Blues Piano Lessons - Chapter 10 Overview

Transcript from this piano lesson below:

This is a quick overview of some of the video highlights from the online piano lessons series titled "Blues for Piano and Keyboard", Chapter 10.

[ piano lessons video here, song used in Chapter 10 ]

Now if you're like me, when the blues is cookin', it makes you want to get up and boogie around the room. In this edition of Blues for Piano and Keyboard, I'm going to teach you exactly what I just played - note for note. So this is going to be quite an extensive lesson.

Now your left hand is going to study something called the walking bass. You can hear the bass player behind me - He's walking around as I'm talking. Now if you're watching on the video, you probably noticed that the left hand was doing this walking bass technique on the piano. It was walking around in between all the different chords and that's what exactly what I'm going to teach you for your left hand.

For your right hand, there's going to be 5 Blues Riffs that we're going to study. Four of them are going to be brand new. So you've got some new stuff to chomp on! In fact, if you want to rewind that video and watch it again, watch the right hand. It's doing all kinds of crazy stuff. But again, I'm going to teach you exactly how I did it, note for note.

We won't just memorize these riffs, we'll study how they are put together so that you can use them in your music. That's a lot of stuff to learn but you're going to really enjoy this lesson. Let's dig in.

Now the left hand's got a sad story. Everybody kind of neglects the left hand, especially in the keyboard world. I've heard so many students say "I don't know what to do with the left hand. It just kind of sits down there. It just seems kind of useless." But today, I'm going to teach you something a little more. Because you see, in blues and gospel music, the left hand is so very important. It drives the music along.

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

Now in this course, I've already taught you already a couple of left hand licks. In the full version of this lesson, this is the spot where we go though and do a recap of the previous left hand blues techniques. And then we introduce new left hand techniques. Here's an excerpt of the video where we're looking at something brand new in the left hand. [ video here ]

Now the walking bass is a little different, it never stops. [ piano lessons video here]. Hear that? It's always, constantly driving the beat. Always moving between one chord to another. This is a great technique to put in your musical toolbox. Okay, let's dig in and really study this.

Now we're going to talk about options today. When you study the left hand walking bass you got a lot of options. For instance, let's look at the first two chords of this song, over the phrase - "Lay down my burdens, down by the riverside". What a great thing to do with your burdens!

Okay you start with the chord C - "I'm gonna lay down..." "My burdens" - down to F. Now C comes on the first beat, 1-2-3-4. And then F, 2-3-4. Now, the walking bass generally does quarter notes. If you remember from the original course, quarter notes are one note per beat. Like this, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. Now, that actually is the simplest form of a walking bass. Just repeating the note. Now it's not really that interesting yet, but it's a good place to start.

In the full lesson, we actually spend quite a bit of time in the left hand technique.The left hand is something that's really overlooked in a lot of piano lessons. Specifically, we go into a lot of detail about how to put together a solid left hand walking bass. In fact, I'm going to jump ahead in the lesson now, where we're right at the end of the section studying that left hand walking bass. Here's an excerpt from that video:

[ piano lessons video here]

4 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 1... right that's just quarter notes, on each beat there's something going on. Whether it's a chord tone, or whether it's a distant passing tone leading somewhere. This is a lot of great stuff here that you're learning! I want to throw you a little extra bone today. We're going to talk about something called a rhythmic kicker. Listen to this...

[ piano lessons video here]

And did you hear that little extra note? Right at the end of beat 4? I'm going to do it a little slower, listen...

[ piano lessons video here]

Ahh!! Did you hear that note? It kicked in just at the end of beat 4.

[ piano lessons video here]

Now, what I'm doing is throwing in one of the notes from the line right at the last half of beat 4...

Although the left hand gets a lot of attention in this lesson, I want to give you some video samples from that portion of the lesson where we're studying the right hand. In fact, we're going to look at five right hand blues piano riffs. There's lot of material in here to study. In fact, we're getting a lot of technique as well as music theory. Like every one of our lessons, you'll be able see each riff in detail, up close, in slow motion. Here's a sample of the video where we're looking at the right hand blues riff number 4.

Riff number 4 isn't made up of a whole bunch of different notes. It's simply a C triad. It's got some sliding going on, right? It's got a rhythmic kicker that keeps happening. And it keeps rocking back and forth between the triad and some passing tones right?

[ piano lessons video here]

Now if you just sat down on a summer day doing this with you right hand... you know a monkey could do this! Now to take a simple riff like that where you're just rocking your hand back and forth, and catapult it into a fantastic rhythm and blues riff that fun to listen to, and a lot of fun to play, you've got to start shifting all the musical accents around. That's really what makes it come to life. This is super important! Let me show you what I mean -now this riff is based on what we call triplets. Just like a tricycle has three wheels, the triplet is made of three separate sections of the beat.

You see it on the screen there, and you can hear that I'm accenting the first part of each triplet. 1 - 2 - 3 .. Sounds like your going to waltz around the room. It really doesn't have much to do with the blues at this point. And when you start throwing the accent around it really gets a little crazy in your head. But it really makes fantastic riffs. Now look on the right side of the screen, you can still see four beats. However, I've put different sections of the beats in bold.

[ piano lessons video here]

Now it doesn't sound real musical yet. In fact, when I show it to you on the keyboard now, you may say "Nah! it doesn't sound very musical" However, when you put it in context with everything else, it really lights up the stage. First let's go through slow and count out those strange musical accents.

[ piano lessons video here]

Stop the video and go try that! That would probably snap your mind, unless of course you are a genius. That snapped my little mind. But now let's bring it up to speed and really pull those accents out. And you'll see that it comes to life. Here it is...

[ piano lessons video here]

Alright, it's starting to come to life. But now let's go a little further. Let's put it in context with the song that we're using in this lesson. Now the tempo is really cooking! And if you look really carefully, you will see that riff number 4 is immediately followed by a riff from back at chapter 8, the long extended static riff. Let's take a look.

[ piano lessons video here]

This is just been a quick overview of some of the highlights from Chapter 10 from the piano lessons series titled "Blues for Piano and Keyboard". The complete version of this lesson is very detailed. In fact, we go through every chord, technique and riff - note for note, in sow motion. If you'd like to see more, come on over to keyboardblues.com.