Like me Greg Howlett was becoming increasingly frustrated to find that piano improvisational DVD courses only offered you an overhead view of what the pianist was playing. No real concrete information and theory examples to help you apply these same techniques to whatever song you chose to play. Mostly just fancy playing and a lot of wishful dreaming on the part of the student.

But unlike me Greg Howlett has the skills and education to provide church pianists with a piano improvisational product designed to give you those tools you need to upgrade your Sunday morning performance on all songs not just one.

As a very talented church pianist himself (listen to some of the audios and view the clip at greghowlett.com) Greg understands the needs of church pianists.

Enter Inspirational Improvisation: A Nine Step Approach to Becoming a Versatile Church Pianist. A piano lesson program Greg has designed specifically for church pianists to not just to show you how great one hymn is when improvised upon but to teach you the concepts of improvisation to apply to any hymn or song you wish.

Inspirational Improvisation is designed to be used as if you were taking a piano class. Nine lessons equal nine months of getting your hands, and ears familiar with the concepts needed to improvise at the piano the songs and hymns you play each Sunday from your hymnal or songbook.

This piano DVD program is ideal for intermediate to advanced piano players who may have the basic concepts of piano playing down but want to improve their sound and know how improvise songs. You will learn music theory and how to apply it. In other words Theory and Application.

What you get

• 5 DVDs with a total of  six hours of piano improvisational lessons.
• An accompanying booklet outlining the concepts in each lesson to reinforce what you are hearing.  And your homework assignment for each concept.

With many of my learn to play piano courses while I may have learned to play the particular song the pianist performed I was rarely if ever given the concepts behind what was being played. And if I was it was only in relation to that one song so unless I knew my theory backwards and forwards it was difficult to translate to the songs I really wanted to improvise on. This was extremely frustrating.

That is what differentiates Inspirational Improvisation. Greg has taken the steps to show the why and the how of improvisational concepts so I can apply it to any song I want to improvise.

Starting with lesson one Greg Howlett’s lesson approach is to familiarize you with several of the most common complex chords used in Praise and Worship music. These are the chords that add feeling and depth to songs of praise and in order to apply them when you want and to whatever song you want you need to become familiar with them.

In lesson two you begin to learn how to apply improvising techniques to songs of your own choosing.  You learn how to transform those tired old triad (3) note chords you’ve been leaning on too long into fuller richer variations of 7th chords.

Then the fun begins. Thank you Greg you have created a program that is badly needed!  Greg begins to show you how and where you might change out some of the regular chords in the song of your choice. How and where! Where in (insert hymn name here ) can I change the chord to give a richer deeper sound? You will start to learn the rules and ideas behind how songs are improvised on.

After each lesson you are presented with a homework assignment to be worked on each night. While you may only need to view the lesson once it would make sense to watch it several times during the month of the lesson you are in.

It is recommended to stay on a lesson for a full month. It is this amount of time that allows you to not just learn but become very familiar with the concept you are learning and therefore be able to use it at any time.

These improvisational techniques and sounds will work well on older hymns and contemporary Praise and Worship songs mostly. While some pianists may look for styles such as Black Gospel and Southern Gospel Inspirational Improvisation is not designed to teach you a certain style but instead how to develop your own.

This isn’t an overnight piano improvisation program. I doubt anyone can teach you to play with feeling and understanding in 24 hours. As a church pianist if you can devote 30 minutes of your day to bettering your piano playing and you know you want to change the sound of that old hymn(insert name here) then this program is for you.

This is not a program for beginning pianists. You already should be familiar with basic music theory, all 12 keys of the Circle of Fifths and be able to play out of a hymnal.

I’ve been working with Inspirational Improvisation for a few weeks now and I really like and appreciate the way this program is laid out.

Each night after dinner is my “piano school” time. If I need to refresh I watch the part of the DVD I need to review before moving to the piano. I spend about 15 minutes going over the homework before moving on to other items in my practice time.

Greg goes over each concept in detail. The lessons are effective and I’m already getting some extra comments in church even though I’ve been disciplined and keeping myself with lesson one until a month passes. Meaning I’m only on lesson one and it’s having an impact.

I highly recommend this piano course. I used to look for piano workshops covering just these topics. If you are still a struggling church pianist and you would like to improve your piano performance each Sunday this Piano Course is for you.

You can purchase it directly from Greg’s website here.