(piano jazz music)
- Hey everybody, Jordan from Pianote here.
The piano is a great instrument for accompanying yourself
because you can play both the chords, the melody,
and even the rhythm stuff all on one instrument.
But it takes a little bit of time to coordinate
both your hands in order to get there.
So I made a couple of examples for left hand accompaniment
that you can use to try at home to start building those
skills so you can start accompanying yourself on the piano.
So let's have a look here.
So the first and easiest way to just accompany yourself
on the piano is simply playing octaves in the left hand.
Just take the root notes of the chords that you're playing
and just play 'em down low to fill out the bass.
So I'm gonna play just eight bars of a simple chord
progression and I'll show you what I mean.
(piano music)
So you can do that easily at home.
But if you want to add a little bit more spice
to your left hand playing,
you can still keep within that octave kind of mentality,
but I like to add, I call them broken fills,
that kind of blend between chord to chord.
And I'll show you what I'm talking about
in the next set of chords here.
(piano music)
So as you can see the final two beats of every bar,
I play sort of a really simple broken triad almost
in the left hand.
I take my left hand octave position
and I just play the root, the fifth, and the octave up high.
And I just do that on every chord.
So I'll just play the left hand here
just to show you what I'm talking about.
One, two, three, four.
Another easy way to accompany yourself in the left hand
is to add a little bit of rhythm.
So the next example that we're gonna look at
is gonna use the same chord progression
but this time we're gonna be playing eighth note,
fifth intervals mostly in the left hand.
I'll show you what I mean.
(piano music)
So that's a really easy other tactic to use.
Practice that kind of thing with a click,
because again you're building a rhythmic skill
when you're playing eighth notes in the left hand.
I'll just try that one more time.
And yeah just listen in, maybe practice along at home
to the sheet music on the screen now.
(piano music)
So you might be wondering why don't we put the third note
in with a lot of these chords.
I just like to keep them nice and open,
so that the right hand melody can handle all the color.
And all we're looking for in the left hand,
is just a consistent rhythmic pulse.
Again this is just stuff that you can use
when you don't play with any other musicians,
you have no backing tracks, you're just looking to fill out
the sound as much as possible
with what you've got on the piano.
The final example that we're gonna look at
is a little more complicated.
We're actually gonna look at a broken kind of motion
in the left hand.
Again, we're just gonna use the same chord progression
that we've been looking at so far.
But this time we're gonna add,
sort of a combination of both rhythm
and a little bit of rhythmic melody almost in the left hand.
So I'll show you what I'm talking about.
(piano music)
I'll play that just one more time
and you can follow along at home.
(piano music)
So that's just a couple of examples of what any beginner
can do to accompany themselves on the piano at home.
A lot of just really simple stuff.
If any of this stuff feels a little bit too complicated,
make sure just to try it hands separate first,
and just go through the left hand to make sure
you have that pulse nice and set.
So try these at home.
Experiment with different instincts that you might have
on your own end for how you wanna accompany yourself.
And eventually you're gonna just end up being able to play
simple little accompaniment lines like this.
(piano music)
Alright guys thanks for watching the video.
If you have anything else that you wanna learn about
the piano be sure to check us out at Pianote.com
We'll see you there.
(piano jazz music)