Arpeggio Drills For Montunos
In this lesson we explore a range of exercises that are useful for students who have never played montunos or other Cuban piano styles.
These exercises include chordal drills, arpeggio-based drills, and drills which contain both chordal elements and arpeggios. The drills and exercises covered in this lesson can be used as a warm-up routine and the patterns can also be applied when improvising over montunos as we will explore later in this module.
Chordal Drills
We start with simple chordal drills outlining the diatonic triads of the C major scale. We explore a number of variations on this drill such as inverting the right hand triad shapes to create a distance of a third between our left hand root notes on our right hand chords.
Arpeggio-Based Drills
Arpeggios play a important role in Cuban piano improvisation and the construction of montunos. Arpeggios patterns follow the outline of the underlying harmony whilst providing more rhythmic possibilities compared to chord based fills. This makes arpeggios particularly effective for improvising in highly-syncopated Cuban piano styles.
Lesson Downloads
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Chord Based Exercises File Type: pdf -
Arpeggio Based Exercises File Type: pdf
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Arpeggios with Doubled Notes File Type: pdf
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Combine Chords & Arpeggios File Type: pdf
Related Lessons
Learn how to improvise over montunos that can be used when playing with a bass player and also when playing montunos in a solo piano context.
We explore right hand chordal techniques built from the 3rd, the 5th, and the 6th of each chord, and also how to create contrary motion.
In this lesson we explore the most common montuno patterns that you hear in Salsa and early Cuban music from the early 1940s.
Practice Tips
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In addition to being a useful practice exercise, these arpeggio patterns also sound great in performance and when improvising over montuno patterns.
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Once the basic patterns have been mastered, experiment with the timing, accents, and rhythmic phrasing as Elio demonstrates.
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Pay attention to Elio's accented notes which are an important stylistic element when playing Cuban piano styles.
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The accents create the motion when playing against the clave and cascara patterns that we will explore in the next lessons of this module.
just wanted to mention what looks like a copy/paste error on the Chords And Arpeggios drills page. The second example correctly states in the video to begin w/ right hand on the 3rd of chord. But in the pdf looks to be a ‘paste’ of the just covered example for starting on the Root.
Otherwise I am very glad this section has been started, and with a very approachable presentation of winning the battle with the ever challenging montuno form. Have had my go arounds with this form, and haven’t yet seen it through to live in the comfortable realm.
Random chance would have it my teacher has been putting songs like A night in Tunsia formatted as montuno (some with Tumbao), which I can use all the help on I can acquire.
thanks,
Michael
Hi Michael 👋
Thanks for letting me know about this and I hope you’re well!
Which PDF file are you referring to?
I see that there are 2 PDFs for the chord and arpeggio exercises which mention “starting on the 3rd”.
I see that for the 2nd notation example in both PDFs, the right hand starts on the 3rd of each chord, but perhaps I’m missing something.
If you can let me know which file you are referring to I will investigate.
Talk soon,
Hayden
ps. yes it’s great to add a new style to the website and we will be adding to and extending the Cuban piano section in the near future.
Hayden
my appologies. It wasn’t until I printed out all the pdf’s did I notice I had misread page 1. It seems the pdf’s are not presented in the same timeline as the video. All in all, I should be more reserve in my judgement.
I agree this a great addition to the breadth of music formats on the site. Perhaps the teacher will contemplate future lessons that teach us how to montuno-ize some jazz standards….
Thanks for the great content
Michael
Hi Michael.
No problem – I agree the downloads should follow the same order as they are demonstrated in the lesson.
My notation/transcription creation skills are not the best, and so we have a transcriber who compiles these PDFs and so I will let him know to make sure that the examples appear in chronological order in relation to the video demonstrations.
Also I agree that it would be great to show how to apply these montuno patterns over the harmonic changes of jazz standards.
As we add more courses on cuban piano styles we can have some courses that focus more on tunes, some focusing on exercises, rhythm, improvisation etc…
We do have 5 demonstration lessons which will be added to this course, they cover the following tunes:
Cuban Descrgas,
Con Poco Coco,
La Mulata Rumbera,
All The Things You Are,
Decidete
I’ll will get these added asap.
Talk soon,
Hayden