“Michael Row The Boat Ashore” – A Simple Way To Play It

You don’t have to be very advanced at all on the piano to be able to play “Michael Row The Boat Ashore” because you can play the melody with just 6 notes and harmonize it with just 2 chords.

Click on this link to watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90C5bbLGhig&feature=youtu.be

Good Morning! This is Duane. Today I’d like to take the little, simple song “Michael Row The Boat Ashore”. It’s basically a piece anyone can play beginners, and even people that don’t play the piano they can pick it out with one hand. It doesn’t have that many notes.

I want to just show you three or four things you can do to accompany it in the left hand that are fairly easy.

The melody goes like this. You go right up the C chord; C, E, G, E, G, A, G. That’s all there is to it, just those six notes. In the left hand you can accompany that with just two chords. You can use C chord and F chord if you want. If you wanted to use three chords using the G 7th cord but let’s just use two. Let’s just use C and F because that’s very simple. You play the C chord every other note up from C and then the F chord you just move the two top notes to the C chord up one and then back down. Like this.

See that, just C and F will harmonize it. As I said, if you want to use G 7th that’s fine too, just move down there. In other words, take the bottom note move it down to B and middle note move it up one. That’s C, that’s G 7th and that’s C. C, F, G 7th, and C. Okay, let’s do that again. This time I’ll play the chord on every beat.

Now, what else could you do? If you wanted to use a little finger independence this is a good drill too. You could walk down the C scale from four notes, watch.

See, the chord C so I’m just going down the C scale four notes. When the chord goes to F then I walk down the F scale four notes and then back to C.

I think I’ll use it. No let’s go to F scale.

If you’re new to piano playing that’s probably a little bit, it’ll take some coordination but it’s kind of fun to do. That’s called a walking bass line, by the way. You’re intimating a bass player. For example, if I as a piano player didn’t have a bass player I could do that on my left hand and put the chords in my right hand, listen.

There’s all kinds of left hand patterns you can use. Walking patterns like that you don’t always have to go down from the root you can come up from the root or whatever. It’s a fun exercise to do and it does develop a little finger independence.

Or, you could just go to a regular swing bass, like this. That was very simple because I wasn’t always hitting all the notes of the chord. I’ll do it slowly. Or combine the two. The nice thing about improvising is you can combine all these styles and not be limited to just one kind of style.

You can start out very simply and then as you get more and more advanced you can experiment with things and broaden out a little bit. That’s it for today. If you enjoy these little tips come on over to playpiano.com and sign up for our whole series. I 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=90C5bbLGhig&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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