WHY and HOW To Practice Bass Lines

what's going on everybody peter martin here welcome to the jazz piano method welcome to this week's lesson i'm so excited that you are here and i'm so happy to be here it is presently the end of 2020 a very strange year that i think a lot of people want to put behind them so if you're watching it still at the end of 2020 watching this lesson or if you're watching this in the future that's kind of where we're at but i always feel like it's a great time to dive into this wonderful instrument the piano not just this one this is a wonderful one but your piano this piano a keyboard whatever the 88s you know uh and and to learn something and and if you're going through a tough time now you know let's take this time during this lesson and this communing over music to just kind of put everything out else out and just sort of block out the world you know like you put up those uh those shades the the light block out and let's just focus in on this and then it could be any year it could be anytime anything could be happening in the world because we're going to be in our own little world um so what are we talking about this we are talking about the whys and the hows of practicing bass lines and um i've done some lessons in the past on this and you guys know i'm pretty passionate about baselines but i still get a lot of questions about it and i think it's an area that we need to be revisiting checking back in constantly and consistently as we progress as jazz pianist because there's so many well let's talk about because because that's why i said the why you know a lot of times we jump right into how to practice bass lines how to play bass lines how to use them over different types of tunes but if we understand why we're doing it sometimes we can kind of up our motivation especially when things get a little bit difficult and baselines can be hard that's why a lot of people shy away from at least to do it well because we're developing all this improvisation and fun stuff with the right hand and here comes the left hand now we got to do some interesting things with that hand who's who's going to get our full attention right so we kind of go to the dominant hand usually but as far as the why the first big reason i think is that it can give us such a great um element to pull out in our solo piano playing so if we're always playing trio and we've got a bass player [Music] so i can imagine that bass and the bass player was actually here playing it even better but it's like we're playing in that that that that um very typical trio style which is great a lot of rootless voicings and stuff we're not even thinking about bass lines and it's not getting in the way but if we want to play solo piano at times it's nice to even if we leave and then we're kind of coming back to it or we're just playing it constantly just to be able to bring that element in and this is just the walking bass line we're going to talk about several different kinds of bass line but the concept is the same pull them in when you don't have a bass player not necessarily to duplicate what a bass would do but to duplicate the feel and the foundation that the bass player would be providing and so that's when you get into that kind of solo piano playing and it's really i mean even if you're playing a ballad you know [Music] it's that kind of playing that starts to get into the area where it's like wow i'm listening to the pianist and i'm not missing the bass i might hear things that are evocative of the bass but i'm not feeling like wow he sounds like he's playing with a trio that doesn't exist you know so that's sort of the first reason of why we need to be practicing bass lines but the more interesting things like that's sort of the utility of why we practice bass lines the usage like how we're going to pull into our playing but these next two areas i think are really more important and especially in terms of our development and if you can kind of buy into these areas i think it can become a fun and effective part of your ongoing practice routine because you'll understand why you're doing it and what the benefits are and that's first to develop independence of the hands practicing baselines is the easiest way in line with actually playing music to to either start to develop your hand independence or more likely to continue and start to take you to that next level of hand independence that's something that we always need to be practicing it's nothing that you ever get perfect at it's always trying to get to that point where the hands can truly operate independently and so what happens is like if we take that f blues that i played earlier and i'm going to do it starting out over a two feel one two three four so this is just a simple half notes simple bass line i'm playing it by itself so i'm working on a bass line right but i'm not really working on independence of the hands because only one hand is playing so then i'm gonna slowly add in some elements just simple comping i'm already now working on my hand independence and the trick is to slowly build this up rhythmically harmonically and we haven't gotten some melodies yet but we're not going beyond what we can do without messing up the bass line so that's what the barometer is we're building the opposite of what we normally do where where the right hand is kind of driving things in terms of the left hand is fitting in whenever it can without messing up what's happening in the right hand this we're shifting over the left hand is the melodic driver because the baseline very important to think about even as these simple half notes restricted bass lines are still melodic entities it's a line right and you think about the great bass players they're really interesting lines right so back to the half notes that's the beginning of that hand independence and the great thing about this is you can always practice this and you can show yourself [Music] if you've got that independence at the level that you're trying to play because if you fall off those half notes or you alter the rhythm you know you've gone beyond what you can handle but if you're right underneath that's fine you're challenging yourself enough [Music] and your real barometer is are you staying within the groove are you dropping beats that kind of thing now you may need to record yourself as you're doing this but if you build up slowly you'll probably be okay and so that's really starting with the simplest voicings you need to and the simplest rhythms and then trying to hear slightly more complicated rhythms but still this is with the right hand still not getting melodic yet then you know you'll start to add in maybe a melody that you know and if you find yourself going so that sounds pretty good but i'm not being independent with my hands because i'm leaving those half notes in the left hand which for a performance situation is fine but for practicing hand independence is not so we'll get into more of that lately a little later but the main thing is just to really understand that practicing baseline is the easiest most effective and actually the most fun way to practice hand independence i can give you a bunch of different um you know well finger independence and hand independence exercises that are wonderful um but if they're not pieces of music they don't have some kind of creativity they're just exercises they're not going to be as fun for you so this is one that can very much be graded based upon how you practice it and just your concentration level is really the only thing um and then the last area of why we practice bass lines and why this can be so important for your development is to start to get some melodic conception and melodic possibilities happening with your left hand i find that much for the hand independence it's the best way to practice is using bass lines same thing for getting your left hand to start playing melodically and a lot of times we think about that in terms of counterpoint so it might be um where it's like two separate melodies either in between or on top of each other um but still kind of like the way a bass player would play and then the way a horn player would play but a lot of things that i know a lot of you want to get into playing like um you know you know like this kind of left hand melodic movement in the middle that's actually in that middle of the three zones base kind of root area mid-zone and then up here that you would think okay that's not a baseline right but if you're practicing playing bass lines the hand independence and the finger independence and just using your left hand using your brain to control your left hand in a melodic way that's the beginning to being able to play melodies up here actually and there's some like neurological science if we have any neuro neurologists uh as members feel free to like chase this down in the studies i think it'd be interesting but i know in terms of how our brain controls the different hands especially the dominant hand which for most people is the right hand 90 of humans i guess um versus how we control what's happening left and we have to train the non-dominant hand to operate in the way that comes more naturally to our dominant hand so this is just the easiest way even when you're doing those half notes you're practicing melodies and when we get into some of the other stuff in a minute we're really going to be practicing melodies and and technically and conceptually from our brain how to control that left hand in a melodic way okay so that's the the um the why why we practice bass lines um let's talk about how to practice okay the first thing is simplify and isolate so important always and we've already looked at the best way to do that over the blues is start with that half note so the concept of simplifying isolate in this context is we're playing the minimum and most simple way of playing a bass line that we can do continuously without any kind of alteration so it's the beginning of kind of automating what needs to happen there so it doesn't mean that you're going to start here and not make some mistakes or mess up the rhythm or drop a beat but you're going to be able to hear it easier but it's simple like that and like i said we're starting very simple in the right hand too really listening for those details and thinking about that melodic movement of that okay so it's a challenge when you just have these half notes to create a melody because things like even when we start to go to four which is the next place you would typically go you've got more notes to play with so it's harder [Music] not to slip up but to create a melody you've got more notes to shape that melody and because we're working on the bass line you're going to put more attention to this if you mess up and don't play a great improvised thing or if you just if that's all you can do no problem because you're really trying to get this going okay and for these i'm not gonna have time this week to go through every concept on this you know but this is the kind of stuff and you'll see it in the transcription here um that if you like some of this stuff you can just learn this like with quarter notes and half notes it's very easy to look at the transcription and start to see kind of where i'm going with these things and none of this stuff is things that i made up this is all stuff i sold from percy heath transcriptions and ron carter and christian mcbride and ray brown all the great paul chambers you know jimmy garris all the great bass players that you know um and also you know oscar peterson if you like doing this half note check out sandy blues sandy's blues [Music] and especially the way he starts to mix it up going between four and two and that's kind of like you know obviously it's oscar peterson it's top level technically and stuff it's not necessarily something that most people can jump right into but it's that kind of inspiration you can get for what you can do as far as actually applying these bass lines eventually into your playing okay um so we talked about that and remember you and we've got this just shells and basic three note voices too you can start with before you even want to go melodic in your right hand if you're having a challenge of keeping those bass lines going and getting interesting things just start with that and then when you go to the melody real simple one maybe [Music] okay and then you know don't get bored or stuck on this just the blues or you can go to different keys but still simplify and isolate [Music] and this is also where you really learn to play in the time because you've got that baseline barometer whether you're [Music] do [Music] so all that stuff i was playing playing over just this requires the same concentration if you want to get to that with the same feel so let me slow this down just half notes [Music] okay so it's very important to get that same feel okay so i see somebody's asking but what notes though yes well that's a very interesting thing and i'm not going to give them all to you but you're going to see in the transcription a bunch of them here um the general concept and the reason i like doing this over a blues so much you know as always transcribing these in a little bit you know from like i would recommend bags groove percy he's solo bass lines on there he's doing a great two feel and a great walking for very easy to hear we'll have a link below as we always do to that recording there's two versions of it too they're both great that's a great way to just learn specific lines and start to get them you know automated in here but on the blues we're always thinking about the chords so if we think about f7 and then b flat seven and then back to f7 that's the first four bars right one bar f one bar b flat two bars of f so we've got two notes at the half note to get to b flat so what are our choices or but which one sounds the best that one doesn't it doesn't quite work great does it because it makes it sound like it wants to go you know these putting these bass lines together is very much like connecting the dots you remember the the the game the the written game if you've got all four you can do that or you can go but with the two it's a little bit more of a challenge your one and your five is gonna be your starting point if you're not sure what to play play one and five especially over at blues but also like if you do all the things you are so you might just do one and five to start i messed up so this is all half notes just one and five and again if this is all too much to do these extra stuff just [Music] maybe get that metronome going on two and four if you can't do it with the right hand just with the left hand and then add that in okay um so that's f blues we've got enough blues blues is great though you can go through all the different keys let's talk about ballads next because this is an area that a lot of people um skip over because they think oh battles don't have bass lines yes they do and they're really important because what we were talking about earlier for solo piano applications this i think is one of the hippest places to add in actual baselines like i'm much more likely to do a walking a walking ballad baseline at least for part of a tune over like you know misty similarly what a bass player um then i would over like a straight walking four um over [Music] i would i would very rarely play that i mean some people do that it's fine but i think over a ballad it's just great because we can actually use it easier in a more interesting way i think and it's also easier to practice because everything's slowed down the general concept is the same but we have more time because it's valid tempo so if we look at same concept one to five [Music] wait let me get in a better ballot field i'm going back to the other field because it's in my ears now so when you think about walking ballad there's two different concepts basic concepts fundamental concepts there's thousands of concepts every individual has them but two different starting points one is two these are quarter notes one two three four where it's based on an underlying triplet eighth note triplets would be one two two even if you're not always playing it that's kind of the feel and then there's a straight eighth note feel you hear the difference here's the straight eighth note and here's the triplet now that's not right triplet that's typically how you'll hear it here's the eighth note again so you should practice both of them and a simplify and isolate way to do it is to just practice one or the other at one time so maybe one course of the eighth note feel walking bass line field and then one of the straight eighth note walking bass line field in practical use you can jump back and forth and you do and that becomes kind of a part of the style and you can look at great bass players how they approach is they're not even thinking which one they it's just both kind of areas that they can they can go to but it's a very good way to have some sort of discipline practice so if we look at misty e flat major and i'm going to extend out slightly as we practice our bass line and we're going to do straight eighth notes for this first part um one five and instead of just five one five again i'm gonna go one five step above diatonically where i'm going that's a great way to put a bass line together simple but effective so it's all e flat major now b flat minus seven uh one to five then the next chord e flat seven one to five one five step above diatonically so just those two concepts check it out here's the eighth of and you don't have to add it in every time just add it in when you hear it and that becomes very much a connecting to that so we're going from a flat major to d flat seven i've got one beat i'm going to add in the eighth notes because i'm practicing just those kind and i'm going to e flat so how do i connect the dots d natural so it's a flat major d flat seven back to the e flat major same thing chromatic now you'll notice i'm playing these chords are very much half notes along with the walking ballot feel this is really good practice to get going but i'm not really practicing hand independence we talked about how important that is for bass lines but that's because i'm getting into it once you can do that you want to start doing you want to start decoupling the hand so it might be with soloing and you want to think about playing things that are simple but are not together with the left hand [Music] and over ballads one of the easiest ways to do this after you start to get acclimated to being able to play these lines is to not think as strictly rhythmically with your right hand [Applause] [Music] here i'm playing pretty much straight within the [Music] but in the right hand it's just kind of free [Music] and in order to start to develop this you have to consciously not play together with both the hands this has to be rock solid but if i'm going so i'm going to go i play a line that goes into the sec the next bar and i'm going to hit one with the left hand with the bass line but with the right hand i'm gonna finish my line a little bit after one now i'm going to try an eighth note in the left hand [Music] now i'm going to try an eighth note triplet i'm gonna wait a minute [Music] so you can kind of just go through and challenge yourself like this you've got those basic elements and what we're doing is we're trying to execute them with the left hand and i'm actually not thinking as much as the right hand it might have sounded like i was playing more notes but that was just kind of stuff you know um because as we practice to get great bass lines i mean look when you go when you go to play in this stuff [Music] like you're gonna float back to thinking about hearing what's coming out of your right hand more than left hand and that's okay because that's natural and um you know we want to kind of be hearing everything and you will once you start making the connections doing more things together and that overlap but you don't want to be fighting against thinking about the dominant hand and what a lot of your melodic improvisation is going to be happening but you want to be able to kind of secondarily almost in an automated way not in a i sound automated but in a way where it can just kind of take on a mind of its own to have the left hand to have that kind of creativity so that's what really we're practicing when we practice these bass lines so you don't want it to just be a thoughtless just kind of like oh i'm just doing this because i have to play it baseline you want to really be thinking about it melodically that's why the right hand has to be sublimated in your thought process as you're doing this kind of practice all right so that's ballads we talked about blues and really just kind of swing stuff in general you know like all the things you are the things that would be to feel uh in a 4 4 situation or walking bass line now let's talk about groove tunes because this is a great area to kind of go in another direction have some fun and just like with the ballads really get some stuff that you can use effectively for solo piano to start to take you to the next level where you know you can do gigs and people like oh we don't need to hire anybody else but the piano player man it's grooving people could even dance maybe like you're really being the whole orchestra we talk about we can be the big band we can be the funk band we can be the orchestra we can be any ensemble rep representing it with the power of this instrument but the reality of doing that is a lot it's a lot so how do we start to do that bass lines is a big part of it all right so i'm thinking like groove tunes could be any kind of groove but ballad or swing because we cover those the classic kirby hancock chameleon [Music] okay this can be such a great exercise because the simplify and isolate concept is already built in and i know what you're thinking whoa i've tried that that's really hard i didn't say it wasn't hard but except it is simple and you are going to be isolating working on the independence of the hands and working on that melodic flare of your left hand so it's only two chords we're not worried about chord changes in a form and everything it's only two lines the rhythm the rhythm of it has some some nuanced complexity right one two three [Music] get upbeats so you want to hit that precision and you got to figure out something to do in the right hand that's not going to mess it up start easy so basically i just took that simple rhythm then i was like let me take it up a notch i did a little too early let me shift it over one beat but you can do [Music] that's working on all right let me concentrate here one two three [Music] so [Applause] [Music] so [Music] okay so when i say let me concentrate there i had a little improvement i was not concentrating on this what i meant was let me concentrate on this bass line and make sure i can kind of nail that now i slipped up on a little bit which is okay you want to challenge yourself as you practice as long as you can do it i think without dropping a beat and and and this gets into a little bit more advanced stuff but it's not as far away from a lot of you than you may think so this is good we're going into 2021 so let's challenge ourselves a lot of times like being able to get yourself out of a sticky situation and solo piano is just as important as getting yourself into a sticky situation so if i'm doing [Music] and i'm like oh what did i do with the left hand think about coming in at that one forget about the i already missed all that like keep that internal um reset right [Music] i had to skip a lot that's okay but i came in right i did it again [Music] okay and now don't jump in trying to do all this at the beginning you don't need to to get the benefits of this whenever we talk about the process just get the baseline first and get it really accurate and if you're like i've got that then add in just a single line [Music] same rhythm one more note okay you're building up it takes some time um sets and reps sets and reps are super important on this um and then you know you can change this up there's a lot of different areas i think you know if you think about kind of a si well not really a similar groove but stevie wonders i can't help it i mean similar i was thinking similar because it's just two chords i mean it goes to more later you can practice like ah let's so it's see [Music] remember it's anything that's not right with the bass line but it's in the groove like what you want to avoid except at the very very beginning is i don't mean to avoid playing this it sounds fine but practicing because we're playing we're coming in rhythmically together so we're not really working the independence going when you need to do that at the beginning no problem but anything any kind of [Music] anything you can do that keeps that line going and you play something else in the right hand it's the talking that really throws it over the edge for me so you heard that i messed that up but i kept it in the groove [Music] so i can tell this is something i need to practice because i was starting to lose some independence there which look it's not the end of the world that can actually lead to some creative things but we do want to be disciplined i think when we practice because again the the why we practice this it's not just being able to play this stuff yes that's that's a benefit of the practice is that you can pull this stuff out when it sounds good and i love pulling out these kind of bass lines much more than i just i don't know why just for me i would much rather play these kind of like grooves i love playing over that that that thing but i'm much more likely to not actually play the line even solo piano i don't know but that process i mean what a pretty melody and what's that going to lead to with your left hand like if you're playing [Applause] remember we talked about how it's teaching your left hand to play melodically and these are great because they're written out i mean they're written out they're composed bass lines like um like so what you know um other groups you can think about um yeah kind of like you know i love coming up with these they're like they're really just all stolen from the meters george porter you can go on and listen to any of anything that they do you know any of that kind of stuff so if we're over a g which is going to be an easy key to start these in i literally make them up different every time [Music] and you always got the four to go to it's like it's james brown up in here but basically you're just coming up with a line and again you might be starting out start simple this is about the groove executing that melody within the groove with the left hand and slowly adding on the right hand if you're playing in anything in the right hand that's not rhythmically in line with the left hand you're working on hand independence which is great um you know they got stuff you know some of the other stuff the meters have in g that's really cool [Music] you can build up the lines based on this that's uh not a pocky way what is that i don't remember look at pie pie all the meter students are great great titles um any of this stuff is great and then okay other groups that we're thinking about something six or three whatever this is all blues that's one of the great bass lines everyone talks about which is great piano audio is clipping i was getting excited sorry i got excited on the on the meters that always clips it out um yeah everyone always talks about the so what but i think that's a great bassline too and if you can learn to just play the melody with that bass line [Music] this is hard so even before you get to that maybe so you don't get discouraged learn just the baseline of course but and then simple maybe three note voicings and then your only requirement on this would be to not play them together played somewhere simple but not at the same time yeah footprints someone's saying that's another good one yeah i mean these kind of tunes are just so good they have written bass lines to get to get your left hand rolling um and then the last area i have for us to think about i mean so many areas when you talk about baselines um i mean you know [Music] that's kind of a baseline that's really like what we're talking about the melodic stuff with your left hand there's a whole world there we're not going to get into the classical today um but no the last air i wanted to talk about is an effective baseline over a brazilian boston oval group so um maybe starting slow um and these are simple because where you really want to start is just a half note you're not we're not doing all that no this is where it's at do [Music] so with that half oh i added in that note there so what i was trying to do i almost made it just half notes even when you want to we're gonna have that later but that simplifying isolate get that independence going man it's so fun and then this over the bossa nova it's a little easier for some people to find those different rhythmic places because it's developing those upbeats that we need think about the guitar think about a guitarist on empanema beach in rio it's summer down there and the bass baseline is the antidote to that [Music] because it's on the bead [Music] and then you know challenge yourself wherever you're at to keep those half notes going i'm going to some other changes i'm really challenging and what's fun about practicing like this too is then when you just kind of open it up and don't worry about the restrictions you're free but now you've got some ideas [Music] so can always go back because you know what that sounds like what it feels like [Music] all right so that's bass lines that's the how and the y it's just the beginning but i hope it reinvigorated you guys this week to um one exploring some bass lines a lot of ideas there that's really i mean in many ways that's months of possible practice over these different styles so think about this as kind of an overview you don't have to do all this for next week this is just the beginning but the main thing to circle back to where we started in terms of why we're doing this is to get that independence of the hands going that's the process that we're practicing if you can commit to every day doing something and and the great thing is there's all these different styles to do you can start wherever you can start on the stevie wonder stuff the herbie hancock the blues wherever you want because it's that process of practicing the independence of the hands in a simplified isolated but yet creative and always listening kind of a way that's gonna just really i think supercharge your thinking and what the left hand can do okay so thank you guys so much as always happy practicing all right what's up youtube that's that's that's how we do it that's the lesson um if you just joined us you're like what is going on it's like a lesson within a lesson it's like those russian wooden dolls there's you pull it out and there's another thing that's the lesson from beginning to end and um thank you guys for being here i'm gonna take some questions because i saw a bunch coming by uh and thank you guys for that uh maybe we'll just take a few minutes to go through that anything oh let me just say so this is jazz piano method like i say i do a lesson like this every week not live usually we just do that every month or two um but it's one lesson per week we're gonna have a bunch of transcription max is gonna have fun on this one uh there'll be some nice stuff on there um and then we present it on the site with some other resources you know as needed and if you're interested in this we're doing a special offer you know how we do it if ian is oh that there it is i see right there 50 off all of our piano courses oh right the piano access pass right so the way that you get access to jazz piano method if you want to see this every week and maybe more importantly see the archive like i mean i've covered so many tunes if there's a two in your answers and i've probably done a lesson on it um but the way to do that is through the piano access pass which is cool because it gives you the whole archive the new lesson every week um like this one but it also gives you all of adam mantis's course who adam mattis um the magic voicing system and it's an ongoing situation and the 50 off is great because um that's our biggest that's like the black friday kind of situation so we're just kind of bringing that in as a special today and also openstudio pro which is coming at the beginning of next year um being part of piano access pass that's going to be your only way to get access to this deeper community more on that to come soon but this would be a great time to really the way to do this is to get your annual plan 50 off today for piano access pass then you're taken care of for all of next year for i think all of your practicing and inspiration needs and new lesson every week like this so even if it isn't there now new things to inspire you so that's the sales pitch please consider joining it's like netflix you know what i'm saying but better well i think it's better anyway let's uh let me go ahead just a couple questions and i apologize i don't know how far back i can go if you have questions about the offer too feel free to drop those and ian from team openstudio will let you know he'll probably will show up as open studio um and thank you for the super chats i saw a couple of you i'm sorry that they flew by so fast that's really kind of you much appreciated um your overhead camera you're using what kind of camera um that's good i've been talking baseline so much this is a panasonic either g4 or g5 i can't tell we've got both of them we use a lot of panasonic cameras in here i like them a lot i've learned a lot about them they're super fussy they're not like you know your phone they're hard to get look right like your phone you just pull out and take a picture and it's gonna look really good these can look even better of course but there's a lot of there's a lot of things that go into making it look right especially the white balance i don't know how we did today what we try to do is to get the keys to be the same color on that as that um and as the overhead and the main shot you know so that's like white balancing we're manually white balancing we're i'm we me because i'm the only one in here manually focusing and stuff but yeah the camera is uh panasonic and it's got a really good fixed lens no autofocus or anything because the autofocus is convenient but it just doesn't look as good so this is like some kind of uh i can't remember what kind it is but it's a really nice lens um cool let's see other questions we're gonna do just for a minute thanks for the great thank you bruce and thanks rich this is a million dollar lesson wow i'll take that not bad senior oh yeah senor blues has an amazing oh what is it uh yeah horse silver it's got i think i'm messing up that bass line actually but it's something like that song from my father yeah horace silver has a bunch of great um great bass lines photography exactly that's what it was joe beam thank you guys for doing that um yes we're this is being recorded um keep that right hand simple until you can do it more yep joe's got my back joe knows what's up uh okay gary's asking how can i keep the time without being distracted by the right hand um that's the million dollar question how can i keep time so this is like when you're kind of crossing over that threshold or the rubicon um is from when you're practicing with just your left hand the question is like what can you practice that is just challenging enough that you have to concentrate on solidifying that left hand so that you can start to trust it to become automated and the way to do this is just very disciplined and gradual practice so if i'm doing um first of all you got to get that line going that bass line where it's grooving and you you can do it you don't have to be able to talk but you just have to be able to play it and then it's like what's the simplest thing you can add in rhythmically with this so that it won't distract [Music] whole notes and if the chord's too much just a single note but we're not into independence yet right so then you gotta go something that's in between [Music] you hear that i'm going on the upbeat end of one so that's harder than it sounds and that's actually the end of the 16th note and one i should clarify because we're going slow meter um but that's you just have to go that slowly by adding in something that's going to challenge you because as you do that you're training that left hand to be able to survive a little bit more on its own and it's gradual and it's definitely the kind of thing you'll practice and be like you might practice just that for an hour and be like frustrated like i didn't get any better i'm still messing it up move on to something else when you come back tomorrow i think and you kind of jump in that but start simple again don't start on something harder than that with that simple one note edition you'll start to see oh something kind of seeped into my ears and my hands overnight this is definitely the kind of area that even away from the instrument you're gonna start to see some improvements if you put in that discipline time um there it is david hernandez thank you for the super chat brother i really appreciate that super car w um do you practice these bass lines just from richard do you practice these bass lines with a metronome or do you rely on your internal clock so now i'm i pretty much and i practice this stuff you guys know it i i don't just preach it i live it like this is some of my favorite stuff to practice um i mostly uh use the internal clock i do occasionally pull out the metronome i've always got the fronds right here big shout outs with franz company i don't even know if that's like a company that exists anymore but this is old school you know it's always here and it's always ready to go um i don't practice it a lot but i do i mean i'll probably at least once a week pull that out to practice and specifically over something like this i would i would say for everybody until you feel like your rhythm is rock solid practice with the metronome a lot now this is controversial so your mileage may vary i know chicory has a whole nother concept and i defer to chip for me i practice with the me i know a lot of great musicians that have great time that practice a lot with the metronome and i know some that didn't so i don't know that it's necessarily necessary but it's like anything like can you get to be like really bulked up not like me super not bulked up but like real muscles and like bodybuilder healthy without weights just using your body yes can you do it easier with weights yes so it's you know it just sort of depends on what you have access to and and how you want to look at it i think um sandy's blues exactly that's what that was um tell about the way you play whether legato or non legato wear his accent so um for the bass lines when you're walking a bass line i'm not gonna have time to go through every kind of bass line of course but walking for bass line which is probably the most common um i like to think about them as even quarter notes and legato but not super legato so it's not like but it's not we think about the way a bass plays you know it's like it's ringing but it's articulating each note and then in terms of the accent i think that i i think it's best to practicing and play them thinking about even accents on all four with just the slightest accent on two and four so it's not no but it's basically the way a really good bass player plays like if you think about it's almost like feathering bass drum it's like if you think about it and can just barely feel it that accent on two and four that's enough because that propels that line forward now how you'd like to play your bass line just like a bass player a pianist or whatever that's going to be individual but to practice it and as a starting point i think that's a good place just the slightest slightest little accent not a written accent or anything just like almost not an accident like an emphasis if that makes sense all right i'm gonna do one more question you guys and then i'm gonna do a bad thing which is jump down to the bottom let's see if there's any questions i know i'm not supposed to do that but um my son is 14 years old and he also plays but when he started with jazz he was sold his spotify playlist changed completely from pop to jazz i'm overjoyed oh that wasn't a question that's just a great comment uh like nina simone oh nina simone i am such a fan uh you guys that have been with me for a while know what a fan i am of nina simone's piano playing uh everybody knows her amazing vocals and song writing and just as a as a as an icon but uh i think her piano player i think she's one of the greatest piano players in the jazz blues and rhythm and blues pop music ever yes her left i mean her control and and talk about hand independence um now i'm sure from a lot of you know she practiced a lot of classical repertoire i mean that was really like her thing from when she was very young and so a lot of that that literature and repertoire you still got to put in the work but it's kind of like made to lead you to the promised land of finger of hand independence a lot of the great classical repertoire for sure so that's always an area to go to um i missed the name of the herbie hancock tune we were practicing chameleon this now this is a good one to practice with the metronome for sure that's a really good one let me just show you guys that because i could already feel myself lacking some precision on that so i would definitely be like i think around 90 or something boo dude no a little fast 100. [Music] listen that's hard that's hard stuff especially when you put it with the metronome because the metronome doesn't lie um so that's definitely a good one to pull out the metronome so there you go uh do i have a lesson on all blues i'm sure i do i'm 99 sure if i don't please somebody let me know and i'm gladly gonna do that one next week i know i did i'll probably do another one soon because i i don't think i've done it in a while and the funny thing is about doing these lessons jazz piano method for nine years like i've actually gotten better over these years not like not as much better as i got from like say age 12 to 21 like that was a bigger improvement i'm sure those nine years but i do look back on some of the early lessons and um realize i've gotten a little better billie jean is not my lover billy g that's a good baseline is that what it is no it's not an e it must be i don't know what kids say um that's a good one for sure um cool well thank you guys so much for being here um i really appreciate it i hope that you guys have a wonderful end of 2020 a wonderful christmas if that's your thing um whatever you celebrate i think mainly just let's celebrate humanity let's celebrate 2021 being a year where we have more happiness more music less loss of life and you know just um being able to come back together in person but let's stay spiritually connected even as we're still apart because uh there's a lot of work that needs to be done and so um you know music is a great place to do that work so let's keep going uh and staying strong and i hope you guys stay safe and i hope that you're you know with loved ones and if you can't be safely with loved ones love them from afar there's nothing wrong with that either you know um a lot of times we think oh i can't get together for the christmas thing and that's great make those smart decisions but you can still be together get on the phone get on the zoom get on something or just send those vibes out there and let's all come together and tonight we'd like to invite you adam madison i if you're new here or even if you're not new you're invited no matter what but you might not know about this at 8pm eastern time tonight which is just in a few hours i believe we're going to be listening to very topical the nutcracker sweet by duke ellington and this is such a cool piece and i've actually played this before i'll tell my story about it tonight but it's such a great piece it sounds like it's going to be so corny and it's just so brilliant i think it's something duke ellington's great writing i mean all this stuff is great um and the nutcracker is the nutcracker which is fantastic but people love this piece people love the original so it's gonna be fun we're gonna listen to that we do a little listening sess just have a little drink and uh listen communally so join us right here on openstudio uh this very same youtube channel and if you like this video if you learned something today how about pressing that thumbs up button because that helps us spread the word to other people that might enjoy these kinds of videos so all you gotta do is smash the button you can join open studio too but at a minimum smash the like button and subscribe because we're going live all the time a lot of great free content and remember what is it 50 off today only on the all access now the piano access pass link below um and that's gonna be our biggest thing of the sale of the year so get on board with that and then you'll be all set for next year and all the wonderful things we have coming thank you for being here peace everybody have a great rest of your day see you tonight you

Channel: Open Studio

Views: 41,378

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Id: KaShTQ-OHqM

Length: 61min 38sec (3698 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020