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Blues Piano Lessons - Chapter 11

Text-only transcription of this piano lesson:

This is section 2 of 4 taken from the introduction to Chapter 11 from "Blues for Piano and Keyboard".

(continued from previous piano lessons video) ...and now you're ready for musical skill #2. So you go back to the video vault, and take a look at blues scale #2 for the key of A. You'll see instead of half scales, it's a full 1 octave blues scale. Let's take a look at that video from the video vault. Skill #2, key of A full 1 octave scale.

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Then you'll fire up the blues band backing tracks again and you go back to the key of A, the slow version. And you play musical skill #2 along with it. It would look something like this...

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I just throw a little flourish at the very end of each one of those piano blues scales. Did you notice that? Let me show you...

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This is kind of a little extra rhythmic jump I like to throw in there on the keyboard at the end of each piano scale. You'll see me do that in a lot of the piano lessons video. Okay, we're going on now - and we've spent the afternoon at your house and you can see where this whole thing is going. It's going to get more and more aggressive on the keyboard, and let me just remind you, you don't have to move this quickly.

If you stay at skill #1 for a month or musical skills #1 and #2 for a couple of months, it doesn't matter. Just as long as you're always increasing your musical skills on the piano - always pushing the envelope of your musicianship.

But this point, we've been here for the afternoon and you say, "Hey Dave! I want to move on musical skill #3".

Skill #3 - you find it in the video vault and we're going to look at it. It's called "The two octave scale". Let's take a look at musical skill #3 from the video vault, key of A. We've got to zoom out the video a little bit so we can show you musical skill #3, it's a two octave scale. The right hand looks like this. . .

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Watch the Video Version of this piano lesson (top of this page)

Did you notice that the two octave piano scale was exactly the same as the one octave piano scale except for the transition between the octaves? Rewind that and take a look at it again if you need to. It's time to crank up the rubber band again and get them going in the key of A, the slow version. We're going to play musical skill #3 against the blues band backing tracks.

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If you've never played blues scales on the piano before and this your introduction to them, don't worry. If you're thinking, "Oh! man this ridiculously hard!", remember at this point, if you're working every day to the point where you can get both hands going over two octaves - that's super aggressive! If you look at this overview and you think, "I don't know if I'll ever be able to play that on the piano", take my word for it, you will be able to play this on the piano.

Years ago, I wasn't able to do this. But eventually you'll be able to play all of these scales on the piano. Especially if you'll really dig in and practice.

There were years in my early college years, when I was majoring in music and I really wasn't taking things too seriously. Then I saw a great piano player and I thought, "My goodness! If he can do that, I can do it".

I remember I was talking to another musician about this. He was saying how discouraging it was when we saw that great piano player that was much better then either of us. I said to him, "You can either be discouraged or encouraged when you see a musician that's much better than you."

You have the option to say, "I'll never be that good on the piano", or you can be inspired and say - "Wow! look what God's doing through that person. Maybe I can aspire to play the piano as well (or better!) than them." So I want to encourage you and say, "You can do it! If you've got 10 fingers and you got the desire to play the blues on the piano, dig in and God will give you the desires of your heart." That's what He promised. So I want to encourage you, dig in and you can do it.

There's actually a few more musical skills here that we're going to look into. The "Three Octave Scale", the "Broken Octave Scale" - that's a lot of fun. And then the "Turn-around Scale". The last musical skill is putting all this stuff together.. By that time, you are ready to be the big funk daddy of the piano (or queen funk momma!) whatever the case may be.

Now the video vault does not contain any videos at all for this musical skill - skill #3. Here's why: The Three Octave Scale is exactly the same as the Two Octave Scale but just it has another octave on top. So there's no video in the video vault for this particular musical skill. However, just for the sake of explaining things really clearly I want to show you what it looks like. We're going to look at the 3 Octave scale right now even though it doesn't show up at all in the video vault.

Remember, the 3 octave scale is the same as the 2 octave scale with just an extra octave up on top. Makes sense doesn't it? Here we go.

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Alright, now let's play that on the piano against the blues band backing tracks. Here we go!

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The full introduction into this piano lesson consists of four separate videos. This has been one of them. If you want to get the entire lesson, and it's really quite a lengthy piano lesson. It's a couple hours of video as well as a couple of hours worth of audio blues band backing tracks. Lot's of stuff to sink your teeth into!

In this website, there's a wealth of online piano and keyboard lessons that you can dig into right away, including this lesson.