How To IMPROVISE On Piano With The C Minor Blues Scale

foreign with a bluescale sounds super impressive but it's really not that hard this video will get you started amazing your friends and family and just having fun when I was in seventh grade I had just joined a rock band and we wrote a song that had space for me to do a piano solo we also had a talent show coming up and I wanted to impress the girls at my school so I needed to learn how to do an amazing piano solo fast the drummer showed me the scale the C minor blues scale and I actually just put little pieces of tape on every single key on the piano that was in the scale and just hit them as fast as I could [Music] but this did help me get some muscle memory for it and eventually I learned there is more to playing a solo than just rapid fire banging all the notes of the scale so I'll get you up and running with that right hand scale also give you a few tips for soloing and I'll even give you some left hand core progressions that sound great with it if you're new here I'm Nate I'd appreciate it if you'd subscribe click the bell and also have a poke around the channel for songs that you're excited to learn let's jump in okay so the notes in this scale are C thank you E flat f F sharp G and B flat and so it sounds complete back to C so notice we have this little cluster of three chromatic notes in the middle everything else is a little bit more spaced out now the fingering is super easy basically you're going to put your thumb on any white key and your third finger middle finger on any black key like this [Music] so a little bit of crossing the thumb under as you go now if you're gonna just do one octave up and down it kind of makes sense to use your pinky on that high C it's just a little bit more efficient rather than crossing under and then back so you can do it that way a really nice way to practice this scale is to do it in two octaves and then when you cross over the first octave here use your thumb and then at the top turn around on your pinky so just spend some time up and down the scale like that and even just running the scale it sounds really cool take as much time getting the hang of this as you need like I said this is the C minor blues scale so it works under any chord progression in the key of C minor but just for starters you could just play a C minor chord in the left hand so that's c e flat and G um and then you can just hit that and start practicing that scale you can play around with different rhythms as you get used to it and we could try some chord changes in the key of C minor here's a nice little four measure chord progression I like so we've got C minor for four counts we're in four four time so C minor two three four up to F minor so that's going to be the exact same shape as C minor but it's f a flat and C then up to G minor again same shape all these chords are the same shape here G B flat and d and then back down to F minor so you can do a nice slow pulse four counts on each of these measures one and two and three and four so I'm just stepping up and down and it already sounds really good it sounds like a piano solo you can kind of turn around sometimes at spots that aren't on the sea [Music] different options here but if you need to take a whole week just getting the hang of the scale in the right hand and keeping your left hand just holding out that single C minor chord that's totally cool but some other tips to make what you're doing with the right hand sound a little bit more interesting in addition to just the stepping up and down and switching directions you can leave some space [Music] yeah like you don't have to constantly be hitting rhythms also you might stumble upon some nice little patterns or just any sort of Rhythm or pattern with a couple of notes they don't even have to be right next to each other in the scale that can be really cool too also you don't always have to be moving between notes [Music] you can do some rhythms just on a single note [Music] speaking of that I am varying the Dynamics as well so sometimes playing loud sometimes playing soft just remember all the expressive possibilities of the piano are there for you as you do this when you really start getting comfortable with this you can start playing around with playing more than one note at a time from the scale you know eventually when you practice this it's like you're looking at the keyboard and all the notes that are in the scale kind of light up or maybe you have the tape on the keys like I did in which case you can just start playing around [Music] notes from the scale are going to sound pretty cool together sounds intense sometimes so last thing I want to mention is this F sharp that chromatic note that's the blues note there that's what gives it that kind of edgy blues sound so that's the one place in the scale where sometimes it sounds kind of ugly so in general you want to do it kind of in passing like a Grace note like [Music] and by the way once I'm sort of playing around with different Melodies I sometimes stop doing just the one and three you can play around with different fingers for different purposes but sounds really nice to just do it as a Grace note like the F sharp to G [Music] so you don't want to linger on that too long unless you're trying to build a bunch of tension for a second because then it's really satisfying when you get away from that but also don't be afraid to slide on it that can be really fun maybe if you have your thumb on C you can kind of or even just slide one finger play around with it it's super fun one super interesting thing about the minor blues scale is it actually works with the parallel major so this is the C minor blues scale and I've been doing a progression in the key of C minor if you just make it seem major but keep doing that scale all right it works it has a different sound but it sounds really cool it almost shouldn't work because you have that tension between the the minor E flat there and then the major e natural there but that's part of what gives Blues its sound there's this tension between major and minor that's kind of edgy but really satisfying so here's that same chord progression but major [Music] thank you sounds really good you can make any of those major chords dominant seventh chords too [Music] finally I just want to give you progression that I think sounds really cool with this scale that's kind of a hybrid between the major and the minor here's the chords for that so we've got the C minor from the Kia C minor of course we can go up to the E flat chord that's going to be E flat G and B flat also fits into the key of C minor or the relative major key E flat major then we can take this F major chord so all white keys fac and then this a flat major chord again from the C minor key so that's a flat C and B flat foreign I love this progression it's got this sort of uplifting sound it doesn't stay in one key so it sounds a little surprising yeah sounds great all right thank you for watching I'm gonna wrap this video up by just improvising for a couple of minutes using this chord progression and I might switch into that c major chord progression just for a little bit of contrast and as I do it I'm just gonna try to keep um in mind some of those different pointers I was giving you about improvising oh [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign

Channel: Piano with Nate

Views: 51,330

Keywords: How to improvise on piano, c minor blues scale, piano blues improvising easy, piano blues, piano blues tutorial, blues scale piano, piano with nate, piano lessons, piano tutorial, nate piano lesson

Id: L79aBxSeWNM

Length: 11min 12sec (672 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2023