Blues Piano Lessons Course Chapters 4 and 5

Partial transcript below:

This is chapters four and five taken from "Blues for Piano and Keyboard".

Ahh... you've got your left hand working, now let's work on your right hand.

Guess what? We're going to use our old buddies again - fifths, sixths and sevenths. This time however, the dominant seventh is going to be on the bottom.

I can hear you say "What? The Dominant 7th can't be on the bottom can it?"

Of course it can - for instance the dominant seventh of C Major is a B flat, but there are lots of B flats on the piano. With your right hand simply play any old B flat with your thumb and then play the third and the fifth of C major above that.

You've got to get used to the notion that you can spread the notes of a chord out anywhere you want on the piano. This is what's meant by that term "voicing" a chord. In our original piano lessons course titled Pattern Piano and Keyboard, we studied how you can take the notes of any chord and then voice them on the piano. Then we learned to play these voicings as Rhythmic Patterns - effectively giving you a powerful music vocabulary that you can use to play any song by ear!

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

Let me cover one more bit - you'll hear me talk about a piano blues trick that involves sliding a chord from minor to major. Now I know I say this a lot, but if you went through our original Piano Lessons course, you would know how to change a chord for minor to major.

Here it is: to change a chord from minor to major simply raise the third of the chord ½ step or move it up to the very next note.

Let's begin with the first chord in the blues which is C. Now we're going to do a "chord voicing" - we're going to put the dominant seventh on the bottom, then using your thumb, (or rather using my thumb... I'm hoping you using your own thumb!) I'm bypassing the root of the chord which is C Instead I'll jump right up to the third and fifth.

So this is really an incomplete voicing at this point, but the left hand will be playing a C. That's one of the great things about learning to voice chords - they get opened up and they have much fuller sounds as you spread those notes around on the piano.

So we've got this nice right hand voicing, minus the root, but like I said, the left hand's going to pick the slack up. It's going to play the root down here. Look at this nice open voicing - this is how you get really are rich sounds out of the piano. Typically that C chord with the seventh would be played like this and... no disrespect to that... there are many occasions where you want to do that, but this isn't one of them.

We'll use a nice open chord voicing - when you add what we've learned in the last blues piano lessons chapter, you already have the sound of the blues. You might be able to get a gig just doing this, but don't do that yet! I've got some more blues piano lesson ideas to give you!

Now let's add some more spice - we've got the foundations and we want to add some of the spice that really makes it come alive. 

Let's take a look at that first chord C Major again - now I'm tossing the seventh at this point. I'm just going back to C triad and playing the third and fifth. Since you went through Pattern Piano and Keyboard you know the difference between C and C minor is - just the difference of 1/2 step on the third.

Just remember when you say C minor that the word minor only relates to the third of the chord. The same goes for C7 or C minor 7. It's just a difference of the half step on the third of the piano chord.

Here's what I'm going to have you do now: every time we play chord in the 12 bar blues, I'm going to have you first play it's minor version (like Cm7) and then using the same finger, just slide that third up 1/2 step to C7. It's a very simple technique. Here's what it looks like if you played it over F7...

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It's exactly the same over G7...

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Now we're going to use this very simple piano lessons technique and play through the 12 bar blues again. You'll be amazed how this simple little minor to major slide suddenly brings real life and character to the music...

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That's a nice little blues trick!

Now we're going to put it all together: some left hand rhythm with some Yum Yum right hand spice!

In the upcoming piano lessons video you'll hear me referring to whole steps and half steps. Whole steps and half steps are the main building blocks of scale and chord construction.

For a more in-depth study of whole steps and half steps, go through the course titled Pattern Piano and Keyboard

One last bit of music trivia - in the upcoming video you'll hear me talk about moving one of the blues riffs up an octave. For more detailed studies in octaves and other foundational musical techniques, you really need to go through the course titled " Pattern Piano and Keyboard".

Let's move on now to a piano blues riff that's been tried and true down through the years. It's built on everything we've learned so far. Here it is...

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Now since you're a fan of the blues I know that you've heard that piano riff maybe a million times in jazz music, blues music, gospel and country music. Let's study how to play it...

Simply play the first chord voicing of C that we learned, then the top note goes up a whole step, the middle note goes up 1/2 step, the bottom note goes up a whole step, then all of the notes slide back to their original positions.

The whole thing sounds like this -

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Note that in the illustration I have the top note going up a whole step, the middle note going up 1/2 step, the bottom note going up a whole step, and then back. This all happens within the first four beats of C like this...

Now if you want to go deeper and have an in-depth study of how all these whole steps and half steps come together to create chords so that you understand how music itself is constructed, dig into the online piano lessons course titled Pattern Piano and Keyboard.

I know that I keep talking about that, but I'm really not ashamed of the advertising because it's been so very helpful to literally hundreds of thousands of piano lesson students around the world.

In this chapter we're dealing with the right hand primarily, but just in case you want to push the envelope a little bit with both your hands, I want to throw you a little extra bone for your left hand...

In the last chapter we dealt with playing fifths, sixths and sevenths for each beat of the 12 bar blues. Do you notice my Pinkie is repeating that note every time? And that's how I taught it to you.

That's a great way to start with a left hand but if you want to throw in something more, you can do what I do a lot - it's called the rhythmic kicker. Check this out...

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Do you see how the index finger is throwing in that extra note in between each beat? The pinky is just sitting and holding. So you've got a couple different options now in your left hand, but remember - you don't have to throw the new rhythmic kicker in right away.

OK or write let's go back to what we're studying in this chapter - this is a new right hand blues riff and we'll play it through the 12 bar blues starting on C.

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