In my ongoing effort to convince everyone that they have what it takes to sit down at a piano and have some fun, and even improvise a little bit, I want to give you a little exercise that will help you to be able to do just that to create some really nice sounding music on the piano. More than anything though, I want to prove that the prevalent thinking that you either have the “gift” or you don’t—isn’t true regarding your ability to improvise or play for that matter. Today’s tip covers improvising using just black notes.

Here are two chords you will need to play with your left hand

F#, A# and C# (F# chord)

F#, B and D# (B chord, which is inverted)

Spend about one minute jumping between those two chords.

Now, here is the nice thing: By using those 2 chords and nothing else in your left hand, you can play anything with your right hand if you stick only to the black notes. Anything you play will melodically sound just fine, so you can play without any stress of worrying about hitting a “clam” or a wrong note.

As unbelievable as that sounds there actually is some theory behind it, as it is based on what is called the Pentatonic Scale (but you don’t need to know any of that just to have some fun and to sound good too).

The move you improvise, the easier it will be to make something up rhythmically that sounds pretty good. To prove my point, (Scott plays the piano). Right, no matter what you play, it will sound OK. Now, I’m playing on a digital piano, so I’m going to take advantage of the fact that there is a rhythm section on this thing. I’m going to start a drum beat behind it. I’ll noodle around a bit to show you what I mean. Here we go. (Scott demonstrates improvising by playing all black notes with his right hand while playing the 2 chords in his left hand.) I can do that on and on …

By doing that I hope that you will start to feel that you are the “creator” instead of the re-creator of the music that you play. This is a good first step to use to get started into the world of improvisation in a stress free and pain free environment. I hope this will be a liberating experience for you without having to worry about what chords you are on or which notes you are playing …

What I really hope is that you continue to have fun playing piano.