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Locked Hands Style On The Piano
| Hello. This is Duane, with more good stuff you really ought to know. Together we’re going to look at the locked hands block chord style. Why do they call it a thing like that? It’s because your hands move parallel. It’s like your thumbs are locked together. They’re really not, but they’re going to run close together. What happens here is that you play the left hand in the melody. Let’s say that you’re playing Danny Boy. Listen. You see that’s the melody, isn’t it? You’re playing the melody in the left hand. You’re also playing the melody in the right hand. Look at the top note. You see that? You got a melody in the left hand and a melody in the right hand. Now under the right hand melody we put in the chords. Either you’ll see it written that way, or once you know how to do this, you can do it yourself. Just put in whatever chords are appropriate for the song. To do that you have to know what the primary chords are and what chord substitutions are and so on. You have to know quite a bit of stuff but you’re learning that. |
| That’s the sound you get. The goal is to make that left hand stand out. There’s two ways you can do it. You can think about the left hand. Just focus on the left hand, think about it, and as you think about it, it will naturally stand out. I hope you can hear it standing out there. It is, in this room. I hope the tape recorder is picking it up. |
| The second thing you can do is you can emphasize it by sliding up to certain notes. You could do a slide-in into some of those notes, like you could go G A B quickly, third, second, first. As I hit that E I played D, D sharp, E. Whoops. You see that gives it a little impetus to it, doesn’t it, if you slide up to that bottom note. I wouldn’t do it all the time because you could overdo it and it would sound sloppy. |
| Now does this style stand alone? Not really, not unless you have the luxury of playing with a group. If you play with a group, you do, because the drummer and the bass player and so on are going to fill up the gaps. If you’re playing solo piano, which most of us have to do, it doesn’t really stand alone. You have to do some other things, and that’s not the subject of this particular little hint. You could use all your other arranging styles and just use this for part of it. Let me show you. |
| See I used it that far. Now I’m going to go back to it but I … Now I’m using another style. I’ll come back to it here in a minute. You hear I’m right back to it. Now you interject a run into the middle of it. I’m using the style now. I forget how the song went. What kind of teacher am I, anyway? I forget how the song goes as I’m illustrating. You get the idea. That’s the locked hands block chord style, more good stuff you really ought to know. You had another lesson there too, and that is no matter how advanced you get, you can make mistakes. We’re all human. I’m going to leave that on just so you can enjoy the fellowship of mistakes. Bye bye for now. |
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