]

it's home, womb space.

[plays flat chord]

But then we go to E Flat, [plays flat chord],

it's still grounded, but, [plays arpeggios]

you know, it's like...

♪ Come with me ♪

♪ Come and see ♪

[plays delicate cheerful arpeggios]

You know, so it's like one of my favorite keys,

because I like to keep my feet on the ground

with my eyes to the stars.

EdinKaso's question, What was the one thing

that really improved your music making?

Okay, Edwin, what's one thing

that really improves my music making is listening.

[plays mellow chord]

That's the constant thing of life, is, how do we listen?

How do we listen deeper,

how do we listen in a way that is both passive,

where we're not participating in speaking or playing,

but is also active, because we're just as engaged

as if we were speaking or playing.

So it's the thing of listening.

If you figure out how to do that, everything improves.

You practice scales, you know. [plays scale]

If you practice a scale,

or if you practice arpeggios or something, [plays arpeggio]

or if you practice playing the blues, you know,

[plays blues melody]

it's all about listening, because it's infinite.

There's infinite ways you can practice scales and arpeggios

and practice playing different styles,

and you can listen to a piece and learn something about it

every day of your life, and just, it's infinite.

So how do I listen better? How do I practice that?

Or, how did that improve?

Well, it's practicing it everywhere you are, all the time,

even when you're not playing,

especially when you're not playing.

So yeah, open the mirrors up. Go ahead, Edin, you got it.

Microburrito1, [upbeat groove music]

What's your favorite type of piano music to play?

Well, my favorite type of piano music to play is like blues.

[plays lively blues melody]

You know?

I love this sound.

It's a party.

It's love and sound.

[ends lively blues melody]

So, you know, I play that kind of music a lot.

I also like playing, you know, just some mellow kind of,

you know...

[plays sober classical melody]

You know.

[plays blues arpeggios]

You know, all kind of stuff, man.

I've been playing a lot of bebop lately.

Arguably one of the most,

if not the most sophisticated form of music ever invented,

it's the peak.

Musicians take all of the logic of counterpoint,

and all the logic of the American popular song,

and blend them together in this form of co-creation

that is [snaps fingers] lightning quick wit in music form.

[plays mellow chords]

You have melodies that are happening.

There's a rhythmic basis to bebop too

that makes it very, very distinct.

It's the two and the three, there's a lot of triplets,

and there's a lot of rhythms that are going

between eighth notes and triplets.

And you have a scale that is, [plays chromatic scale]

there's different forms of what we call bebop scales

that are made so that you can land throughout the changes

in ways that are graceful and that match the changes.

[plays chromatic scales with chord progression]

So you're doing all of this weaving and melodic construction

in the context of the rhythm section that's also doing that,

the drums are playing rhythms

and reacting to what you're playing and vice versa,

the bass is playing a walking line on every beat,

and that's a low melody.

And then the piano is creating

all of this different counterpoint

to everything that's happening, and everybody's doing that.

At least at one time, there's four people

that are creating counterpoint together.

AlphaQ984,

[upbeat groove music]

Recently my piano teacher asked me

to add more 'feel' to my playing.

Okay, so, [plays lively scale]

bebop is about feel, Alpha, you see?

We're talking about bebop.

So, [plays frenzied scale]

like you gotta have a certain kind of like,

[plays frenzied melody]

that kind of, [plays frenzied melody]

so like, [plays frenzied melody].

So that you could play that without feel like...

[plays staccato melody]

Or you could do it like [plays frenzied melody]

So it's like, it's hard to describe feel

other than rhythmic intention

and clarity of execution.

So if you wanted to talk about feel

and how to get your feel better,

start with getting your rhythm better and your execution.

And then, even like when I was just playing it,

like I'm just throwing it off right now,

even when you make a mistake, if your intention is there,

and execution is almost there, it's gonna come off better

than if you were playing all of the right notes

but it was kind of iffy rhythm.

And so, feel really starts with rhythmic intention,

and matching that level of intensity of your intention,

you know exactly how you wanna play it,

what swag you want it to come off with,

matching that with all of the right notes.

So that's what you gotta do, you know what I'm saying?

[plays frenzied melody with chord progression]

Ah.

[concludes frenzied rhythm]

Mitchmgj,

[upbeat groove music]

What's your practice routine?

How can I practice more effectively?

Document your practice.

Document your progress, [plays arpeggio]

and your observations.

Think about what you're doing

from the perspective of constructing yourself,

your building, your ideal version of you.

And you look at the things that you want to do,

[plays chord arpeggio]

and you look at the things that you can't do,

and you figure out how to bridge the gap between those

and close it a little bit each day.

And you decide, okay, these are my objectives,

that's the points that I want to reach,

and then you go after those very methodically.

And there's no such thing as failure, it's just discovery,

so you try different things.

And then obviously the fundamentals, that's the best way

to continue to improve.

To learn.

[plays arpeggio]

See, that's a C triad.

There's so much in there.

The fundamentals, every day you can just learn something

about the fundamentals of music.

Learn something about music making from reading a biography,

or sitting at the piano and just playing the C major,

'cause sometimes I would do that while I play a chord,

[plays major chord]

and I'll just sit and listen to it

with no objective other than to listen

and let it reveal something to me

that maybe I haven't heard.

Get acquainted with the instrument, and with music,

like it's a friend, like it's a part of you.

So just so much that you can do to absorb it,

just be about it, and you'll find it.

Seek and you will find.

♪ Oh, yay, yay ♪

[plays delicate melody]

[chuckles]

And then just play. Always remember to play.

[plays delicate mellow melody]

Like the child, you see?

[plays chord progression and delicate melody]

[chuckles]

Let's see.

Wow.

5120t,

[upbeat groove music]

How do you make catchy music?

Well, how do you make catchy music?

Listen to catchy music.

How do you learn how to do anything in this human form?

By absorbing the frequency,

by absorbing the energy of the thing,

you embody it, you physically absorb it,

you synthesize it within yourself,

and then you become a vessel for it.

So you have to exist within the world of the thing

that you want to become.

So music is such a manifestation of that concept,

because you can't hold music.

You can look at sheet music,

but even the notes on the page are not

the comprehensive representation of what you're hearing,

there's all kind of nuances and inflection,

and there's all types of intention behind notes

that can't be written down.

So what that means is, you can't study it

as much as it's a matter of embodying it.

Certainly you can listen and study, and there are formulas,

and formulas work,

but formulas are just representation of things

that exist on a frequency.

And if you figure out how to tap into that

and receive that frequency on a regular basis,

and you can find other people who are on that wavelength,

build a community of people who are into that too,

'cause that's how you compound the energy,

and then all of y'all are gonna start embodying it.

If you think about songwriting,

and the catchiest music of all time is often written

in a duo format or a trio format.

It's just the way it is.

Even if you think about people

who were incredible artists in their own right,

Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones,

Gambling and Huff, Rodgers and Hart,

there's always even the person

who makes the music that's catchy.

If it's like Irving Berlin or something,

it's always about finding the singer,

or the arrangement to arrange it.

Music is a communal activity, it's a communal effort.

So find your people,

and people that are on that same frequency, that wavelength,

that y'all are complimentary to each other.

And then let the ego out of the room.

The ego is great to have

so you could be confident in yourself, stand up,

play your music, da, da, da, da, da.

[plays upbeat arpeggio] It's great.

But you want to just put it to the side

and leave space in the room for God to walk in.

And that's when it's, oh, snap,

like what's happening out the speaker?

It's just getting me, oh, it's, ooh, catchy.

It's catchy.

It's catchy because you've been caught by it, oh.

Okay, AtomixAndy, [upbeat groove music]

Why do pianos have keys? What's locked?

What are the pianos hiding?

So see, this is a bit of a pun.

The piano keys, you know, [plays chord]

I would say, if you want to go all philosophical,

the pianos have keys because music is tied

into the universal divine alignment of all things,

which we see in mathematics some,

but music speaks to the unspoken within that language.

And it also speaks to the mind, to the heart and the spirit

all in one.

Each key is a key to life. [plays arpeggio]

And then you put 'em all together,

and it's like a beautiful equation of living.

So that's why people make songs and create music,

because it speaks to something that's greater than ourself,

and it's a great way to create a shared body

of our collective wisdom over time.

Generations pass on songs and melodies

and rhythms and all these things, and the piano does it all,

'cause it's actually a percussion instrument.

It's hammers in there, so it's not just keys, it's hammers,

Hammer time.

SYLOH, explain like I'm five, [upbeat groove music]

What do the pedal on the piano actually do?

How do they do it?

Okay, well it's deep, because this piano has two pedals.

The modern piano typically has three pedals.

So I'm gonna explain it in a way

where you'll have to imagine what the middle pedal does.

Each string [plays note]

[plays deaf key] has a hammer, a mallet,

that strikes the strings to create the tone.

[plays note repeatedly]

Now, there's a felt on the top of each string,

and it's a set of three strings

that create the tone of each note.

Now, if you press this, [plays note]

the pedal does all the way to the left,

what it does is it shifts the entire pedal board over

so that you're only attacking two of those strings.

So the tone becomes felted, it becomes dampened,

it's like you put a blanket on it, it's lovely,

it's a beautiful, like, check out the difference.

[plays arpeggio] This is without it,

and then you play the pedals all the way to the left,

[plays arpeggio] you hear the difference?

[plays arpeggios]

It's like a string of pearls. Okay?

The middle pedal is sustain without reverb,

so we don't have a middle pedal.

But the middle pedal is typically

what sustains whatever note you play

at the same time as you activate that pedal.

So if you play [plays chord] all of these notes,

it would sustain them all,

and then the rest that you'll play on top of it

wouldn't be sustained while that would continue to ring out.

The pedal to the right is the sustain pedal,

so as long as you hold it, everything is sustained.

[plays chord and arpeggio]

Now what that does,

because of the way that it's sustaining,

you see how it lifts every single mute,

every single felt away from the string,

so that it's not possible for it to be muted,

it sustains the whole body of the instrument.

Well, what does that do?

It also creates reverb, that's less talked about.

It sustains the notes,

but the middle pedal doesn't create reverb,

and this one does,

and that's because of the mechanism of how it happens.

So actually for me, when I think about the sustain pedal,

I think that's a misnomer,

I think it's actually the wrong name for it,

it should be the reverb pedal.

The middle pedal is the sustain pedal,

and the pedal to the left is the damper pedal,

but it has a certain sort of tonal quality to it,

so it's not really dampening, it's rounding out the edges.

When I see the sound in my mind,

it goes from a sharp pointed edge to a rounded edge,

and that's a great way of thinking about it

in your music expression.

A Reddit user asked us, [upbeat groove music]

Did Ray Charles basically

single-handedly invent soul music?

Ray Charles was the architect of it,

nobody put it together in a way that Ray did in 1959,

for instance.

He put all of the elements together,

he was the architect of it in a way that allowed for us

to have a shared language for it,

in a shared way about how we present soul music

to the world.

The elements of soul music existed,

people were singing elements of it in different forms

of our history.

Sam Cook popularized it as much as Ray Charles.

There's so many different examples of proto-soul music,

but soul music was Ray Charles.

You can't argue that Ray was the architect of it.

And I'm a son of Ray Charles. [plays blues arpeggio]

You see?

Taking those kind of chords, [plays chord] gospel chords,

[plays chord progression]

you see?

♪ Oh yeah ♪

That old, that inflection?

♪ She gimme money when I'm in need ♪

♪ Yeah, she's a kind of ♪

Like that kind of cry, feel, holler,

mixed with the jazz and the horn section.

♪ Friend indeed ♪

It's just all so brilliant.

Like that thing that we all know.

♪ Hit the road, Jack ♪

Imagine hearing that for the first time on wax.

Just like, we take it for granted now,

but just like, you know what I mean?

Like,

it's not normal.

Just, this is a whole nother. Yeah.

Yes. Single handedly, we could say that.

You can say that and be safe.

Sea_Perception_2017,

[upbeat groove music]

What are the essential piano repertoires

that every pianist should learn?

That's a deep question.

Because this piano,

it exists in so many musical traditions.

It's the orchestra at your fingertips.

So you can play anything,

almost anything can be played on the piano.

What's essential out of everything,

it's such a personal question,

how you want to philosophically approach it.

Do you want to make a whole repertoire list of things

that you know that you'll probably be able to grasp quickly,

and connect to the things you naturally do well?

Or do you want to go in the opposite direction,

and try to learn a whole bunch of stuff that just,

almost feels averse to your musical approach

and almost is like another language?

I think both are very valid.

Then you'll figure out what's essential

through that process.

There's no right answer.

People might say, you should learn,

you know, like people always play...

[plays lively classical rondeau]

Or you know...

[plays sober classical melody]

Even if you playing jazz.

[plays cheerful honky tonk melody]

The blues, yeah, Beethoven, all of it's good.

Everything.

A Reddit user asked the question,

[upbeat groove music]

Best official piano arrangements

for video game soundtracks?

Final Fantasy VII, I would say,

is probably the greatest soundtrack of a video game ever.

Nobuo Uematsu, incredible.

And also the Capcom series of games I listen to,

whether it's Mega Man, all the series.

The whole expression of themes in these games

shaped my compositional, [plays arpeggio]

my compositional mind.

But Green Hill Zone, Sonic the Hedgehog, level one,

[plays idle melody]

that melody.

So I did an arrangement.

[plays cheerful idle melody]

That's when the strings come in. I had my...

[plays arpeggios]

I just had that idea to write a string orchestration.

I wrote it in a taxi on the way to the studio.

So you just gotta listen to the recording.

That's all the questions. [upbeat groove music]

Jon Batiste signing off.

I'm so glad that you are here, I hope you had fun.

[plays arpeggio]

[upbeat groove music fades]