This excerpt from the Public Television program The Piano Guy is brought to you by the Roland Corporation
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You know what I would like to do right now is walk you through the tune I Left My Heart
in San Francisco.
It's a great tune obviously Tony Bennett, it was really his signature tune, kind of
an interesting side note, his accompanist Ralph Sharron who's one of my all time favorite
piano accompanist is who actually brought him the tune originally and it ended up being
one of his biggest hits.
What I want to do in working through this tune is not focus on all the little stylistic
interpretations things, but instead get right down to the meat and potatoes of what it is
to get this tune learned and underhand in your head.
Which is just the melody line and just the chord changes and to do that we obviously
use a lead sheet.
So, lets go ahead and start with our right hand, now this melody is really pretty darn
simple, its a really pretty lyrical melody but its not that hard to play, so let me just
play a couple of measures
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You know and if you have never read a music in your entire life ever before, you probably
aught to get to that basic step of every good boy does fine, and some of those things but
quite frankly even if not if I could say this starts on an E, I bet you could probably hunt
and peck it if you knew the tune well enough just by singing.
So don't ever be afraid to let your ears guide you. I think sometimes we put the
cart before the horse and think that the reading is more important than the playing and boy
that's just not the case. So use the reading as a guide to help you get something underhand.
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And on and on. There is nothing really in this that's going to trip us up. You just
need to work your way through it and just kind of get it underhand. its not a tough
one.
Lets shift onto the other hand now to do our chords. Now with our left hand we are going
to start out and I'm gonna give away some of these chords. I'll tell what they are and
I'll play them, but before I do that I want to give a little caveat and tell you I really
think its best when you are learning chords to get chord diagrams in front of you. Weather
thats in a book or an electronic chord finder or online somewhere, however you can find
it do it like guitar players do. You know how they always read those little fret charts
when they are playing chords. Well on piano I suggest doing the exact same thing for your
left hand and you just need to knuckle it under and get some of those things learned
if you haven't learned them yet. The great news and a bunch of you that have seen me
a bunch of times already know this. Once you learn a chord you've really got it locked
in for the rest of your life. It's not like you are starting from scratch on every single
tune, you really can come into most tunes with a good base of knowledge and then your
snowball keeps getting bigger and bigger as you learn new chords.
So, moving on here we go...
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It starts out with a C major 7, and then goes to a E flat diminished 7, that's maybe one
you haven't had before. That ones not so standard.
So it's............then do a D minor 7,and to G 7, sorry I'll do it in root position.
I"m going to move the melody line up and octave so that I can get my fingers out of the way
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G 7, back to C Major 7, to G 7,
There's a B Minor, actually I added a 7th, you can just play the B Minor, to E 7,
Ok, so really then it just repeats. This tune is kind of an odd one from a structure stand
point that it doesn't ever really go to a bridge or a whole second section. It just
kind of A, A it just kind of plays through a couple times.
But let me tell you what, I'm just checking to make sure I got through all the, there's
another E flat. I think I did we got through all the chords.
Let me play a couple measures for you, kind of up tempo and I"m very intentionally not
going to do anything sneaky. I'm not going to use the Ralph Sharron lick, the......
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You know some of those other things you remember. That's something you can do later, once you've
really got it underhand. But for now I'm just going to use the root position chords, just
exactly like you would look them up in a chord finding book of some sort and I'm going to
play a one note melody with it. I think you'll find that it sounds pretty darn good. I'm
going to go ahead and keep the melody line up one octave from where its written just
cause I feel like playing it up there. So here we go.....
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(music) And then on and on, it will kind of repeat it's self through the second part of the tune.
There you go, that's a pretty darn easy tune to get underhand. The chords aren't really
you know, number one there's not a ton of chords in the tune and they are not particularly
tough chords and the melody's pretty straight forward.
This is really a beautiful one to focus on just the niceness of the tune which is a really
gorgeous melody line. So have fun learning to play San Francisco and getting down these
basics and once you do that you will have a really good platform set to start adding
some tips and tricks on top.
Have Fun Playing
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