(Jazz piano music)
- What's going on everybody, Peter Martin here
for Two Minute Jazz, just wanted to talk to you guys
today about some left hand voicing options that we have.
Many different ways to approach solo piano
in here playing around on the great Dave Brubeck's
"In Your Own Sweet Way," iconic jazz standard.
And I was thinking about, you know we have the
(plays piano)
root and seven resolving with the
two fives to root and three.
(plays piano)
A great way to start and then, you know we've got
all of our sort of classic left hand rootless voicings.
(plays piano)
Mostly four note.
(plays piano)
But the trick is, I think, is that you know
they don't have to be separated
like every eight bars you switch back and forth.
I hear a lot of pianists doing that
and if you can kind of get into a flow
of shifting between them, some nice things can happen.
(plays piano)
So we're going, you know, root it.
Rootless.
Back to rooted.
And then back to, you know, you kind of
see what the flow is there.
So the trick to this is really practicing
that left hand alone before you even try to combine it here.
And really, you want to get a half note root movement,
make sure you've got that covered.
And you can kind of check yourself by hearing it,
some rootless voicings in the right hand for your practice.
And then,
(plays piano)
just going two notes.
You know there's choices, different ways to do these.
Now, if you can reach these, you can go three notes.
Even if you can't reach them, catch the pedal
and cheat a little bit, no problem.
Because those are great options as well.
Then, as you're practicing
you might shift every bar and you want to kind of try
to still get your voice leading together so
maybe you even start every two bars.
Then you're shifting up to rootless.
But you know you're going to go back down
so you're kind of getting ready.
Ah, start again.
Two bars, now rootless.
Back to rooted.
Oh now, check out what I just did there.
This is a great little sort of bridge between them.
This is kind of a cool sound and it's more,
it's actually got the root on the bottom
but it's a four and o so it's kind of a combination.
It goes nicely back to that, to the rooted.
Back to rootless.
Okay, so that just sort of gives you some more options
of course, there's many more options
for our left hand voicings, but I don't
want you thinking about them as having to
be separated by every eight bars or every A
or anything like that, we can shift between
these great options we have for our left hand.
Alright, happy practicing.
(jazz music)