Newswire Powered by. Close the menu. Rolling Stone. Log In. To help keep your account secure, please log-in again. You are no longer onsite at your organization. Please log in. For assistance, contact your corporate administrator. Arrow Created with Sketch. You might not be able to recognise his tone, but you can definitely hear his delicate touch on the instrument.
It's worth keeping an ear out for Nick Johnston solely on how minimalistic his approach is. Whether it's expansive arrangements or cheeky comic book movie style tracks, he's always aware of his musical context. His pick attack and volume control will reflect this. He'll even go as far as to flick his pickup selector in mid-phrase just to get variations of tone out. Outside of that, you can always learn a thing or two about how to finetune your control of the instrument.
Not everyone is comfortable having their playing blasted through hot pickups and cranked amps. But for Nick, it's just another way to delicately balance his notes. For your listening homework, you can always start with each of his four studio albums.
Each album has a theme and approach associated with it. It makes for a journeying experience where you can track his subtle but grand shift towards a larger sound. Tosin Abasi Tosin Abasi is the modern-day equivalent of a shredding virtuoso. He represents his band Animals as Leaders as well as his very own guitar company. But on an MP3, he represents the kind of skills that can leave you shaking in your boots. Abasi plays in a technically driven style. Having been inspired by the likes of Meshuggah, he sought comfort in the world of extended range guitars and chugged strings.
This was, however, only a launch pad for things to come. As one of the two resident guitarists in AAL, he started showing his prowess on the instrument. His skills were based both on concept and practicality. This allowed him to do things like execute advanced rhythmic concepts, develop unique picking styles, and play complex musical ideas. His signature techniques include double thumping his strings with his thumb and playing cascading chord clusters.
On the record, these techniques are fused with advanced music theory to deliver a unique futuristic sound that's not found elsewhere. Tosin's playing style is unique because it's one of the few that sounds so unachievable.
You can sit there for hours trying to decode what you're hearing but still come up short. In the end, you're forced to accept the person behind that guitar sound is either extraterrestrial or just too mechanical to be human. Regardless of the conclusion you arrive at, it can be refreshing to listen to some off the wall playing. And it definitely sets a good benchmark of how far one can go with their inhuman guitar skills. You can feast on this impossible playing style in any of Animals As Leader's four studio albums.
Mark Holcomb Mark Holcomb makes one-fifth of the band Periphery. He made his foray into the band's progressive metal sound. As it happens, it was only a short while before his personal stylistic influences crept through.
It's what he's recognised for today. Mark has a very dynamic approach to the guitar. For one, he's not very fond of basing his riffs off of scales, modes, or just familiar patterns.
Instead, he focuses on outlining extended chords with his riffs. This makes for a more organic method of riff writing that takes advantage of the emotional progression of chordal tones. And when he's not using riffs to communicate chords, he'll outright play them on a distorted guitar.
It instantly becomes clear where the depth in his chords comes from when a power chord is more than just a root, fifth, and eighth. The playing style splits the difference with his expressive side to add emotional depth to the more metal side of his playing. This is achieved thanks to his open string vocabulary, far-reaching slides, and spacious intervals. He's able to craft a sonic broth that's billowing with tonal flavours that both excite and soothe the ear.
If you're in the mood for some progressive metal that's a bit more than just riffs and chugs, Holcomb's playing might just be for you. With his group, Polyphia, he managed to redefine what it meant to be popular playing the guitar in the modern age.
Listening to Tim's tracks, you can get a sense of metal shredding past straight away. He plays beefy bottom strings, sometimes on 8-stringed guitars, to add that quintessential Djent rattle in his playing. It's featured alongside other metal-isms like sweep picking, pinch harmonics, and dive bombs. The balance comes when it's complemented with thin tones, pop-inspired melodic motifs, tapping, and arpeggiated chords. All this happens when it's playing behind a programmed trap beat and sub-bass.
It's a playing style that's capable of turning a lot of heads around—using this kind of technicality on its own thing. But using it to approximate the sounds of synths, phasers, and flangers is genuinely out there. By and large, it's not a style that's supposed to make sense yet somehow manages just fine.
You can get the gears in your head, turning just by thinking about the possibilities this approach can have. Anything in Polyphia's discography past its EP is the right place to start with this equally absurd and endearing playing style.
Melanie Faye Coming in at just 22 years old, Melanie Faye happens to be the youngest on this list. But thanks to her distinctive way around the fretboard, she's on the verge of being the next biggest hit. Melanie started her journey into fame when a competition video of her playing went viral.
Her style of playing can best be described as a soul choir living on her strings. She's able to move entire chords around her fretboard in melodic and harmonic ways. And when that's not enough, she'll mimic the inflections of the human voice by adding trills, phasing vibratos, double stops, micro-bends, and stewing bass lines. Few players in the guitar world can claim to bottle human emotions into their playing.
And yet, Melanie Faye has done just that. Final Words Musicians are always defined by their generation, and guitar is no exception. You can admire the guitar greats of yesteryear, but sometimes it also pays to keep your eye on what new players can do with the instrument.
If you've been reading so far, you might've gotten a couple of useful suggestions about where to start. Now all that's left is to explore and find out what else can be done with a piece of wood with metal stretched over it.
They're crass, they're loud, and they're proud. This Aussie band rose to new heights when they made the 70's a proving ground for their sound. What's more, they've laid the deep-rooted foundations that would define what rock meant for decades to come. It just so happens that it lives up to that name well. That begs the question, what exactly is the secret to the band's overwhelming success?
Well, for starters, it's the unique way they've built their songs over the years. That's why we'll be going over the necessary recipe and ingredients that you'll need to get your song to sound like it deserves to be played on a long Sunday drive to downtown. There's much to be said about the unmistakable high-stakes energy that the band manages to weave.
But any discussion is remiss without looking into the different instruments and roles that the band uses as its foundational ground. So, here's how each member makes this magic happen: Rhythm Guitar Stevie Young : After his brother's tragic passing in , Stevie Young was left to fill a hole that Malcolm Young created.
But luckily, he has risen to the occasion ever since and kept his brother alive both in spirit and in sonic form. Having been taught by Malcolm himself, Stevie is able to easily channel those characteristic rhythm guitar tones. Angus Young's approach on the guitar tends to be flamboyant yet tasteful.
He's able to utilize classic blues techniques in his solos to give them that classic bite. Cliff lays his bass playing in very foundational roles with the occasional rhythmic kick to it.
Behind the crunchy guitar tones and the warm bass sound, you can hear his vigorous drum lines providing a pulse to a song. Phil Rudd is appreciated for his tasteful restraint when it comes to drumming. Instead of launching into elaborate turnarounds, Rudd keeps a steady, solid beat going. This focus on impeccable timing helps lock in the swagger of the band. And it was an entry that the rock world will not soon forget. Brian characterizes his vocals by singing with terse tonalities that compound everything else in the instrumentation.
And that means following some common techniques, tools, and habits of the band. But more than their ability to keep a consistent rhythm is upsetting it for some interest-building and that is what sets them apart. The way the band usually does is by building rhythmic dissonance between different instruments. Even something as minor as this creates rhythmic interest in the groove of the song. While all this is happening in the background, the guitars have their own displacement going on.
The effect this creates is staggering. Songs like Back in Black are common for this kind of rhythmic displacement that enforces some 16th note excitement with everything else going in with the mix. You can use this concept for some inspiration the next time you're at your own musical drawing board. Instead of trying to lock everything down to a single time feel, try adding metric flourishes that help each instrument stand out. However, it's not only the chords themselves that are characteristic but also how these chords progress to one another.
Normally, rock guitar tends to have chords that move around safer destinations like 4ths and 5ths. In fact, it's harder to pull this progression off without having to sound like them. Over the years, it's almost used as a joke to poke fun at the band's heavy reliance on this particular progression. It's even gone to the point where band members like Angus Young have acknowledged and run with the joke. Here's a direct quote from the man himself: "I'm sick and tired of people saying that we put out 11 albums that sound exactly the same.
In fact, we've put out 12 albums that sound exactly the same. You'll be able to rest assured with the knowledge that you've reached plagiarism levels of similarity with the band.
It's the harmony that forms between the bass and guitar. And it's used to link these two instruments together. In songs like Back in Black, this is used when the chorus starts with the guitar riff and the bass supporting it.
For the first few bars, the bass and guitar both double down on B and then switch to an A. No matter what the guitar and the bass play, those two pedal tones are always featured in the back of the song.
When combined with the instruments' rhythmic displacement, it creates a nice disjointed but subtly groovy feel to the track. At no point do the pedal tones overpower the arrangement.
They just hang back to provide some invisible support to the mix. It's an easy concept to apply on your own and can even help you write simple bass lines without having to stray away from its rhythmic duties. They also have the ability to make you have a strong urge to utter something with their songs. The band has countless examples of songs with lyrics relating to satanic themes that make you want to sing along.
A band would be scrutinized for picking this kind of imagery for their lyrics in any other context. And it shows. They can joke around with any subject matter in the lyrics and still get a crowd to recite their words back to them.
You don't have to look any further than the intro to songs like Thunderstruck. It launches into an electrifying riff accompanied by stadium-like chanting until the song is cheered on. You can use this to greatly affect your songs by structuring the musical energy and lyrics to elicit an almost involuntary reaction from the listener. Even if you don't know how to recreate their sound, you'll definitely know when you hear it. And the secret spice rack that makes that happen is the Mixolydian mode.
Whether it's the guitar riffs, the vocals, the solos, or even the bass lines, they all sprout from that sickly-sweet set of notes. This presents a unique opportunity for you to cobble together their sound in any kind of track.
It's the vocals that practically set the tone for the band. The vocals for the band tend to be more stressed than what your average rock singer is comfortable with. They're belted out with a chest voice and a borderline falsetto to push that screechy tone out. It's something that works really well in the mix with all the other instruments and can't really be substituted all that well.
It helps that Brian has a raspy voice quality that adds to the carnal nature of the band's sound. You'll feel a lot of strain on your voice if you try to force the vocal quality.
Instead, focus on achieving a high enough head voice first and then focus on getting it to distort under pressure. The Angus school of guitar solos relies on three main factors: anticipation, vibratos, and scalar interchange. These factors stamp his all too familiar signature on any solos you hear in their songs.
His solos will often start on the first few frets before jumping up higher in pitch to create suspense and anticipation. From there, he's able to blend his tones by mixing minor and major pentatonic scales to elicit crude but palatable rock tones.
And, of course, the mammoth-wide vibratos help sell the unique character of the solo. You can approximate many of Angus's solos by starting with traditional blues or country phrases and dialing them up to eleven. Just remember to throw in copious amounts of vibratos, held bends, and fast pentatonic fiddling. Their compositional tendencies and skills make up what the rock genre takes for granted today. But even in such a simple and foundational sound is packed with tons of creative depth.
Luckily, you don't have to get thunderstruck trying to make heads or tails of their craft. Like any instrument, learning to play the drums is all about making mistakes and rising above them. And dealing with it can be a bit overwhelming while still trying to get accustomed to your instrument.
But when that control starts wavering, there can be some severe problems. The Mistake The biggest problem beginner drummers have to face is realizing the right amount of force they need to play.
Play too soft, and you might not even make your hits listenable. But play too hard, and you risk drowning out your sound on top of wasting energy and sacrificing speed. But more than that, it also results in an uneven style of play. Some of your hits will end up sounding much louder than others. The most common example of this is laying in too heavy on your cymbals. Moving forward, one of the first things you want to do is practice away from the kit before you build up some sense of direction.
Start with a practice pad and a suitable pair of sticks according to your hand size. You want to be patient with yourself and give yourself enough room to master your muscle memory. Get yourself positioned correctly and hold your stick with a firm but relaxed grip. Everything from the drop of the stick to the hit on the pad and the rebound afterward will have a definite feeling. Try out different variations of your hitting strength until you can notice the differing sensation.
After all, why else would you do it? And a lot of that fun involves playing parts of your favorite songs. The Mistake Most players tend to gloss over structured practice routines and drills before heading to play something on their kit.
Practicing can be a slow and dragging process. This might leave you feeling bored and uninterested in trying to build the necessary skills up. In the long term, neglecting key basics like this can cripple your playing. It almost always boils down to cashing out on the gratification of playing well without making the necessary time and effort investment.
How to Avoid It Believe it or not, sometimes the best way to break out of this habit is to take your time when learning new drum parts. Start by listening to it a few times until you can accurately play it back in your head. This can be especially helpful for compartmentalising skills that you can recall at a later time.
At the same time, make sure you set aside a large portion of your playing towards practice. The ratio of time spent learning the execution can seem a bit unbalanced.
But once you start polishing your skills, that time frame gets shorter and shorter. Think of it this way. Every time you see your favorite drummer play exceptionally well, you can bet that there were countless hours dumped into practice to get there. So if you really want to chase their results, you should have to go through the same process.
Even so, the desire to add in something extra can be fairly strong. This kind of allure can often lead beginners to stray off and start overplaying their grooves. The Mistake Overplaying can be a reactionary response to want to have more fun with a song a lot of the time.
You might get bored playing the same basic pattern and decide to spice it up. In your own time, that might not be such a bad thing. However, it can be a bad habit to get in as a beginner. The situation gets worse when playing extravagantly is seen as playing well. Especially when a large part of the drumming community likes to paint minimalist drummers like Meg White and Lars Ulrich in a bad light. This can form some long-lasting associations with many novices. Not only is overplaying unnecessary, but it can also remove musicality from your playing.
If playing music is like having a conversation, then overplaying is like interrupting someone mid-sentence. Nothing does a better job at making your look vain in the eyes of your audience and bandmates than stepping over your musical bounds. Worse so, it can even be seen as a sign of disrespect towards any musicians you collaborate with. All it takes is doubling your subdivisions or a few too many cymbal hits to start going into the excessive territory.
When this happens, it can help to take a step back and go back to basics. Then start adding elements only if they serve the song. It helps to think of a song in its entirety rather than parts when playing. This will stop you from wanting to seize every opportunity to unleash your bag of tricks. Keep in mind that overplaying can be a natural phase for many beginners.
Wanting to play well and have fun can always lead you down to the path of sneaking a few extra hits in. The key is to acknowledge it when it happens and stop it from making a permanent place in your playing. The Mistake The most common problems with bad posture involve not taking your frame into consideration. Everyone has a different height and arm length. Posture on the drum is no joke. All it takes is a slight deviation from a relaxed posture to make playing drums an uncomfortable experience.
But aside from serious physical consequences, bad posture can also have an effect on your sound. Hitting your drums at an unnatural angle can give you a bad variation of tone or wear out your drums quicker. How to Avoid It Good posture on the drums starts right from where you sit.
Your first order of business should be to adjust your drum throne according to your height. You want it to be low enough to let your feet comfortably reach the pedals while also maintaining a degree angle with the ground. Next, work up towards your upper body. Start by keeping your back as straight as possible without hunching forward or leaning back.
Relax your shoulders, elbows, and wrist by doing some basic stretches. Keep your arms loose and fluid at all times. Finally, work on your stick grip.
While you work on correcting your posture, it might be a good idea to optimize your drum placement. When you assemble your kit, you want to keep your snare, bass drum, and high hat in a reachable position.
Using that as your reference, you can position the rest of the drums around it. The trap is falling into one pocket of music for your drumming without trying to explore outside of it. The Mistake As a beginner, you might be drawn towards particular inspirations and styles when you first start out. The problem comes when you use it as a means to lock yourself down to that style. You might even end up preventing yourself from learning critical skills that are a part of a different style of music than your own.
One of the simplest steps you can take is to be willing enough to listen to a large variety of music. It helps to hit shuffle on your favourite streaming service so you can experience a plethora of rhythmic variation. Once you start building up a taste for different styles of music, you can start putting it into practice.
Work on playing a song from an unfamiliar genre from start to finish. Then try dissecting and analysing the kind of rhythmic components you just played.
Always be on the lookout for drummers that manage to stray from the beaten path. And you might even gain yourself some newfound inspiration towards your playing.
Closing Thoughts To summarize, learning the drums can come with the prospect of making mistakes and falling into undesirable habits. And hopefully, this guide has helped you in achieving that. Nine times out of ten, you're likely to land on the piano. That's because this year-old instrument has seen everything from being a solo instrument to providing accompaniment, enriching harmony, serenading melodies, and acting as a textural element in the background.
It's no secret then that pianists are often left to bear the responsibilities of fulfilling multiple roles. Not only can it be a bit of a mental load, but it also requires you to know your instrument physically and musically. So, how do you get close to getting better if you're just a beginner?
Well, luckily, you don't have to fret too much about that. Down yonder, we'll be listing some of the best ways to improve your piano playing. These will help you get into the right mindset with your practice and ultimately elevate your playing skills. Look Up to a Role Model With such a long and decorated history, the piano has had several maestros enter its ranks. You can have your pick from the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, or Modern period of pianists.
And they can help inspire you on the way to your very own piano mastery. Even if you limit yourself to one era in history, you can usually find plenty of pianists to gain insight from. If you have your heart set on the Romantic period, you can learn from Liszt's finger-tangling expressionism. If classical is your jam, consider the dramatic hammerings of Beethoven.
And if you're in search of something modern, you have the feather-light dynamic control of Debussy. Looking up to a role model isn't just about admiring their work; it's also about learning their craft. After all, the western scale only has twelve notes. It's not about which of those twelve notes you play, but how you play them that makes the difference. Getting immersed in someone's playing habits and techniques can act as a gateway to your own playing.
You'll start to learn what kind of sound you're drawn to and what form of articulation favors your artistic expression. Do that with enough of a handful of influences, and you're on your way to having a confident playing style of your own. Work on Chord Analysis Playing chords is a big part of being a piano player. When you have the theoretical ability to play ten different notes at once, that can only mean having the densest and richest combinations of sounds to work with.
Not only is chord analysis helpful to those studying in conservatories, but it can also benefit a beginner pianist. Even knowing some basic chord progressions can help you track the emotional flow of a song and pinpoint which chords are about to follow. You can do some beginner level harmonic analysis by listening to your favorite songs and trying to recognize their progressions. Genres like country, pop, and rock will give you enough ease to start getting comfortable before you move on to something complicated.
It helps to have a good repertoire of chord knowledge to take advantage of your analysis. Start with your basic diatonic triads, then your 7ths, extended chords, and some modal chords to cap it all off. The more chords you know by heart, the better you'll be at eventually recognizing them play out in real-time. Play Arrangements of Popular Songs Sitting on your practice bench and staring at an 18th century piano score can become a habitual rote after a while.
Sometimes it helps to break out of that headspace and go for practice material that's a little more up to date. Understanding the modern conventions of music happen to be just as crucial to your progress as studying classical works. It's especially useful if you want to get used to playing modern harmony that's fit for contemporary piano.
You can find scores to plenty of popular songs both online and in music stores. It's a good idea to run through them at least once in your practice routine. And if you progress enough, you could even start arranging them yourself by ear. Whether it's a classic Christmas carol or a new hit single, diversifying your song choices helps build your note vocabulary. On top of that, it's a helpful way to understand modern arrangement techniques.
As a bonus, it'll also give you a varied music selection that you can play for others. However, relying on them too much can be detrimental to your playing in the long run.
And it's something that every beginner has to come to accept. Out of the big three, the sustain pedal tends to get most of the limelight. It just so happens that this is the pedal that ends up getting used as a crutch when playing the piano. It's to the piano what a capo is to a guitar or a falsetto to vocals; an essential tool but one that you can habitually lean back on too much. Nothing screams beginner quite like playing with too much sustain to make up for lack of note delivery.
It's an easy pitfall to get into and one that can turn into a habit very quickly. That's why avoiding it for purposes other than sonic ornamenting is so essential.
It's always best to practice things like sustain without the safety of the sustain pedal. In fact, it's better to leave it out of your foundational playing unless a piece specifically calls for it.
Instead, you'll benefit more from using it at a later stage when you're more equipped to realize its articulative potential. And you'll thank yourself for it in the long run. Practice Sight Reading Musical notation is an essential language that any pianist has had to get fluent in.
Playing or practicing piano means being in front of sheet music on a daily basis. Your improvement can often hinge on being able to accurately translate those lines and dots from the paper. Make sure you spend at least a third of your practice time getting your sight-reading down.
It's easy to gloss over notation if you've already heard the piece being played. But the real challenge is playing pieces that have only existed on paper for you. Like anything else, the best way to go about sight-reading is to get immersed in it more and more. Try gathering a variety of scores from famous pieces to movie soundtracks, modern hits, and even Jazz standards. Getting a songbook or a Real Book is really helpful for this purpose.
There will be a lot of information packed into scores, so you want to go step by step. Start by learning how to read basic sheets and work your way from there. Make sure you have a metronome handy, so you're always able to play in time with the tempo on the score.
You can also incorporate beginner practice books into your sessions. These let you get used to moving around the staff with different exercises and practice drills. With consistent enough practice, you'll immediately start seeing a drop in the time it takes you to parse a score and translate it into play.
Set Time Aside for Polishing Your Theory Out of all the instruments available, the piano has some of the fewest mental shortcuts you can use to get around the instrument. That's why theory is a significant aspect of a pianist's life. Unlike a stringed instrument, you don't have the relative symmetry to always find your notes. Each key leaves you having to play a different pattern of notes. That's why you're required to know precisely where each and every note of your piano is.
But piano's necessity for music theory goes much beyond that. Any time you're accompanying yourself with your left hand, you need to know chord and interval relations. Every time you play an elaborate arrangement, you have to pay attention to things like inversions, modal interchange, compound meters, nested harmonies, and more.
As a beginner, there's no faster path to piano mastery than getting your music theory cemented to memory. After all, you're going to be playing a lot of notes together. You might as well understand how they all relate to and affect one another. During any play session, ensure that you've set aside enough time to work on theory. You can either buy yourself a textbook, watch a video, or just look for sources online. But as long as you're putting in work to polish your theory, you're bound to see good results.
Use Fun Learning Outlets to Enjoy Practice Believe it or not, playing an instrument isn't all about working on your skills. Sometimes you're encouraged to have fun with your music.
And if you can combine the two? Well, then you have a good thing going. Combining fun and practice can be as simple as experimenting with a different style of music. Maybe you want to try playing some ragtime, saloon music, or some off-kilter campfire sing along?
It may not seem like it, but you can do that while meshing in some rhythmic or melodic exercises that were too dull on their own. Another path to take would be to use programs like Synthesia.
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