Blues Piano Lessons Course Chapter 9

Transcript from this piano lesson below:

This is Chapter Nine in the piano lessons series titled, "Blues for Piano and Keyboard".

< piano music playing >

Now blues and Gospel music have always had a lot in common. Here's a new left hand piano technique for you... [ piano lessons video here ]

In the past, I've taught you a left hand riff that sounds like this: [ piano lessons video here ] Remember that? You can review that in earlier blues chapters. Now the right hand is going to sound like this: [ video here ] That's also a blues piano riff that I taught you in some of the earliest blues lessons chapters.

Today, I'm going to teach you a new left-hand blues riff called left-hand propulsion. It sounds like this:

[ video here ]

This is a great left-hand piano technique to use especially if you want to learn to play some cookin' black gospel music. Let's take a closer look.

[ video here ]

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

In this next session, we're going to make use of musical concepts called half-steps and whole steps. Now if that sounds like a foreign language to you, you really need to go through our first course titled, "Pattern Piano and Keyboard". It's the original piano lessons course and you can find it on the net at playpianotoday.com.

Let's look at the first chord of the song, "Down by the Riverside" - what a wonderful old spiritual. The first chord is C, however this riff does not start on the root of that chord, it starts a whole step below. So a whole step below C is... B flat. Right students? Yeah, right! So the first note is a whole step below the root, then it goes up a half step to B, then another half step to C (which is the root) and repeats. So it's actually pretty simple. Let me start again, starting a whole step below the root, up to speed, it sounds like this: [ piano lessons video here ] This blues riff really helps to push or propel the beat of the music on the piano.

Now the second chord of the song is F. Remember, we don't play the root. We start a whole step below F which is E flat right? Okay we start a whole step below, come up half step, come up another half step and repeat it. So F sounds like this:

[ video here ] ...and I'm throwing my right hand blues piano riff in with it. [ video here ]

Nice and funky okay? Now let me go between C and F. Sounds like this: [ piano lessons video here ] Here's G: [ video here ] Right? I started a whole step below the root, came up a half step, came up another half step, and repeated it. So here's G again: [ video here ] Okay, let me show you something a little more now.

Okay, I've taught you the left hand propulsion. Today, I want to show you something a little more. If you've gotten comfortable with that, I want to show you the left hand propulsion with an octave backflip. How do you like that? You can be in the Olympics! Here it is: [ piano lessons video here ] In F it sounds like this: [ video here ]

You start a whole step below right? Come up a half step, come up another half step [ piano lessons video here ], and then drop an octave [ video here ] Really thump it good, like a kick drum. Here it is again: [ piano lessons video here ] Here's F [ piano lessons video here ], Here's G [ piano lessons video here ] Aright, let's put it together now with the right hand.

Sometimes I'll play the repeated note [ video here ] and then sometimes I'll play that octave backflip [ video here ] In either case, here's the whole thing:

[ video here ]

Here's the entire song again, minus vocals, so you can concentrate on just the piano.
[ piano lessons video here ]

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

Online blues piano lessons demo c. Music Unlimited Inc., another Piano Lessons success story!