Hand-Over Piano Arpeggios In Your Left Hand
Left-Hand Piano Style #6: Hand-Over Piano Arpeggios
Good morning, this is Duane and over the last few sessions we’ve been taking up various left hand bass styles. Today I want to take up left hand bass styles number six, which is called hand-over piano arpeggios. First let me just review where we’ve been so you can get up to speed. We said that when you’re playing a melody on the right hand, whatever it is, your left hand supplies a chord of some sort. It supplies a harmonic background and that can be as simple as just holding a note like that.
We said that probably the first style you should learn is to strum the chord, the background. That was number one. Number two was a simple swing bass where we hit a low note and then a chord, a low C and then a C chord or a low F and then a F chord, and the chord can be in any inversion; it doesn’t have to be in root position. It can be root, first or second inversion, doesn’t matter. Then it goes for four chord notes too like the G 7th. You can play it upside down like that. It doesn’t matter; any inversion is fine. That’s the swing bass where you hit a low note, the low root, and then swing up to the chord and swing back to the bass and so on.
Then we said there was an alternating bass so we could hit the root and then the chord and then the fifth and then the chord like this. You’ve heard that plenty. Then we said there was an Alberti bass based on the playing and writing of a guy named Alberti in the 17th Century, I believe, where we take the bottom note and then the top note, middle note, top note, bottom top, middle top, bottom top, middle top, bottom in a repetitive fashion, or bottom top, middle top, middle top, middle top, bottom top, middle top, middle top, middle, top, bottom. There’s variations in all of these and after we get done describing the basic styles we will then combine them.
Then we got onto the arpeggio, the arpeggio in 10th where we break the chord up. Instead of playing the root, 3rd, 5th, we play root 5th, and then 3rd an octave higher. It’s like this. If we were 4/4 time we might do this: one two three four, one two three four. It’s better if you depress your damper pedal as you’re playing those so all those notes won’t blend together. If you don’t depress the damper pedal it sounds likes this. While there’s a place for that if it’s appropriate in a song, for example if the rhythm is and so on like that. But it’s the same three notes no matter what the rhythm is.
Then we said we could also do this. We can hit a low root and then the 5th, and then 3rd, and go back and forth in 8th notes: one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and, and two and three and four and one. And so on like that. That was style number five.
Style number six that we’re going to take up today is arpeggio but it’s called a hand-over arpeggio because you don’t stop with the 3rd. You bring your fingers over and play the higher notes of the chord. It varies on how much time you have, but like this. You’ve heard that style in and so on. Hand-over arpeggios, you play the low note, the 5th, the 3rd, and then you bring your fingers over to the next note of the chord, whatever it is. Then it depends on the situation but you can go back down the way you came up, or any other way as long as you hit chord notes. I’m doing that on C. Let me do it real slow. Root, 3rd, 5th. Root, 5th, 3rd, 5th, root, 5th, 3rd, 5th, root, 5th, 3rd, 5th, root, 5th, 3rd, 5th, root. In other words, you’re dealing with those three notes – root, 3rd, and 5th – but you stretch them out like so. They’re open voicing down here. In other words, you’re not hitting all the notes of the chord, but when you get higher you can do that. You can go as high as you want, actually.
Again, in application you’d play it like this. When I first started out I wasn’t doing it right because I didn’t have the rhythm clear in my mind but gradually it dawned on me so I realized you have time to do this. Time-wise, one and two and three and, one and two and three and, so it depends on what the time signature is, what the rhythm is, and so on. That’s the idea of a hand-over arpeggio.
That’s number six and we’ll continue again with this series next time we get together, maybe combining those six styles in various ways. We’ll see you then, and if you like this sort of thing come on over to playpiano.com and sign up for our free newsletter on piano chords. You get a lot of instruction likes this on a wide variety of piano playing subjects, usually on video. Thanks. Bye bye for now.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIPA_lw3o54&feature=youtu.be
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