Left Hand 7th Chords – How To Voice Them When Playing The Blues

In our video today we are going to cover left hand 7th chords that we use when playing the blues, jazz, R&B and several other types of music styles.

Good morning. This is Duane and last time we met, I guess it was yesterday, I recorded a video on a right-hand pattern you can use in the blues. If you recall, it went something like this – and while that appears to be fairly advanced, it’s not really because you’re just using one, two, three, four notes twice. Use them down here as well and then you use two connector notes, E flat and C. That’s not the subject of mine today.

Today I’d like to take up the left hand. Yesterday someone was very critical because I didn’t cover the left hand. Well, I was talking about the right-hand part. Today we’re doing the left-hand part. I’d like to talk about voicing 7ths in the left hand when you’re playing the blues. As you know, the blues almost always have a 7th and, like if we’re in the key of C, you’d use the C 7th and then you’d use an F 7th and then you’d use a G 7th.

There’s better ways to voice those chords so they sound more bluesy. Let’s go to the key of G say. Yesterday I was in the key of F so let’s do it in the key of G. If I was playing in the key of G, a blues in the key of G, I’d probably do something like that. Notice I hit the low G which is the root of the G 7th chord of course. Then I voice the chord like this, 7th on the bottom, 3rd in the middle and 6th on top. 7th, 3rd, 6th. You may say, well there’s none of the original chord left except the 3rd and you’re right. There’s no 5th but we did hit the root down here didn’t we. We hit the G down there.

We have all the notes of the chord except the 5th and we’re replacing the 5th with the 6th and the 7th to get that open sound. That’s kind of nice there because what you can do is you can slide up a half a step easily just by freezing your hand. It’s like you dipped your hand in glue and it froze that way. You can just move a half a step to the next chord or down a half step so you get some variety like that.

See that? Okay. You hit a low G and then you hit the chord depending on what the time signature is, maybe three times or every beat. If you want to you can slide off that B flat onto B sometimes. Let me just play it very simply for you so you can watch my left hand. Now it’s time to go to the C 7th chord. By the way, if you want to know the formula of the blues – I don’t have time to cover that today, but it’s a 12-bar blues where you have so many measures of the 1 chord, so many measures of the 4 chord, so many measures of the 5 chord and then back to the 1 chord.

We’ve played the 1 chord. Now we’re going to go to the 4 chord which is C. Now, it doesn’t really work to voice the C chord like that because it’s too low and this is too high. I’m not going to use the 7th on the bottom, the 3rd and the 6th like I did on the G chord. Instead I’m going to do something like this. I’m going to start on the 3rd, go to the 6th, 7th right next to it and then the 9th. That works too. You hit a low C and then come up and play that.

In fact, you could hit a C and G if you wanted to. That gives you a nice full sound. Okay, then when we come to D 7th we could use it. Let me back up to G. Now back to the G chord. Now the [5-7 00:04:20] chord is D 7th. What I can do if you want, you can play F sharp on the bottom, that’s the 3rd, the 7th in the middle and the flat 10th on top, if you like that sound. Otherwise you can do that.

There’s some ideas for voicing the left hand. You can put the 7th on the bottom whenever it’s convenient. Otherwise maybe use the 3rd on the bottom. Sometimes, like I say, you could use a 3rd on the bottom with a flat 10th if you like that sound. If you don’t you can do something like that. All right. That’s it for today, a little left-hand chord voicing and tomorrow we’ll take up another element of the blues I believe. If you enjoy these little tips, come on over to playpiano.com and sign up for all of them. Hope to see you there. Bye-bye for now.

Click on this link to watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbwjPVq7XLc&feature=youtu.be

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