Fast Piano Lessons Blog

In this lesson we’ll continue covering patterns for swinging rock piano! These are bass line patterns for your left hand. They really help push the song along and give it energy. These are meant to be played fairly quickly. They can also be fairly redundant because most of the attention is going to be on your right hand. Your left hand just plays a supporting role to drive the music, while your right hand gets the spotlight.

I came up with these notes because they’re notes from the chord. If the chord was C, we could play each of the notes in the C chord, one at a time: C E G. If we do all three at the same time too low on the piano it sounds muddy and has no energy.

Even though some of these are simpler, when I’m trying play and sing at the same time, I’ll use these simple patterns the most! There is just TOO MUCH to focus on in piano to do it all well!

Click on any of the examples to make them bigger!

Example 1: The first bass line you should start with. It outlines the same notes that are in a C chord: C, E, G.

Example 2: has a new note at the end: “A” (C, E, G, A). Fingering: Place your left hand pinky on the C and the thumb on the A

Example 3: is a little different than ex. 2. The notes are C, E, G and A, G. The last two are 8th notes, going twice as fast!

Any song would work really, so I chose a song everyone is familiar with to see the different flavors it has when we use different patterns on the piano. The examples we’ve been talking about are blues, rock, swing, bossa. If you use just a few patterns from jazz, rock or swing it starts to become a song in that style…
Its up to you to decide how to use some of these ideas! I’ll keep showing you examples.

Here is a video covering what we talked about in the last blog post:

“What songs can you apply these patterns to?”

Celine had a great idea to do some reggae! but unfortuneately the video was already finished before I could add a reggae example. I’ll be sure to add more reggae patterns in future lessons!

Lorna had a very good piano question:
Which songs can we apply some of these country, bossa nova or blues patterns to?

ANY SONG is the short answer!

Think of what I’m showing you as interchangeable parts, or pieces for building your song or arrangement. Lets take the song twinkle twinkle which is part of the classical genre. You could add the blues bass lines and get a bluesy version of twinkle twinkle, or you could add a bossa nova bassline add a different flavor.

It all depends on what you want to make your arrangement sound like!

Thanks for the great piano question Lorna!

I just posted a quick lesson for the Michael Jackson song, Billie Jean. It covers the verse of the song, and has some extra information about chord inversions. Let me know what you think and any difficulties or questions you have!

Inversions are when you take a chord like C major and re-arrange the order of the notes. C major in its root position (or regular position) has the notes C, E, G (from left to right). An inversion of C major would be either E, G, C or G, E, C (from left to right in that order). They are both still the C major chord, but now they have different notes in the bass.

The great thing about inversions is it allows you to keep the melody note of the song on top, while adding harmony underneath. Keeping the melody note on the top (AKA to the furthest right on the piano) is a great way to get it to stand out from the rest of the notes.

The first clip is a little silly. There is a guitar part in the song that I wanted to play, but my hands are too busy doing the other parts so I had to sing it. When I’m playing this song for an audience, the audience will sing along with high “whoo” if you teach it too them. Its really fun.