So I know that many of you struggle to play blues
piano hands together to get the hand coordination working with the left and right hand. That's no
surprise because it's the biggest problem that most piano students have. So today I'm giving you
a very special tutorial on how to start practicing piano blues, and how to play blues piano hands
together. This is a really important lesson. We're gonna get right up close with the fingers,
with the hands, and we're gonna try some different approaches and it's really gonna make a big
difference to your practice. And for many of you, because this is such a big challenge that's
holding you back, you need to be patient. You need to slow down and do some really good
practice. And if you're a fan of our work here at the London Contemporary School of Piano, head
over to our site contemporaryschoolofpiano.com and ask for our free blues piano pack because it's
an extremely valuable resource that will really help assist your blues piano practice.
So just head over to our site and and just ask us for our free piano blues
pack. It will really come in handy. We're going to firstly start with a very simple
riff and ostinato in the left hand, because if we keep it really simple in the left hand, we're
able to keep track of what we're doing in the right hand. And for some of you, you're gonna need
to slow this right down and spend time practicing and measuring your results and seeing how you're
going. So let's just start with a simple swing in the left hand. And this is a very straightforward
blues boogie left hand on the C G and the A. So let's just warm up with that. Let's just warm up
our left hand. Basically, you should be able to have a conversation with me right now whilst doing
this in the left hand. How was your weekend? What did you get up to today? The point is that that
left hand almost has to be on autopilot. So the first thing you wanna add to your practice routine
is some left hand independence exercise just by just letting that left hand move by itself
on three notes like this with a swing rhythm. And sure, if you want a bit of variation,
you can vary the chords, put a 12 blues on it. But I'm not gonna talk so much about
core progressions today. I'm gonna talk about coordination and how to play blues piano hands
together. That's the really important thing. So the first thing we're going to do is
we're going to study some comping in the right hand playing some chords. I'm just
gonna play a nice C seven chord here. You can play it in whatever position
you want, really doesn't matter. We're going to practice some comping against the
left hand. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna comp on the first eighth note
of the bar. That's a good starting point. Okay. Now is another exercise. We're now going
to comp on the second eighth note of the bar, which is going to coincide
with the G in the left hand, like this. We get a bit of syncopation
here. The second eighth note of the bar. And when we comp in the right hand, we just
want a nice stab and it's just getting that coordination. Now, if you find that really hard
to do, you are not alone. Many people do. I mean, I think everyone does when they first
start piano. So you just need to, there's two things you need to do if
you're finding that really hard. Slow down. That's the first thing. Go as slowly as you need
to. The slower you practice the faster you learn because you are drawing pathways to your brain
and coordination. So slow it right down. Slower it doesn't mean worse music. You really want to
get used to practicing slowly and then just slowly take your tempo up, start to speed it up as you
get more comfortable. Another practice technique that you can use if you're finding that really
difficult is tap it with your hands like this. So take out the notes and just treat it like a
percussive rhythm exercise because this is rhythm that we're really effectively doing. The reason
why coordination and left right hand is an issue for so many of you is because you're not really
prioritising rhythm. You're just thinking of notes all the time. So take the notes out of the
picture entirely. So we can continue this exercise by playing a right hand chord comp or a chord stab
on every quarter note of the bar. We're gonna try the third quarter note of the bar now. That's
going to coincide with A now in the left hand. And so on. So you can actually practice
playing on every quarter note of the bar in the right hand. And that is the first
step to building effective coordination and playing with your left and right hand
and building an interface there. Okay, so this is the question that many of you have.
Now, how do I then go ahead and improvise in the right hand while holding a left hand rhythm?
Well, that's not an easy thing as well, in fact, it's a supremely challenging thing, but it can
be broken down. And I have taught students many, many times from beginner to be
able to do this very effectively by just taking steps. And the most important thing
you need to learn as somebody studying piano, as a piano student, by the way, we are all
students of piano. I am a student of piano, right? I see the things that, you know Art Tatum does
with his left and right hand. And I'm just like going, okay, you know, we we're all on a journey
here together in music. This is a collaboration, right? So we're all students of this, but one
thing we should be able to do with students, this is really, really important. Rather than just
feeling overwhelmed by the difficulties, you need to have ways of measuring where you are up to.
That's really, really important to say, okay, my left hand can do so much with my right hand and
it's up to here and you have some measurement in place that really helps you because then you know
where you're up to. I never ever let my students say, oh, I sound crap. Oh, that sounds really bad,
because I always correct them when they say that, I always say, okay, you say that sounds bad.
Where are you up to? Is what I really wanna know. Where do you think you're up to? And
where do you want to get to next? Because if you all of a sudden have an understanding of
where that is working and your coordination and your improvisation, all of a sudden you are
not a deer in headlights. You know where you are going. So let's do a couple of exercises
with improvisation in the right hand and the riff in the left hand to start figuring out where
we're up to. This is really, really helpful. So what we were doing in the left hand, this is
just a good one because it's a nice simple one to start with. What we are now gonna do in the
right hand is we are going to match that rhythm with our improvisation. So we're playing
exactly the same rhythm in the right hand, just different notes obviously. I'm playing
notes from the C minor blue scale by the way, just because it's a good starting point. It really
doesn't matter what notes. I mean you can play the C major blues scale or pentatonic scales, you
know we're not talking about notes right now, we're talking about coordination. But for this
example, I'm gonna use the C minor blues scale. So you might, might just spend a bit of time on your
right hand now, locking in a good swing rhythm. In the right hand on the C blues scale. Now what
I want you to do now is I want you to just to let go a little bit. If you're sitting at a piano now
this is really good, just play with me here. You know, just draw a line with your hands going up
and down the piano in different combinations, just using notes from this beautiful C minor blues
scale with a little swing to it. Just spend a bit of time doing this, holding a nice swing rhythm.
You just wanna spend time now you wanna enjoy the process as well. Practice doesn't need to
feel laboursome and, you know, painful. You do want this to feel good. You want this to feel
musical. You wanna just enjoy it. Just enjoy the process and the journey of improvising. I was very
dyslexic as a child. And I overcame these problems through enjoyment, through not making it feel like
it was hard labour and practice by just moving at my own pace and internally feeling the music.
So that's a really important aspect as well. So here I am just swinging on that blues scale.
Now I can just spend a bit of time getting that left hand back in again. And I'm just going to
match the right hand rhythm with the blues scale. Now, some of you might need to go a bit slower, we
can go slower. I love slow. So useful to practice slowly.
Now you should just sit down and do that
for, you know, as long as you can - 20, 30 minutes a day just locking both of
your hands to the same rhythm, right? So powerful. Okay, now we're gonna take
things up a notch, get a little bit harder. So one thing we can do in the right hand now to
add a bit of variation to our left and right hand. Put a few little gaps in that rhythm.
A couple of longer notes. And now to make a bit of interest with the
texture, I might combine some notes now in the C blues scale just
to get textures like this. The gaps. 12 bar blues. You don't have
to change the scale in the right hand. So that's a really good starting point. Now
let's get a little bit virtuosic. Let's just take this up one further notch. One rhythm
that really helps us understand what swing is, is the triplet rhythm because the triplet rhythm.
What is a triplet, by the way? All the triplet is, is when you evenly distribute three notes, you
evenly distribute three notes over one beat. So effectively what a swing rhythm is it's a triplet,
it subdivides into a triplet. So that's a triplet against a swing rhythm in the left hand.
Now before we get into those logistics, let's just have a bit of fun. It's great to
balance this up with fun cause this is hard work. Let's now experiment with improvising
in triplets and in duplets, which is swing, swing, quavers and triplets together at
the same time. So we've got swing, triplet, Swing,
triplet. They just fit beautifully together in combination. Much of blues, bebop, jazz.
Subdivisions of these 2 rhythms put together. In fact, a really good exercise is to
parallel that improvisation with both hands. That's
The sort of thing you see Oscar Peterson do so effortlessly. So let's
just change the left hand with these triplets and duplet combinations just to make it a little bit
more palatable and digestible to start with. We're gonna go for a more major fill. So these are just
half notes now, and I'm gonna combine triplets and duplets in the right hand. I'm also gonna use
the C major blues scale as well. And if you, if you like our work and you go to our website,
contemporaryschoolofpiano.com, if you head on over to our site, we have a special blues pack. And
if you email us and ask us for the blues pack, it has information on these different scale types.
So you really should, if you want to take your playing to the next level, head over to our site
and subscribe to our channel. Here we go. So I'm gonna play a mixture of triplets and duplets,
a mixture of C major and C minor blues scale. Well, I hope you found today's video
very beneficial to your playing. Remember to measure where you're up to
and have fun. Enjoy what it is you're doing. Enjoy the process, enjoy the journey.
And if you need some extra support, head on over to our website contemporaryschoolofpiano.com
and we'll send you our free blues pack, just get in touch with us and ask us for it.
I'll happily help you out!
