Everything in this blues course builds on our original piano lessons course titled Pattern Piano and Keyboard. This piano course starts from the ground up, assumes that you’ve never played piano before, but then it quickly progresses through college level musical techniques.

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

If you’re brand new to music or if you already playing and you’d like to learn to play piano or keyboard by ear, check that course out.

The first thing we need to do is look at the form of the blues

Maybe you’ve heard of the 12 bar blues? This means that there are 12 measures or bars that repeat over and over. Within each of these 12 bars are measures with four beats.

In the upcoming blues piano lesson chapters there’s lots and lots of video zoomed in close to the piano level where you can see the details of what each hand and finger are doing. But at this point in the first chapter we’re not quite ready yet to look at specific chords are notes.

Instead we’re looking at an overview of the 12 bar blues form. In fact, you can see it there on the screen: 12 bars or measures, each containing one chord. To help you keep track of where we are in the 12 bar blues, just follow the circle. It will follow along with what I’m playing on the piano.

One final thought before we play through the 12 bar blues on the piano-

I want you not to be too concerned about what notes I’m playing at this Point. I just want you to get a sense for the overall form of the blues. Are you ready?

[ transcript note: in the video above, piano plays through the 12 bar piano blues]

There’s some pretty funky stuff there – hang on, because in the piano lesson chapters ahead, we are really going to dig into this blues style and figure out how to bring it to life on the piano.

In the next clip you’ll hear me talk about fifths, sixths and sevenths. If you went through our original course, you already know how fifths, sixths and sevenths are built, but just to be sure, let’s do a quick refresher .

How do we build a fifth?

For the sake of practice let’s say we want to build a fifth in the scale of C major. Starting on the root of the C major scale – count up five notes in the scale of C.

It’s easy to count up five notes in the scale of C – after all they’re all white notes. However if you understand the first 20 minutes of our original course titled pattern piano and keyboard, you’ll understand very clearly how to build a fifth in any key or scale .

Now that you know what fifths are let’s use them to build a simple foundation for the blues . Look at the blue box again – the 12 bar blues – for each chord I’m going to play a fifth built on that chord and then hold it for four beats. Here we go…

[ transcript note: in the video above, piano plays through the 12 bar piano blues]

Now we’re just at the foundational stages at this point – don’t be afraid to review that as many times as you need to so that you’ll get a really solid foundation. Then move on.

In the last audio clip I played a fifth for each chord and then I held it for four beats like this…

[ transcript note: in the video above, piano plays here]

Now we are going to build on that foundation using sixths and sevenths.

To make a sixth, simply count one note higher than the fifth. But this is super important – count up one note in the scale of the chord that you playing.

Here’s where it can seem to get a little complicated. Depending on the scale of the chord that you’re playing that sixth can be a black note, or a white note.

But don’t worry, there’s a very simple trick that will allow you to find the right note:

In our original piano lesson course, we looked at how all major scales are a simple pattern of half steps and whole steps. Because of that, some scales look radically different: For instance, C Major has no black notes while A major has three black notes. However, they’re all based on the same simple pattern of half steps, and whole steps. Here’s the trick: if you learn to use this pattern you’ll be able to quickly find any note no matter what key you’re in… make sure you get the original course.

We’ll also be using the dominant seventh chord. The dominant seventh is the bread and butter chord of the blues and it’s the number one spice that you’ll use as you learn to cook up a nice tasty the batch of the blues.

The dominant seventh chord is a different beast. Don’t worry about what key you’re in – simply find the sixth and then go to the very next note higher.

Remember some dominant seventh notes will be black notes and some will be white. Just remember to go to the very next note up from the sixth no matter what key you’re in.

Now are going to use the fifth, sixth and seventh in each measure. On the first beat we’ll play a fifth just like we did in the last example. On the second beat I’ll stretch my hand up a little higher to play a sixth, and on the third beat I’ll stretch my hand out a little more to play a dominant seventh. On the fourth beat of each measure I’ll come back down and play a sixth.

So for the entire first measure of the 12 bar blues where the chord is C it sounds like this – all four beats..

[ transcript note: in the video above, piano plays here]

So far it’s pretty simple but it’s solid. This is the left hand foundation that will pull everything together.

The next thing that we’re going to do is build on this left hand foundation…

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