The Carpenters - For All We Know (piano cover)

Have to make a connection, and a real unicept here!

For all I know, maybe Karen (Carpenter) was taken seldom seriously as the skillful drummer she was actually.  Perhaps honestly since the time of one Gene Krupa all drummers have had to bear some sort of a stigma or another.  I feel some since I'm myself also a drummer, and one of a very few namely at this forum.  With Karen though it was internalized as anorexia, while with Gene Krupa it was his heroin drug addiction.  With me too, it was a drug habit, now ended, thankfully.  Admittedly though I as a young starving artist may had felt er experienced some spirituality, because always I was an out of work hungry jazz drummer.  (Smile.)  Sadly, it was possibly just drugs.

About Karen however, fans lauded mostly over vocal chops.  Which along with an ample complement of drum chops from Karen did indeed appear as angelic as any I'd myself personally imagined ever earthy possible...

Where I live, nearby the University of California Long Beach (UCLB) has the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center, while closer to me the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) has The Herb Alpert School of Music named after Herb Alpert of the famed Tijuana Brass of course.  Now my location is much nearer than those two (2) schools are to the school University of Southern California, exactly where my ex heads one of its music departments.  (Before, she had an office off of La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles.  While entering this text as I think of it, another a female friend of mine {few I got} is the assistant to the dean at the UCLA school of music.) 

The Carpenters and Herb Alpert both recorded their albums respectfully under the A&M Records recording label.  That was founded by Herb himself along with Jerry Moss in 1962.  Others from Joe Cocker and Sérgio Mendes to Quincy Jones and Carole King recorded within A&M.  Man, even Melvin Van Peebles did the soundtrack to his famous landmark er ground breaking film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song at A&M; I saw his coming and going there, when the recording studios were at La Brea off of Sunset Blvd.  (I may had missed all of it entirely, had my high school teacher at the time, chosen someone else another other than me to attend the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) sponsored seminar that then was held at A&M.  Whatever had prompted the teacher {who was to choose me} is completely a mystery to me.  He was very Italian and thought of Chopin as only one of history's first jazz musicians.  And, he certainly couldn't have known Mario Van Peebles, Melvin's son who later directed New Jack City was ever an early childhood friend to me, since Mario and I did play as four-year olds accompanied and brought by the parents his dad and my family to the beach at Santa Monica, somewhere along its stretch.  {It was back when quite someways away Pacific Ocean Park [POP] was a very popular attraction and amusement park there.})

I about the song rendition from your video, have to give perhaps some tough love here.  As I see it, it was choppy, very choppy.

Although you play on a musical instrument obviously other than a woodwind or brass, you may need to look at a wind or brass player's performance and see if you can pick up any technical pointers from such.  If you will, identify with the players, as much you can.  If you will notice too, orchestra members have often to breathe along with whatever music that's sometimes before them.  They breath in time between phrases and passages.  Even some parts of a score show specifically and exactly where throughout the piece precisely the performing instrumentalist is to take his breaths.  It is where he is sometimes to stop and take a breath or ever how many indicated, even if he has himself to mark his sheet music.

I'm no formally trained pianist taught specifically on a piano.  But, as a drummer who improvises with other musicians often I wait when a soloist is finishing a phrase and come with a type of accent which might had detracted during but emphasized only afterwards (that is) at the end of the phrase.

Now I'm hardly trying to dictate what all of your sentiments had ought to be!