Do You Need To Play Piano To Be A Great Arranger?
When I got started with music, I never touched the piano. My first instrument was cornet (thanks to an upbringing in the salvation army) and then along the way bass was added and cornet changed to tuba. Not once during my upbringing did I take any sort of piano lessons and interestingly, I actually started writing and arranging before I ever really touched the instrument. It wasn’t until university when I started to learn the piano, mainly because it was part of the required curriculum to graduate. I thoroughly enjoyed the process but not enough to really pursue the instrument further outside of the class assignments. I was too busy writing and playing bass to carve out the necessary time to actually learn piano properly. And in reality, I’ve never tried to learn the piano since nor have I found myself in a position where it has been needed.
Now depending on your background, that last statement might give you the impression that my writing may be subpar due to my lack of ability on the piano. However, I did put in the time to understand how to actually write, whether that be voicings, orchestration, composition etc, none of which require the ability to play piano to actually develop. Simply being good at the piano doesn’t make you a great writer and there is more to the art than being comfortable with playing voicings on the instrument. There are also limitations with the piano that can actually create problems for writing for other instruments too. The crucial realization is that the piano is simply a tool in the writer’s arsenal, one which can be useful but isn’t essential, and you don’t need to look far to see a whole lot of successful writers that don’t know how to play piano, let alone read music.
Once upon a time, prior to digital notation and DAWs, piano was the primary playback device for writers. If you wanted to get any sort of immediate feedback, piano was the easiest out of all instruments to hear fully realized chords and voicings in real time. However, it should be noted that this can also be done on other chordal instruments such as guitar too, albeit slightly less conventional from a jazz arranging perspective. As such, piano became almost essential for writers because it was the only real way to hear your music played back without a live ensemble. Interestingly, even during this time, various reputable composers had differing abilities on the instrument.
Notably, Irving Berlin is known to have been not the best pianist and would only play and compose in the key of F#/Gb major. He had a specialized piano which could transpose to other keys, similar to the transpose button on modern day keyboards (I imagine it was quite the mechanical feat to have an acoustic piano do it), but he would still only play in one key the entire time. It would be the equivalent of only feeling comfortable with playing in C major (all the white keys), something which most people learn pretty quickly if they take introductory piano lessons. Yet despite Berlin’s approach, he is seen as one of the great composers of that era and many of his compositions have gone on to still be popular today. So if composers like Berlin were able to still get by a century ago it’s not hard to believe that writers today might be able to as well, especially given the technology at our disposal.
These days we have a lot more options at our fingertips, many of which actually better represent a composer's intention than the piano. A lot of people now choose to compose entirely in DAWs such as Logic and Pro Tools where it’s possible to hear samples of real instruments play the lines you come up with. While the piano is great at giving real time feedback on voicings and melodies, it doesn’t take into account the various timbres, ranges, and registers of the instruments you may be writing for. Digital notation software and DAWs on the other hand get you much closer to the sounds produced in a live setting which can then help inform your creative decisions a bit better than the piano. No option is perfect and they all come with issues, but now that we live in an age where we can access playback devices that can replicate our intentions more accurately, it makes sense why fewer professionals these days are relying on piano.
While there are many reputable people I can show as an example in this situation (just take a look at the entire pop music industry), one person who stands out is my friend Tim Davies. I’m sure Tim has some ability on the piano, but he primarily works in DAWs and digital notation programs these days, and if you have any doubts about his ability just look at his long list of credits. He’s received multiple grammy nominations for big band albums he’s written, and outside of arranging he is primarily known as one of the go-to orchestrators in Hollywood, having written for so many A list films and video games it is silly to name them. Go check out his bio if you want to get a better idea of his accomplishments (https://www.timusic.net/bio/).
Don’t get me wrong, knowing how to play piano will never be a bad idea, it just isn’t essential in order to be a successful composer/arranger these days. Everyone has their own preferences, some use tools like DAWs while others prefer more traditional routes like the piano. Whatever works for you is the best option and as long as you are happy with the music you write, then that’s all that matters.
No one should feel guilty about how they choose to write music and in reality, listeners don’t care if you wrote a hit song by plonking away on an instrument or by any other means. It only starts being an issue if you aren’t happy with how you write music or want to be inspired by exploring how others go about the craft. The world is evolving and how we make music is too. Make use of the resources available and don’t be afraid to try something unconventional, maybe it will help shift your creative process into something better. Just remember, everything in this world was new at one point and before the creation of the piano there were other ways of writing music too. Innovation isn’t bad even if it might make us feel uncomfortable, embrace that feeling and you might find yourself in a place you never could have dreamed.
Until next time,
Toshi