How to Play Keyboard like Jordan Rudess

How to Play Keyboard like Jordan Rudess

Keyboard players aren’t usually the first to come up when thinking of rock or metal legends. But Jordan Rudess has certified rock-star status. 

Having a decorated multi-decade career is one thing, but being influential enough to develop his own plugins, samplers, and apps is a whole new ball game.

Jordan Rudess is a versatile keyboardist; that much is clear. From face-melting synth solos to nocturnal piano soundscapes, he has the entire spectrum covered. This has allowed him to play with music legends like David Bowie, Steven Wilson, Tony Levin, Dream Theater, and Liquid Tension Experiment. 

But what really puts Jordan Rudess on a unique pedestal is his ability to innovate in his space. He hasn’t reincarnated the sounds of his progenitors. He’s gained influence from them and infused them with his own flair for some contemporary playing techniques. 

This brings the question; how do you use his own sonic distillation techniques on him? How do you extract the essence of what makes Jordan Rudess sound the way he does? And how can you use those techniques yourself?

Well, you’re in luck. Because we’ve got an answer for those queries and more. Down below, you’ll find a fundamental breakdown of Jordan Rudess’s playing characteristics. These will serve as a window into his mind when tickling the ivories. 

How Jordan Rudess Developed His Playing Style

Getting a handle on how a player like Jordan Rudess is isn’t the most straightforward thing. After all, how else do you go from playing subtle harmonies to imitating foley sounds from cartoons in the breadth of a second?

As it turns out, there’s a very clear linear path that answers that question. And it has to do with Jordan’s past and foray into music. 

You see, as a young kid, Jordan Rudess was the kind of prodigy that gets showered with compliments. As early as the age of nine, his talent for music was discovered by his piano tutor. By the 2nd grade, he was already enrolled in the Julliard School of Music. It was an experience that instilled the vital inner workings of music theory for him. 

Later on, he would audition and play for bands like Blue Ocean, Ram Jam, and The Dregs. This was crucial to his playing chops and early musical foundation. It’s also the period of his life where he would find his instrument amongst himself. He would switch from classical piano to the drums, and then finally more towards the synthesizer/electronic keyboard side. 

Some of the last defining moments of his career would be with Dream Theatre. Here, he was pushed to develop nuanced techniques and compositional elements that could fit the band’s prog aesthetic. And it’s the starting point for a lot of what makes his current playing state. 

Counterpoint the Sound of Other Instruments

Keyboard players in the rock world can have a tough time finding their footing. It’s so easy to get drowned out by the sound of a distorted guitar, a booming bass, or a thrashing drum kit. They have to practically fight for some sonic headroom. Jordan Rudess manages this with his own creative method. 

Listen to any Dream Theatre song, and you’ll instantly understand how Jordan Rudess fits into the picture. He doesn’t just double the other instruments or provide them with a harmonic backdrop; he counterpoints them. 

Any time John Petrucci is busy shredding over a diminished chord, Rudess follows with his keyboard. Every one of Jordan’s notes is a calculated answer to John’s. And they play out right after each guitar note rings out. It’s almost like having a musical conversation with instruments. 

You can channel this in your own playing by visualizing notes individually in context rather than as bars of repeating phrases. It can help to look into baroque counterpoints since that is where Rudess gets his inspiration from. 

Audiate Your Playing

No matter what instrument you play, audiation is a big part of internalizing sound. No one is a bigger advocate for this concept that Jordan Rudess. 

Countless music producers have commented how Jordan launches into a humming frenzy before he plays something. And it makes sense. To structure rich harmonic content like him, you’d need your inner hearing to be polished. 

This practice is a bit like a golfer taking practice swings or a runner jogging in a fixed place. It’s all about exercising your skills mentally before you execute them. 

The next time you sit at the piano, try to imagine what you’ll be playing. You’ll have a clear idea of what it will sound like before you even put your finger on the keys. And it’s a telling characteristic of many Dream Theatre songs. 

Ground Odd Chords with Pedal Tones

Prog-rock can be littered with some oddball chord combinations. Making sense of them can be hard enough, but uniting them under common ground Is even harder. That is, of course, If you’re not a seasoned musician like Jordan Rudess.

Rudess’s immediate strategy for making non-diatonic chords is tethering them to a pedal note. This allows him to play complex chord progressions that would never fit together on a scale. 

Any time you see an Amadd9#13, an F# add9, and a Bb maj13/#11 featured on a Jordan Rudess score, you know there some pedal tone trickery happening underneath it. 

An advantage of this strategy is that it allows him to stabilize or destabilize the harmony of a piece with just one note. But it’s also an excellent recipe for contextualizing chords that might seem too busy or dense.

To play around with this concept, pick root notes for your chords from a scale. Then, add any extensions you want to them or make them chromatic. Finally, play around with the pedal tones from your original scale until you find something that sounds good. It’s both a fun exercise and a great skill to have on hand. 

Try to Sound Multi-Dimensional

Jordan Rudess has been blessed with a ton of advantages from being both a composer and a performer. But his biggest win has always been the ability to sound multi-dimensional.

You can find snippets of this capability in his work as a band member. But to truly get the intersonic Rudess experience, all you have to do is listen to any of his solo work. 

On tracks like Wired for Madness, he intersperses different sounds that cross the dimensional realm. It incorporates a variety of sounds, including classical pianos, analog synths, sawtooth strings, sine wave bass, modeled lead guitar, and more. And that’s before you even start going into the weirder combinations like steel drums and upright bass. 

But this being Jordan Rudess, the buck doesn’t stop there. He also plays with nuanced rhythms, includes 40 seconds of vocals, and features a music video complete with retro graphics and spliced footage. In his own words, the track is a “full-on eye and ear extravaganza.”

If there’s any lesson to learn from this, it’s to always look at songs through vertical and horizontal lenses. As long as there is space to layer on something or play it a little different, then there’s all the more reason to capitalize on that opportunity. 

Individualize Your Keyboard Samples

In the absence of innovation, it’s easy for a keyboard to sound old and outdated. Unlike a guitar, there are very few places for a keyboard to go in terms of tone. However, Jordan Rudess makes his own way around this problem.

Instead of limiting himself to the sounds his keyboard can make, Rudess samples his sounds. Some of his most iconic presets have included sounds from legendary synths like the Minimoog, Roland 60, Korg Wavestation, and Yamaha CS-80.

Jordan maps these sounds in interesting ways by either having a different sound for every key or every group of keys. Listen to any of his older albums, and you’ll hardly feel the veneer of a sound that’s done and dusted. 

You can do this with most modern keyboards out of the box or through a DAW and a plugin. It makes for some interesting sounds and eliminates the issue of getting too dull. Best of all, it’s a good alternative to having a multi-rack keyboard setup.  

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Be Limitless with Inspirations

Jordan Rudess is a man of many sounds. But he’s also a man of many inspirations. And he makes full use of them when playing the keys. In fact, he uses them to break the limits of his playing.

Having toured the world of classical and modern music, Jordan has plenty of tools in his belt. From the classical world, he’s drawn to the likes of Mozart, Bach, Chopin, and Debussy. On the more contemporary side of things, his inspirations span Pink Floyd, Rick Wakeman, and Richard Emerson.

All this has a very apparent effect on his playing. He’s able to effortlessly master both sides of the coin; a classical pianist with a refined sound and an electrotonic tech wiz with plenty of ways to modulate a note.

When he’s feeling really adventurous, he’ll even throw in some ethnic music influences. It’s not uncommon to find a Jordan Rudess track with a break section that has a ragtime feel or a Latin rumba. Not even the sound of a cranked electric guitar is safe from the hands of Jordan Rudess’s fingers approximating it on the keyboard. 

Be sure to explore all your avenues for sound before formulating musical ideas. After all, when you live in an age where the majority of the repertoire is already explored, even the slightest form of musical expression can make the difference. 

Harmonize Altered Fourths

Harmony is one of Jordan Rudess’s favorites modes of expression. But it pays to know where a lot of that harmony is based. If you plan on getting his playing habits down, that’s one to watch out for.

Jordan tends to favor harmonies that have a 4th or 5th as their tonal base. But most of the time, you’ll find an altered 4th as the common thread in the harmonies. It’s his own little way playing outside the realm of common tonality.

The most surprising thing about this trick is that he’s able to use it to harmonize odd sounds. His Stravinsky-Esque impression allows him to make diminished and augmented chords as musical as anything from the diatonic realm. 

It’s a nice trick to fall back to if you’re ever unsure about how to approach your harmony. Using the altered 4th as your lowest note is enough to send instant Rudess vibes through your playing. 

Use Time Signatures Effectively

Jordan Rudess’s music exemplifies the use of odd signatures. They’re not only a vehicle to drive a wonky time feel, but they’re also essential to add cadential elements to the song. 

Revenge of Sithravisnky is one of Rudess’s infamous orchestral pieces to use this technique. It cycles through sequences of 6/8, 7/8, and 8/8 time signature throughout the track. When the piece is made to be expressive, the length of each bar gets progressively longer. And then movement Is accented by shortening them. 

But it’s when the compound time signature kicks in that the piece picks up. The strings and woodwinds play different sub-divisions of notes alongside each other. These create an inner cadence within the larger rhythm of the song.

A great way to put this into practice is to split your left and right playing into different time signatures. Start with something like a repeating 4 note melody on the right hand with accompaniment on the left. Accent each quarter note beat of the meter like playing three chords on the left hand and three notes on the right. Soon you’ll have an impromptu 3/4 meter going. 

Closing Words

Jordan Rudess has no shortage of tricks up his sleeve. He’s a music-making wizard with plenty to say with just a few notes. From his extensive playing techniques to his smallest musical nuances, they’re all straight A’s. All it takes is ingraining some of the musical aspects above in your playing to start serving keyboard masterpieces- The Rudess Style.