Hello!
I can sing and accompany myself, but only with very basic accompaniments. I'm looking to make my piano style a little more Ben Foldsish, and I was wondering if anyone had any advice for making accompaniments in rock piano a little more sparkly and rhythmic. However, don't go to viruoso on me because I need a starting point with this.

Hi - I see no one has replied at all - so I will change that. I listened to a couple of ben folds numbers on youtube. It is a fairly straightforward style. He arpeggiates the chords, puts in suspensions to give some interest and tension, and plays the left and right hand to give rhythmic interest - a bit like playing the bongos:-)
How do you get more like that??
Listen to lots.. including other rock-piano vocalists.. especially the good ones eg Carole King and even Elton John..
There are quite a few rock piano tutors which give you some ideas.
Play along with numbers you like - get the sheet music and then try for the sounds you like.
Put something on youtube and ask for suggestions..
Ummm - any help??

hey, thanks for replying. It does help. I probabaly need to be a better listener. Where I get hung up is knowing when to try to come up with some thing, or go and buy the music. I want the skill of being able to make something sound lush without having it all written out for me.

I guess your approach should be to try to come up with something - and if you can't, you know it is time to get some help - which could be go buy the music, or could be a range of other things. Maybe it just happens for some people, but for most that I know, the route to developing some sort of competence has included a lot of input. Listening is perhaps the most important part of it - and youtube is fantastic for material. A major help is to get a good teacher - there have got to be plenty of those in New Orleans!!! tom

I'm less familiar with Ben Folds, but for rock piano in general, try to get familiar with Floyd Cramer's style, since he has influenced Billy Joel, Bruce Hornsby, Elton John, and other top players. His licks are based around using scale steps 2 and 5 as grace notes to 3 and 6 respectively in the pentatonic scale and generally staying pentatonic for melody work (the major scale with the 4 or 7 scale steps). This aligns nicely with the straight ahead basic chords you'll see in rock.

Hal Leonard publishes these Signature Series books for a few artists.

http://www.amazon.com/Ben-Folds-Five-Key...01796532&sr=8-1

Instead of just sheet music, there are descriptions of the song styles and a CD with slowed down and full speed parts of each song.

I'm still at least 5 years away from pulling off Philosophy.

GregF

I would still get the easy to hard level of the song you want to play (fake music, chord and lead line),and try it first to get the melody, get the changes down and voice the chord in the right hand to be close to the melody, so you can incorporate your melody in the chord.
Your left hand is the bass and guitar player, so mix it up, play a little bass, then play a chord. The more you do it, the more you find that you are covering a whole group with your 10 fingers. All from chords.