Want to learn how to sound like The Piano Guys? Today you’re going to learn a simple trick to sound like The Piano Guys using only three notes.
If you don’t know The Piano Guys, they’re an amazing piano and cello duo who got famous on YouTube for taking grand pianos and putting them on top of a mountain or out in the jungle and playing amazing music.
While it’s really cool to bring a grand piano in the middle of the jungle, they really got famous, in my opinion, because people really connected with their sound which is an incredibly beautiful combination of piano and cello.
The trick I’m going to tell you about isn’t going to make you sound exactly like The Piano Guys, there’s a lot that goes into their music, but it will get you closer to that Piano Guys sound.
You can use this if you’re playing in a band, if you’re playing with a singer, or, where I hear it all the time, on worship teams. If you ever want to play on a worship team at your church this really is a great pattern to use. Let’s get into it!
The Pattern
Like I mentioned before, this pattern only contains three notes – C G C. That’s it. Jon Schmidt of The Piano Guys uses this a lot, especially in the big parts of the song, the main course, where the cello and everything is playing underneath it.
I like to play some left hand in addition to these notes with the right hand, I demonstrate that in this video, but just know if you’re playing in a band or on a worship team you don’t even have to play the left hand because the base player or whoever else is playing is going to be playing the left hand part.
So I’m going to be playing the chords C, G, Am, F, but you can play any chords in C major and it’s going to work. For the right hand, the pattern goes top, bottom, middle, bottom – that’s it. It repeats over and over again.
Once you get that sequence faster, it sounds amazing. You hear what I mean in this video. You can also play it an octave up if you want too.
I hear this all the time in The Piano Guys’ music. They don’t necessarily always play this exact pattern, sometimes it’s a variation on the pattern. I want to tell you about a few easy variations you can try out once you’ve gotten the main pattern down.
The first pattern is what I call cycling down. Instead of top, bottom, middle, bottom, it’s the same three notes but we just go top, middle, bottom, top, middle, bottom. Boom! Easy variation.
We have another one that goes the opposite direction – bottom, middle, top, bottom, middle, top, bottom, middle.
In reality, if you want to get creative with it, you can take these three notes in any order and make up your own pattern. It’s pretty much always going to sound good as long as you use those three notes.
If you like that pattern, the sound and vibe you got from it, I actually have another pattern for the left hand called the “Secret Sauce” left hand pattern and you can hear it here. While it sounds really hard it’s actually easy to learn. People in the comments have said before they’ve learned it in a day or even an hour.
Finally, if you’re really serious about learning piano, I do have a free Become a Piano Superhuman Course available which you should definitely check out too!