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Welcome to Metalworks Institute keyboard tips. I'm Peter Kadar, and today
we're going to talk about boogie woogie and blues piano basics. One of the things that
students seem to struggle with when they come to see me, is left right independence and
being comfortable just grooving at the instrument. I always recommend that everybody gets into
blues because blues is the basis of all of the popular music that we hear in western
society. Rock, country, blues (obviously itself), gospel music, r&b, funk.. Everything comes
from blues, which means we need to get comfortable playing the blues. So for beginning piano
students, one of the great things to do is to start with a simple repetitive left hand-based
pattern. I often recommend something like this. So we have three quarter notes, and
two eighth notes. Go through an entire blues progression. Now what I'll get them to do
after this in the right hand, is to add chords. We'll start with whole notes. ... 2, 3, 4...
1, 2, 3, 4... So I'll get them to play through an entire chorus of blues just doing this.
Putting two different things together. Once we get the whole notes together, we can start
to go through the different note subdivisions. Half notes, here we go. Once a student is
comfortable with half notes, let's do quarter notes. Then we do eighth notes. Here we go.
So these are sort of swung. Now, up to this point we don't have anything that really sounds
like what you would hear on a record. What we do next is, we drop the eighth notes that
are on the down beat and only play the eighth notes that are on the up beat. So the 1, AND,
2, AND, 3, AND, 4, AND... So when I put that together with this left hand pattern, we're
going to hear something you hear on a lot of famous old records, and it sounds like
this. AND, AND, AND, AND, AND, AND... So I'm just playing the off beats in the right hand.
I still hear this a lot in country music. Yeah... I'm Peter Kadar for Metalworks Institute
keyboard tips. We'll see you next time.}