Starting out with Blues

So as I start out this project of learning to play some basic blues on the piano, I thought I should document my starting point, as your basic elementary pianist. I restarted my piano playing using traditional classical teaching repertoire, stuff around the level of the first half of Bach's Minuet in G, and this Telemann Gavotte. I'm pretty comfortable reading music, though I'm no brilliant sight reader. I enjoy studying music theory, and then seeing/hearing it enact itself in the pieces I'm learning.

I started out by learning the following left hand patterns, and just practicing keeping a steady grove in the key of C (swung eighths). I found a rhythm built into my Casio PX-120 called "boogie-woogie" which works well with this sort of practice.

It's kind of zen -- to get it to sound right, I need to get sucked into the rhythmic trance, but if I get sucked in too far some inner alertness goes passive, my beat falters, and my inner dancer stumbles and gets peeved.


For the first few days I concentrated on this stuff, and gradually worked up to repeating some very simplistic right hand melody patterns while my left hand played the first of the four patterns above. This took lots of work for me -- I am still quite challenged by coordinating differing activities between the two hands. The other night I had a breakthrough, though, where I broke my melody/harmony snippets down into sequences of three eighth-notes (both hands together), and learned each one (not hard) then moved on to the next (overlapping) one. After doing that, they all came together into a whole amazingly smoothly. Must remember that technique.

Yesterday I started learning the blues chord progression, played thus (more or less: I figured out a better ending, but haven't figured out how to write it down yet).

 I can play just the bassline at 105 bpm, but hands together I am barely half that speed, and I do still struggle to make the chord changes without losing my place with the piano's built in rhythm section.