Bill Hilton

Piano Pack
no. 4
Piano Pack Number 4 - Contents
Introduction 2
Exercises 3
Links and listening 6
Practice piece - Pop Study in D 8
Problems and challenges 10

Introduction
Welcome to Piano Pack number 4! This pack has a pop piano theme, so if you’re into
contemporary and ballad styles — the names I usually mention are Elton John and
Ben Folds, but we could also include Regina Spector, John Legend, Tori Amos and
many others — I think you’ll like this.

If pop piano isn’t usually your thing, I think you’ll find it worth exploring. It’s a great
style to play, with roots in jazz, folk, classical and church music. And because of its
unique approach to rhythm it’s offers a very effective way of working on your hand
independence.

So, as with all the Piano Packs, in the pages that follow you’ll find a mixture of exercis-
es, challenges and stuff to listen to, as well as an original pop piano-style piece to learn
(Pop Study in D on p8). As usual, I’ve put together a walkthrough video in which you
can use to get tips and advice on the material in the Pack, and watch to check you’re
playing things right. You’ll find out at this unlisted YouTube link:

https://youtu.be/dL_FfKWtx9o

Happy playing!

Copyright notice: the material in this document and associated videos is copyright (c) Bill Hilton 2021.
Please do not distribute or resell without written permission. Small numbers of reproductions may be made
for personal use.

Piano Pack 4, page 2

Exercises
Exercise 1 (01:06 in the walkthrough video)
One of the characteristics of pop piano is the way the hands work together to create
complex cross rhythms (and often complex harmonies too, of which more later). This
is something you need to get a “feel” for if you’re going to be a good pop player, but
even if you’re mostly interested in other genres working on it can be fantastic for your
hand independence.

Try playing the exercise below, perhaps slowly to begin with, but ultimately aiming to
play it at a solid tempo of around 100 beats per minute. It might look complicated -
traditional notation isn’t great for representing the rhythms of pop piano, which often
moves stresses off the centres of beats, and/or uses rhythmic anticipation or delay. If
you’re not sure how it works, have a look at the walkthrough video, in which I break
the exercise down and show you how it works in detail.

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I haven’t written any stress (>) or phrase marks in the score, nor any pedal indica-
tions. As you play, notice where the stresses fall, try to get into the ‘groove’ that the
part is laying down, and experiment with the sustain pedal. I discuss these issues in
more detail in the walkthrough video.

Exercise 2 (04:05)
Once you’ve got the hang of Exercise 1, transpose in into the keys of D and then Bb
major. It’s not much harder in those keys than in the original key (C major), but trans-
posing is always a good exercise, and it’s good to get used to the slight variations in
hand position and fingering that different keys impose. If you’re feeling extra nerdy,
try some more difficult keys, like Ab or B. If you’re unsure how to do this, I explain it
in more detail in the walkthrough video.

Piano Pack 4, page 3

Exercise 3 (05:52)
This is somewhat like Exercise 1, but this time the right hand is doing a little more
and the left hand a little less. Try it slowly to start with, but aim to build up to around
100bpm, the same tempo I asked you to aim for in exercise 1. Once again, refer to the
walkthrough video for a step by step explanation of how it works.

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There are three things I want you to notice here:

1. Although the right hand looks busy, it’s the same basic pattern repeated over and
over. Pop piano is heavy on repetition (and can often be somewhat minimalist, an
idea we’ll explore further in the Links and Listening section on pX).

2.I’ve marked in the stress pattern, using stress marks (>) in the first two bars and
throughout by using beams to group the quavers/eighth notes. This corresponds to
an underlying dotted crotchet/dotted crotchet/crotchet (or dotter quarter note/dot-
ted quarter note/quarter note) rhythm that is very common in pop piano, and in pop
music in general (it’s a rhythm that bass guitarists often use, for example, as it creates
a complex, forward-driving cross beat when played against a drummer’s solid 4/4).

4
& 4 œ™ œ™ œ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑

We saw the same rhythm in the right hand part of Exercise 1. This time, the crotchets/
quarter notes are split into quavers/eighth notes, but the stress in each bar still falls in
the place where the quarter notes would begin in that original rhythm.

3. I haven’t marked the chords in. They were getting pretty complex in Exercise 1
(G13, anyone?), but here the additional complexity of the right creates a great varie-
ty of chordal sounds — lots of sus4s and add9s — which would just make a mess if I

Piano Pack 4, page 4

tried to notate them all (I could put the underlying chords in if I wanted to — they’re
pretty much the same as in Exercise 1). Here’s an important point about pop piano: in
harmonic terms, it often does more by doing less. The right hand part doesn’t change
here, but running it against the changing bass line creates a progression of subtly
developing harmonies. The same thing happened to an extent in Exercise 1, but the
effect here is richer.

Exercise 4 (09:12)
...you’re probably ahead of me here. Take Exercise 3 and transpose in into the keys of
D and then Bb major. Once again, the transposed forms aren’t much harder than the
original (except maybe for that right hand thumb on Bb...) but getting a feel for alter-
native keys is excellent practice.

Exercise 5 (10:18)
Pop piano often uses broken chord/arpeggio patterns in the left hand. This one is in
the key of E major. Take it slowly to start with, but aim to reach around 80-90 beats
per minute, a fast-ish ballad tempo. I’ve written in suggested fingerings in the first
bar — you should be able to finger each subsequent bar the same way. Feel free to vary
these fingerings to suit your own hands, but always aim for a smooth, flowing, legato
style. Be sure to count this one carefully, taking particular care to let the final beat of
each bar last its full length — it’s very easy to ‘clip’ the final beat in an effort to get back
down the keyboard for the start of the next broken chord!

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Exercise 6 (12:57)
Back to using both hands! Take the left hand pattern from Exercise 5 and improvise
a right hand part above it, using the right hand pattern from Exercise 3 (transposed
in to E major) as your starting point. Sound complicated? It isn’t really, though it will
take a bit of practice. Take a look at my demonstration in the walkthrough video to see
how it works in detail.

Piano Pack 4, page 5

Links and listening
Pop piano is a fascinating, diverse style, and it doesn’t get discussed (or taught) enough.
There are myriad little techniques that crop up time and again, and I just want to take
the opportunity to pick out a couple here. Do remember in Exercises 1-4 we were us-
ing that dotted quarter note/dotted quarter note/quarter note rhythm?

4
& 4 œ™ œ™ œ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑

It appears again and again in pop piano. See if you can pick it out in this performance
of ‘All Of Me’ by John Legend, or in Elton John playing and singing his all-time
classic, ‘Your Song’. (Clue: it’s pretty obvious from the start in ‘All Of Me’; in ‘Your
Song’ it’s present throughout as an underlying stress pattern, but is only really obvi-
ous at a few points). While you’re listening to those two recordings, listen out for what
I call ‘country thirds’. This is about the most common lick/riff in all pop piano, and it
has its roots in country music (and probably ultimately in church music). Anyhow, it’s
just this small movement, or some variant of it:

& 4 œœœ ˙˙˙ ™™™

4 ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑

You’ll remember we saw it on a C chord at the beginning of Exercise 3. It’s a very nat-
ural movement on the piano, especially on chords like C, F and G, and it gets used a
lot. It was possibly Elton John who introduced it to pop music — you can hear it, for
example, in his ‘Tiny Dancer’.

Elton John has been very influential on the whole genre, and you can hear aspects
of his style creeping into that of many later musicians. (By the way, you might also
like this affectionate cover from Ben Folds, which includes some good hands-on-
keyboard shots. And while we’re on the subject of Folds, listen out for some similar
effects in his song ‘Landed’.)

You can get a sense of pop piano’s diversity by listening to Regina Spektor, who has
clearly been influenced by Elton John, and also, I think, by Tori Amos. In Spektor,
with her conservatoire-level training in piano and composition, classical technique
meeting some quirky pop sounds. Listen to her ‘Samson’ for some classic (Tori Amos
influenced...) pop piano; to ‘Fidelity’ for an demonstration of how effective a simple
pop piano part can be; and to ‘Aprés Moi’ for classically-influenced fireworks.

You can also have a listen for some of the effects I’m talking about in this cover ver-
sion of Elton John’s ‘Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road’ by Sara Bareilles and this
before-she-was famous performance by Lady Gaga/Stephanie Germanotta. Re-

Piano Pack 4, page 6

member, too, that ballad-style pop piano playing can easily transition into something
faster — as demonstrated in one of the greatest rock songs ever.

I said above that pop piano has a lot of similarities with some aspects of minimalism,
in particular the way that small, subtle changes in chords or bassline are used to cre-
ate harmonic or rhythmic effects. If you’re not familiar with minimalism as a style
you could start with Philip Glass’s piano album Glassworks. I’m also very fond of
the work of Michael Nyman. Have a listen to him and David McAlmont perform
‘The Glare’, from the 2009 album of the same name. The influences here range from
Handel’s operatic arias (really: listen to the piano part from 1:42 to 1:52) through to
contemporary soul (the vocal line, written by Nyman, who co-wrote the piece based
on earlier work by Nyman).

That’s a very quick survey of what is, really, a massive genre — and, like I said, one
that has been very little studied. As you listen to pop piano it’s worth keeping your
ears open for influences from other genres: the harmonies and cadences of church
music, in particular, are deeply buried in the mix (Elton John once said that when he
was stuck for ideas for a song, ‘I write a hymn’). But folk, blues and the western classi-
cal tradition are there, too — the latter unsurprisingly, given how many of today’s pop
piano players spent their childhoods working through the classics.

Piano Pack 4, page 7

 Pop Study in D

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Bill Hilton

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Piano Pack 4, page 8
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You can watch and listen to me play this at 16:07 in the walkthrough video.

It might look tricky — all those ties and dots! — and in few places it is, but most of the
apparent difficulty comes from the fact that it’s hard to represent the rhythms of pop
piano in traditional score. For example, what’s happening in the first eight bars is,
barring a bit of finger-switching in the left, pretty straightforward.

If you’re a relative beginner, just concentrate on the first eight bars and watch the
walkthrough video carefully: you might not fully master them for a while, but there’s
a lot to learn here. If you’re a more advanced player but you’re struggling with the big
broken chords in the final eight bars, then simply replace them with a repeat of bars
1-8. To give a satisfying ending. Have a go at the broken chords if you can, though!

Piano Pack 4, page 9

Problems and challenges
You’ll find the solutions to challenges 1 and 2 on p11.

Challenge 1
Look again at Pop Study in D on pages 8 and 9. Here are the underlying chords for the
first eight bars:

D | F#/C# | Bm7 | G | D | F#/C# | Bm7 | G, A...

Knowing that, can you work out the overall harmonic structure of the piece? There
are 32 bars in total, and let’s label the first eight bars above an ‘A section’. How many
other A sections are there? Are their any sections with a different structure? What
order to the sections come in?

Challenge 2
Can you work out the underlying chords for the section(s) that are different from the
A section written out above? Write them into your score, if you like.

Challenge 3
Let’s do some composing! Can you write eight bars (or more?) of your own piece using
the 8-bar progression above? Don’t worry if it’s really simple. If you want feedback,
send it through to me at billhiltonmedia@gmail.com, either as a recording or a writ-
ten score.

Piano Pack 4, page 10

Challenge 1 — solution
The basic structure is AABA. The second and third A sections have some slight varia-
tions on the first A section, but nothing substantial.

Challenge 2
The underlying chords for the B section are:

Em | A7 | D (or Dsus) | Bm7 | Em7 | A | Em7 | A

Piano Pack 4, page 11

Enjoyed this Piano Pack?
If you have, chances are you’ll really like my books: How To Really Play The Piano,
An Introduction to Cocktail Piano and Seven Studies in Pop Piano.

Right now I’m running a bundle deal on the digital editions. You can get all three for
just £18.95 — a saving of 30% on what you’d pay if you bought them separately.

Visit billspianopages.com/bundle to find out more!

Piano Pack 4, page 12