There are some pieces of music that every pianist wants to play, and it turns out that, in 2023, one of those might be Dr Dre’s Still Dre.
New research by Ukulele World indicates that the song, released in 1999, is one of the top searches among Amerians looking to learn tunes on the piano. The track’s iconic riff was composed by Scott Storch, who explained how he came up with it when he spoke to Rap Money in 2022.
“I was thinking all night about something like, kind of like a piano piece that’s wrong but ‘right’, you know what I mean?” said Storch. “Where it’s kind of off-beat, and I was like ‘oh shit, it goes kind of with this drum pattern’. And I started playing ‘bling bling bling bling’... the notes were kind of like, I was playing it sloppy on purpose, and Dre just ran in the room like ‘That’s it man! That’s the fucking thing right there!”
Still Dre has an average of almost 20,000 monthly ‘how to play’ searches among pianists in the US, but there are songs that are even more popular. Jingle Bells tops the list with an average of more than 28,000 searches - weighted heavily towards late November and December, we assume - followed by Beethoven’s perennial favourite Fur Elise. John Legend’s All Of Me sneaks into third place, with Still Dre and JVKE’s Golden Hour rounding out the top five.
• 8 easy piano songs every beginner should learn: The Beatles, Coldplay, The Weeknd and more
Taking into account searches among cellists, guitarists, pianists, violinists and ukulele players, though, the most in-demand song to learn appears to be Harold Arlen’s Somewhere Over The Rainbow. That said, more than 39,000 of its 48,000 searches come from team ukulele.
The top search term for budding guitarists, meanwhile, is Oasis’s Wonderwall. However, given the number of times we’ve heard it played wrong, either there are some dodgy lessons out there or a lot of people aren’t paying attention…
