12 thoughts on “Tim Gross playing “Bennie and the Jets” at a Jam Session”

  1. How do you do that? Tim you play so fluently; how does a professional musician like yourself make piano movements AT SPEED from your conscious (learning), mind, to the (permanent) subconscious mind, and convert them to, ( physical autopilot)? There’s the magic. I’ve purchased at least a dozen piano courses with the hope of discovering what happens to trigger processing physically what my mind does mentally. The closest I’ve come to understanding the process is a quote I read that said, “Practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect,” Meaning; play accurately at the slowest speed to allow my muscle memory to remember the right way. Otherwise, playing at speed for the sake of speed will result in remembering errors; mistakes etc. What are you thoughts Tim? Looking for guidance here. By the way, your course is the best so far as understanding what’s happening when I play. As far as the brain and mind, I think I may need to speak to a neurologist. LOL!

    1. Theoretically I want to make a little video showing the timing of that song so I’m going to remind myself to do that later…

      Bennie and the Jets is a harder than normal song to play/sing at the same time because it’s more percussive and there are a lot of “pushes” where the chord plays on the “and” instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, but *overall* the right hand is playing chords on the 1, 2, 3, 4 beats, and the left hand is playing octaves on the 1, 3, beats, and that’s a very standard rhythm (ignoring the pushes)

      The chords are somewhat complicated, but they can be learned, and you can practice singing/playing it by tapping your hands on a table while singing, playing quarter notes 1,2,3,4, with your right hand, and 1,3 with your left hand…. Once you can sing the song tapping that rhythm, you can finally start tapping the off-tempo pushes on the table while singing it, and at that point you just swap out the table for a keyboard and play the actual chords. 🙂

      I hope to do a video soon explaining that better, but for now that’s the basics of what I’d say in the video. 🙂 Hope that’s somewhat helpful for a start.

  2. That was absolutely and positively the best rendition of Bennie and the Jets I’ve heard besides Elton himself. Brilliant…I can’t wwait to play as such…Tom

  3. OMG!!!!! That was great …. looking forward to seeing the Elton John in our course ..
    and the fact that the clapper May have been off beat now n again it didn’t bother you at all.
    You are the most talented person I have ever met !!! Thanks for sharing !!

  4. you have a great voice tim! & do love elton’s songs, any chance there’s some elton songs in you’re training videos?.

    chris

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