Left-Hand Chord Voicing For The 12-Bar Blues

Here is the transcript of the video:

Good morning. This is Duane and a few days ago I made a video about the inside blues move where you position your hands with the root and the seventh and then you play around with the flat third and the flat fifth and just kind of “Duane playing the piano” that kind of sound.

Then somebody wrote and asked an excellent question, “What about the left-hand voicing?” I didn’t explain the left-hand chord voicing for the 12-bar blues because I was focusing on the right so let me do the left-hand voicing today. We’ll stay in the key of C here just to make it a little easier for you. I’m voicing the one, you know with the blues you have three chords. You have the primary chords of one, four, and five. So I’m voicing the C chord in the key of C like this its first inversion and I use the third and then we’ll call it the sixth, this is the dominate seventh, and the ninth. That’s the voicing I use for the left hand of the one chord and I’ll have to establish a low root for it and play it something like that. I might play it as a block or I might break it up like that. Listen. “Duane playing the piano.”

And, then when we move to the four chord, my hand switched from that position, E, A, B flat, and D, to that position, E flat, G, A, and D, and that’s the F chord with the seventh on the bottom. You see in the C chord we had the third on the bottom. Now we’ve got the seventh on the bottom and I like that. There’s no root. There’s no F and although I hit a low F here to establish the feeling. So I have the seventh on the bottom, then the ninth, the third and the sixth. Hold them like that. So when you’re on the F chord and you’re playing, “Duane playing the piano”, back to the C chord. Now the G chord would be like this. Hit a low G and then use the seventh on the bottom of that too. F, B, and E, that’s a stack of fourths, and so you not only have the bluesy sound with the seventh in it particularly on the bottom, but you have the stack of fourths, the open kind of voicing, “Duane playing the piano” then back to C.

So the three chords that I’m playing in the key of C are the one chord with the third on the bottom; E, A, B flat, and D, the four chord with the seventh on the bottom; E flat, G, A, and D, and on the G chord with the seventh on the bottom; F, B, and well I think I left out the : F, B, and E. You can put in the A if you want to, but I think sounds better just open like that. So let me just play through a simple chorus that goes like this. “Duane playing the piano.”

Remember I’m just playing a simple motive in the right hand, and I’ll talk about that in a minute. Now the only thing I did different was occasionally I moved up a half a step. Now you have to stay on the C chord for so long that it gets boring so sometimes I move them up a half step. Just take all the notes in the C chord and move them up a half a step. So you’re really moving up from C to D flat, C seventh to D flat, and the same on F. If you want to move up a half step then “Duane playing the piano.” And then that’s really all there is to it.

I just wanted to talk about the voicing of the left hand to go along with the motive in the right hand or the inside blues move that we talked about in the right hand. It all works on the blues. There’s some ideas for you blues’ players so we’ll see you again tomorrow with another little piano tip of some sort. If you haven’t signed up for our free newsletter, be sure and come on over to playpiano.com and sign up because we’ve got a lot of good stuff for you there. Thanks. See you tomorrow. Bye, Bye for now.

More info on chord voicing in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_voicing