Fast Piano Lessons Blog

Brad had a question, he wants to learn more about gospel music and get away from reading the music… His goal is to interpret and embellish what he reads on paper.

I’m not a gospel expert because I grew up in washington state… I don’t have a lot of experience playing that style of music or in churches! BUT I have really worked hard to make some of the elements of gospel music a part of my playing to broaden some of the sounds I can create on piano.

One of the books I recommend for learning more about gospel music is called Gospel Keyboard Styles. You should be able to read music before working through this book. I like that it has short examples of rhythms or chord progressions that you can pull out and put into your playing.
For example, they give you a cool walk up to do when going from a 1 to a 4 chord, C to F and then its up to you to actually apply that in a song you are working on, or transpose it to a new key! Not too much different than what we do on this blog with licks.
This book is great, because it offers a lot more concentrated information than a video would, going in depth to tell you all about when to use certain progressions and how things developed.

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Another good gospel book is Gospel Piano: Hal Leonard Keyboard Style Series. I like all the books in this piano series because they have a lot of good fills and licks and history. The only thing that I don’t like so much is it requires you to be a good reader, but it comes with a CD if you have a good ear.