Here Is an Idea For Your Piano Practice

Good morning. This is Duane. We’re doing a series of short videos on practice ideas, piano practice ideas.  A swing bass is where you swing your hand from a low note to a chord, low note, chord, low note, chord, low note, chord. There’s a lot of varieties to that, as you know.

Right now what I’d like to show you is to hit the fifth before the root. In other words, fifth, root, and then break up the chord. Instead of one two, two strikes, in other words, a low note and a chord, you got four. See that? There’s two down there and then there’s two up here. Push your damper pedal down, by the way, so it connects the low note with that. You’ll don’t need to do it all the time but once in a while it’s useful to have that feeling. Also, while you’re doing that you can run around the chord … That’s a chord progression, right? One, six, two, five. That’s what it is. A C chord to the A minor chord to the D minor chord to the G seventh chord. Very familiar. It’s that “Heart and Soul” chord progression that we all played when we were kids.

As you’re doing that you can also practice running chords or straddling or two-one breakups or something in the right hand. Listen. Now that’s not something you play in a song unless it was just as a filler between phrases, but it’s really good to practice because your left hand can keep going like that while your right hand does something entirely different. There I’m just running up the chord like that and back down. I’ll do it in C. Now I’m coming down on A minor, going up on D minor seventh, coming down on G seventh or any combination that you want to do. It gets coordination practice between the two hands.

Now that was a run but if I wanted to practice straddles. Of course you don’t have to stick to those four chords. It’s a good thing to do because you don’t have to think about other things, but once you master that you can go onto any chords you want of course. I guess I’ll call that run around the chord progression. We’ll run in the right hand as we play the chord progression in our left hand. There’s practice idea number one. See you tomorrow with another idea like this. Bye bye for now.

Hi, this is Duane again and I’d like to tell you about a little book that I wrote a few years back. It’s called Piano Chords and Chord Progressions: The Secret Backdoor to Exciting Piano Playing. It’s a terrific resource about chords. If you want to know more about chords, you ought to latch onto this book. It’s just barely over ten bucks; eleven bucks I think it is. It covers all the chords and chord progressions that I talk about in my videos. It’s not a substitute for videos of course or DVDs but it’s a great summary, and it’s so inexpensive that it’s well worth your while to get.

Here’s a table of contents so you can just look down here and see all the things it covers. Starts out with major, minor, diminished, augmented, sixth, seventh, and on to thirteenth chords and suspensions and alterations, and then gets onto chord progressions and so on. It’s a very thorough book and it’s got a lot of illustrations. I’ll just toggle through a little bit. There’s the back cover. It’s worth your while to get. Hope you take advantage of that. Thank you. Bye bye for now.

YouTube video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akxS6NOJB-c&feature=youtu.be

***For lots more good stuff on piano playing come on over to my website at https://www.playpiano.com and sign up for our free piano tips – “Exciting Piano Chords & Sizzling Chord Progressions!”

Here’s a great little book on chords and chord progressions on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Piano-Chords-Chord-Progressions-Exciting-ebook/dp/B0076OUGDE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404158669&sr=1-1&keywords=piano+chords+duane+shinn

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