JPF Home Page Forums Musician Gear and Techniques Keyboard and Piano Forum Randy Newmon

Hello everyone my question may be elementary or it may not be but here it is.
In Randy Newmons song "You've got a friend in me"
What style is he playing on the piano?
The reason I'm asking is because some of the chord progessions
and chords move me.
And some of these types of chords and progressions appear to be showing up in black contemporary gospel music.
I would like to add some of those colors to my own music.
Thanks in advance everyone

Randy Newman is one of my all time favourites! I love a lot of his songs and albums. His latest "Harps and Angels" is a great one!

He has hos own rolling style of playing the piano, but I don't think there are any agreeable official terms for his particular playing of that song. If I were to describe it, I'd say he plays a mix of ragtime or New Orleans style piano (because of the rolling technique), and Broadway style (very little use of the sustain pedal, and progressions we know from jazz standards with a lot of embellishments).

"You've got a friend in me" is a film piece, and his Broadway sounding piano suits that genre like paintings on a wall. I think the fact that Newman is able to combine pop and broadway is part of why he's so sought after in Hollywood..

Thanks,
I guess I'll just study the chords to try and reproduce parts of that sound. I've already discovered the use for Dim and Dom7ths flat 5 "we will work it out".

Deacon,

You can buy the score from Musicroom or other online sheet music stores for about 5$, if you can't listen it off.

Another way is to import the song into your DAW, and get the notes from there, or have a program like Melodyne make a midi file of the audio.

I think there's a few programmes out there that'll do the chord analysis as well.

Basicly it's a shuffle. The chords under the title hook would be:

I Eb Bb7(#5) I Eb9 I
You've got a friend in me
I Ab Adim7 I Eb/Bb Eb I
You've got a friend in me

Sorry this site compress the spaces, so I can't show you excactly where the chords are supposed to be ('me' is first word in the second bar of each line), but there are 4 bars where the title hook are sung twice with these chords..

Thanks again

Randy Newman is also one of my all time favorites and has an instantly recognizable style which he has nurtured for a long time. I am not a piano educator, so I can't answer your question in technical terms, but it's nice to hear from fellow fans of his!

Brian

I bet Mike Dunbar could offer additional info to Magne's.