Runs & Fills: How to Add Real Emotion to Your Piano!
We’ve all heard pianists make us drool with musical jealousy when they play, using a toolbox full of lightning-fast runs and clever fills that make us cry out for more. I well remember hearing Errol Garner play “I’ll Remember April” when I was 14 years old. He had no idea a piano like this could be played, and was absolutely fascinated by all the interesting and exciting runs and fillers that he added to his improvisation to those standards.
If you’re like me, you’d love to learn how to “fill in the blanks” with scale snippets, chords, broken chords, etc. Techniques like eighth note, sixteenth note, 32 note, triplet fills, and many combinations, some so fast that you can’t even see what notes are being played. Techniques such as “cascade races”, the fabulous “professional races”, the exciting “tremolo races” and much more. Learning to “fill it up” with runs and fills is sure to take your piano playing to the next level.
After listening to countless pianists of all genres, I compiled a list of six types of runs and fills they commonly use:
1. “Cocktail” races: the ultra-fast races used by the great “show” pianists. One-handed runs, two-handed runs, open-octave runs, tremolo runs, waterfall runs, and more. It was made famous by names like Eddy Duchin, Carman Caballero, Liberace, etc., but it was also used tastefully by many others, such as Roger Williams and many “pop” pianists.
2. Embellishments – Mordents, inverted mordents, trills, turns, tremolos, grace notes, glissandos, etc. These are the “finesse” techniques that give your piano class and grace. Virtually NO amateur pianist uses them, so the pianist learning them is being placed in a class generally reserved for professional pianists.
3. Piano Tricks – How to make your oriental piano sound, or sound like a drum or a music box? A bell? Latin? Country?
4. Evangelistic runs: These are the octave runs and fillers used by the great gospel pianists of the past and present, such as Rudy Atwood and other evangelical pianists.
5. Jazz and blues performances: use of the “blues scale” up and down on the keyboard, blue note cracks, slides, etc. These performances are very useful not only in jazz and R&B, but also in “black gospel” (I hate to use that term because it sounds racist, but people use it to describe a certain type of gospel music, so I reluctantly use the term. .. but only in the sense of the word), fusion and many rock-pop songs.
6. Fillings in abundance: filling an empty measure with a counter melody; creating an intro; creating an ending; developing “course changes” as well as chromatic fills, fills based on the Dorian and Lydian scales and other “church mode” scales used by contemporary jazz and fusion artists.
It’s exciting for any pianist to imagine himself playing those LIGHTNING FAST runs up and down on the keyboard in time for the next chord, or playing CASCADING RUNS down on the keyboard for a CASCADE of wonderful sounds, not to mention using mordents, inverted mordents, trills, turns, tremolos, grace notes, glissandos, fills galore, cocktail piano performances, plus gospel-style performances and blues scale-based “blues runs”!
Are some or all of these techniques worth the effort to learn? It certainly has been for me, but each pianist will have to make that judgment for himself.