“Walk on Up” Chord Progression (With a Bluesy Riff Thrown In)

Good morning, this is your headless piano teacher again with a free lesson on the “Walk On Up” chord progression. This is called the “Walk On Up” technique and it’s very simple.

In chord progressions, as you know, chords have a tendency to want to move up a fourth constantly. In other words, the C chord wants to–particularly if you put a seventh with it–it wants to move up a fourth to F. The F chord wants to move up to B flat. We’re going to be talking about the circle of chords here, or the circle of keys. That happens all the time in music. What usually follows D7? Almost always G. What follows G7? Almost always C.

We can take advantage of that by walking up between chords. For example, if I’m walking up from the C chord, say, to the F chord, I can walk up in tens, and it gives a real nice secure sound like that. Some people’s hands aren’t big enough to play that. If your hands are, then do it. I can’t do it, so I have to cheat. I have to use two hands. I have to use… See my right hand is playing the tenth above it. So that’s all there is to a walk-up, you just walk up like so. If we’re in the key of F, it would be… See that?

Now we’re going to throw a little curve ball here. We’re going to use what we learned last week, that is, the four of the four technique. So let’s walk up to four, but before we play the F chord, let’s play the B flat chord. That immediately gives it a little bluesy sound. Let’s do it in F. If you put the sevenths in there, you can get a bluesier sound.

Let me put this in context by doing it in an actual song. Let’s say you’re playing Amazing Grace. You can do this on any song, of course, but let me just play it. That’s F to B flat and back to F and so on. Now watch this. See that? I’m walking up to B flat and my right hand has to help. Before we play B flat, what are we going to do? Play the four of the four.

There at the end I put on the four of the four to the four to the one. Let me do that again a little slower. Amazing Grace–now I’m going to walk up–how sweet. Now before I play B flat, I’m going to go E flat, B flat. Now I’m going to play F one-four-one. I could go up to the four of the four if I have time.

Now, the chord here is C, instead of going to C, I went to the four of the four. What’s four of the four, it’s B flat. So I played the B flat chord and then just came down. On this walk-up, I tripletized it. I went triple-it, triple-it, triple-it. See that? My left hand is just walking up in octaves, but my right hand–you can’t see my bottom finger. That’s okay. It’s playing an octave lower. In the right hand, I’m tripletizing it. Triple-it, triple-it, triple it. Triple-it, triple-it, triple-it, [inaudible 00:04:44] four. One-four-one. Four, four, one. See that? You can do it with all kinds of voicing. You don’t need to do it just like I did it. Voicing is not the subject here, we’re talking about chord progression.

That’s it for this time. Practice hard. See you next time. If you want more tips like this, and if you’re not already signed up for our newsletter, come on over to playpiano.com and I’ll send you a newsletter like this every three days or so. Thanks for being with me. See you later. Bye-bye for now.

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/use-chord-progressions-when-writing-music.html
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