Superstition - Learn Funk Piano

The thing about playing funk music is uh the way you're subdividing time and the way your hands feel when you're on the keyboard , playing a clavinet or a keyboard , the way you're getting those weird and cool um upbeat rhythms and stuff is the way your hands are working the keys , not just playing the notes , but the percussive nature of how your hands are working .

And a lot of times it's a matter of the way the digits are hitting the keys and it's a lot like you approach playing a conga drum , which is why I'm on a conga drum right now .

But if you can just practice some hand , this is one of the main movements when you're , when you got your thumb and you're pinky on an octave on the keyboard and you're playing , that's the kind of hand motion and you notice that conga players subdivide in a real similar way on the drum .

And so when we're addressing the keyboard for something like superstition , which is an E flat minor , an E flat minor is a really great key , especially if you're blind .

Who knows why Stevie Wonder uh sings a lot of his songs on this key because it feels great .

It feels you can find the notes really easily .

And that's , uh , part of the reason why this is such an easy lick to play .

The thing about that recording though is that it's really involving , uh , three or four clavinet tracks .

So in order to kind of approach it , we're gonna kind of , uh do a little bit of , uh , I guess , uh , an adjustment to let us have a little more of what's going on at the same time , but not really playing exactly what's being played because the , like I said , there's several tracks and if you're the only keyboard player in the band playing Superstition , you kind of have to accommodate a few things .

So what we're gonna do first is look at what we did with the conga with octaves .

You can kind of start doing the same exercise with your fingers as you did on the conga .

If you wanted to do pinky thumb , pinky thumb or the other way or pinky thumb , pinky thumb .

If you can keep these things kind of steady , then you're already entering into what's necessary to play a funky class part because all these notes and these upbeats and things that are happening are just subdivisions of sixteens .

Usually if you're going 1234 and the subdivisions are one and two , see what I'm saying .

So when you got a part that's got several complex things happening at the same time , you're always thinking about that one E end to two E and three en to four E end of feeling .

But it's a feeling rather than something you're just really conscientious of in terms of time .

It really , it's how it feels under your hands like it does on a conga drum .

So if I start to play that main riff in the line of uh superstition , it sounds like this .

OK .

The thing that makes that funky though is everything else that's happening around it .

There's a base line , the base is doing this .

The good thing is in a band .

I don't have to worry about playing that because the bass player is already playing that for me .

So it frees me up to play a few other things around that principle uh or bass note that's happening .

So what I can do is maybe use this thumb and kind of augment rhythmically , things that are happening here like this .

And this is still going back to this whole two hands , thumb and pinky , these subdivisions that you're feeling that you can practice on the drum or practice on a table top , kind of get you to where you start feeling some of these subdivisions in there .

And then you work that into the line and then we start kind of embellishing that a little bit and adding a little more of the back and forth twiddly kind of stuff with these octaves and maybe even that note right there .