all right welcome we are going to look at walking in memphis yes
challenging song shockingly challenging curiosity yeah because brett has the best attitude ever
shockingly challenging so i'm here to kind of sing a little bit just to help to place
some of the song parts and brett's here to teach you how to play this awesome song
absolutely we're going to be looking at a lot of different sections the most iconic
one and the one we're going to start with is the intro section to this whole song so pretty
it has four chords to it it has an f5 so an f with no third then a g with no third then a c
with no third and an a with no third so that would be a first good way to practice this is just play
so your left hand and right hand are playing the same notes just an octave apart from each other
and once you have a five finger pattern you kind of are locked into that shape for all
four of these chords and you can just play them solidly like this for a while
and just get that pattern comfortable and then you'd want to break it up and go
and once that becomes comfortable you'd probably want to add a metronome to it because rhythms
create feet these rhythms aren't where you'd imagine them to be if i just played this kind of
like freely and just played it as i was now you'd hear it as one and two and three and four and
but that's not what this song does no
every accent is anticipating the next strong beat anticipating beat one
anticipating beat three so um the very beginning starts on a beat one and two and three and four
that's pretty awesome can we add some singing to this we can certainly try give it a shot all right
put on my blue suede shoes and i boarded the plane touched down
it just carries on and carries on and carries on super cool so that's the verses basically that's
the verse is basically now we need a chorus i think this might be my favorite part of the song
yeah so what i would do is focus on the accents we got the chords walking in memphis
yeah so how did you select the like what you were playing essentially because you were using fg
so the chords are f g c a minor
you've chosen a specific kind of voicing here yeah i'm just picking
a nice open one five one in my left hand okay and then completing a whole triad in my right hand
gotcha so this is right down near middle seat has this rich kind of kind of meaty area of the piano
and um everything is a push and accent except for the start of the phrase okay so it's like
i love this part you kind of like hang in space for a moment
hang in space for a moment so the intro to the second verse um has a new feel it's kind
of a guitar pattern that actually might be a guitar pattern okay but in the left hand it goes
so i think about that rhythm
so that's the first half of the verse okay so you just kind of work over top of that vocally if
you're singing along it's incredibly difficult to sing and play this one at the same time so that's
why there's two of us yeah or play along to the recording this is in the same key as the original
so you can go ahead and overlay your own playing on top of on top of the recording that we know and
love um halfway through the verse it switches hands and this pattern goes to your right hand
and then we get a base part the base part goes
there's a big shot and the rains are choruses yeah so let's try those together really really slowly
down in the jungle room yeah i'm walking in
do i really feel the now we're hanging in way again playing in space again in a new way we've
got chords we haven't seen before we're headed into the bridge of the song and we have a c7 sus
so in your right hand this looks exactly the same as an f sus it does because we've got you
know you'd have an f triad here and then you're raising that third to the b flat but there's a
c on the bottom so this is the seventh this is the c the root of this chord okay and this is
the suspended bit that drops back down to give you this bluesy c7 chord so you've got a bar of this
you've got catfish
to see
okay so that little bluesy section halfway through the bridge we go into this e7 rev green be glad to
so this is an f7 okay well you slid into it with the g sharp and that's what made it cool
i do that the second time around okay
so i'm moving this whole f7 up to this b flat chord see that is a b flat triad
with an f on the bottom and then back down to the f7 but the second time you're right i slid
from that
g sharp or a flat and then this walk-up f-sharp diminished chord
yeah we've got the next verse from there we've got a double chorus from there and then we're
coming back down to the intro that we know and love so the parts that we've already learned are
just kind of cycling through absolutely there's one little section that kind of combines all of
the things together okay where it's got that verse two feel in the right hand and um the accents from
the verses in the left hand too so that gets a little tricky so we've got our verse two section
that we were doing in our left hand yes is now in the right hand in the same octave down here
keeping us on our fingers now i'm walking in memphis and then we're back into that okay so
more time a little bit more slowly yeah if i were gonna really want to play along because this isn't
the original key so you can take all of these parts that we're learning and you can actually
just go play along with the original and have a lot of fun but this this little bit let's work
that through a little more slowly yeah let's go really slowly one and two and three and four and
now i'm walking
your brain just has to go there yeah all the hardest parts end with going
and singing walking in memphis if you get stuck just do that just do that back to the chorus okay
so the ending of the song basically just circles you back around to the first verse
of it which i think we should play i think you should demonstrate it and i think the
world needs to hear your voice so i think you should sing oh no yeah the last person yeah
okay so you've come you've come through your double chorus and now you're here
blue okay shoes and i boarded the plate
touched down in the land of the damn to blues in the middle of pouring rain touched down in
in the middle of the pouring rain
nice low open c chord like that it's a great voicing for it nice and slow as a pause and
that's the end of walking in memphis you got it so now it's up to you to do the practice
if you want a more guided approach a step by step dive into the sheet music access to
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a full version of this tutorial hope you enjoyed this one and we'll see you around see