Whether you’re a fan or not, I strongly recommend that you learn to play “I’ll Show You” by Justin Bieber on piano. I haven’t always been a Bieber fan myself. In fact, there was a time not too long ago when his voice annoyed me! But his recent album “Purpose” had some undeniably catchy and fun pop songs. And beats! The production is top notch, thanks to some of his featured friends, DJ Skrillex, Diplo, and Usher just to name a few.
I’d already taught a few sections from a few other songs off “Purpose.” However, I wanted to teach “I’ll Show You” for a few specific musical reasons (other than that its a relatively easy Justin Bieber song on piano). Let’s dive in!
It’s challenging to play in time!
The beat is slow, but the rhythms in the melody can be quite fast and syncopated. This poses a difficult challenge for anyone trying to play this “in time” (meaning without slowing down or speeding up at all). Because the Playground Sessions app uses backing tracks that sound like the real song instead of metronomes or MIDI files, I thought this would be the ideal format to practice these tricky right-hand rhythms on top of the slow beat.
Triplets vs. duplets…
The sections I taught for this tune were the Pre Chorus and the Chorus. The reason I chose to teach 2 sections instead of the normal 1 is that the melodic rhythms between the 2 are very different. In the Pre Chorus, you need to be able to subdivide each beat into even 3’s (triplets). But in the Chorus, that changes: we need to subdivide by 2 or 4 (even 8th notes or 16th notes). The pulse stays the same (the quarter-note beat), but the subdivisions change from one section to the next. So, this song poses a GREAT rhythmic challenge: keep the left hand chords moving exactly the same, but subdivide by triplets in the Pre Chorus then switch to subdividing by 16th notes in the Chorus. Think you can get a 100% score in the app on this one??
Now it’s your turn to play “I’ll Show You” by Justin Bieber
Justin Bieber may not be who you think of when looking for the best composer or musician to study while learning the piano, but there are way more gems in his music than it seems at first glance. If you love using your favorite songs to learn the piano, come check out “I’ll Show You” at the Playground Sessions YouTube channel.
If you like what you see you can download our app to learn the rest of this song with our interactive sheet music.
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