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

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

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.

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: [ transcript note: in the piano lessons video above, music plays in this section ]

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:

…and I’m throwing my right hand blues piano riff in with it.

Nice and funky okay? Now let me go between C and F. Sounds like this: [ transcript note: in the piano lessons video above, music plays in this section ] Here’s G: 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: 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: [ transcript note: in the piano lessons video above, music plays in this section ] In F it sounds like this:

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

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

Here’s the entire song again, minus vocals, so you can concentrate on just the piano.
[ transcript note: in the piano lessons video above, music plays in this section ]

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!