You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Playing With Two Hands - S3E36

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

Piano Week continues over into this week, as Peter and Adam talk about using your left hand more in your playing.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Adam. What's up? How do you spell save? Command S. Very good. I'm Adam Manis. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast.

Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. That intro was brought to you by our assistant producer Alexis, who's manning the board right now. Yes. Yeah. We've been preaching to her. I think we're preaching to the choir, but we've been preaching Command S, Command S, Command S. It's a big part of logic. It's a big part of Saba.

Anything at the Mac computer, I think it's important. I don't think any of our users would be that surprise. with how many episodes we've lost by not command essay. Anyway, what are we talking about today? Today we're talking about using our left hand at the piano. So this is a piano-centric one. So if you don't play piano, you're sorry, you'll hear it. Consider this, you'll hear it.

But we are, we're continuing, even though we're on, it's Monday, it's a whole new week, we're still at the piano. We still, man, this is, I can't believe we slept here under the piano all weekend. You just love it. We love it, and we know you love it, so we're going to keep on with it. and this is important. Yeah, this is important. So, and really this can be for anybody because we were talking about and talking to horn players and vocalists and drummers and everything all the time about, you know, up in their piano game and how much that can help their jazz development.

It's a well-known thing. And you're never too early to kind of get the left hand involved in the party and the melodic party. And that's kind of how I like to look at it because there's a lot of things that we learn to do with the left hand. But it's just like anything, you get into the habit of doing whatever. is that you're doing and it's not just a little comping machine here that's right although it's good at that it's very good at that and jazz musicians are notoriously known for being one-handed pianists in a way that I think is a little unfair yeah but our classical brothers and scissors are actually very very accomplished with their left hand because they have so much music that they get to

play with it and for us not so much right of course they can't play anything unless it's written on a page in front of them but that's another thing that's a whole other thing it's called the yin and yang of classical and jazz. But if you don't work on your left hand, if you don't have it together, you're missing out on a whole bunch of textures, colors, sounds, and interesting ideas that you can do otherwise.

Yeah, and I think, you know, there's a lot of different ways to approach you. We're not going to hit them all today, but let's try to hit them all. We're not going to hit them all. What kind of time you got? I don't have a lot of time. So for me, the thing that was really a breakthrough

both, you know, when I was younger and even now I sort of fall back on is just thinking about practicing and learning about baselines. in just some sort of basic swing groove sort of baselines to start to get the left. Because look, what we're really talking about is independence of the hands. That's right. There's the strengthening of the left hand, of course.

And there's many kind of obvious ways to do that. But in terms of independence between the hands, especially for improvisation. Yeah. Where we don't, it's one thing to learn a classical piece where there's two different things happening. And that will help. That will certainly help. And that's a big part of it. But I would just say playing some bass lines.

And you can start right here. and what you want to be doing is thinking about the time I mean it's basic but give it a little bit of melodic interest right but the thing we're not having to worry about

is rhythm outside of we're playing cordonoles that's said so we do want to be in the groove the form you're not having to improvise rhythm no but we're kind of improvising the direction of the melody right

so I think the first level once you get this going even that is not the easiest thing to do but anything that you do different in the right hand And the whole thing is to keep the left hand from changing. You don't want to be like, do the anticipations together. I mean, it sounds fine, but that's not working on your independence.

No, no, no. That's some level one stuff, right? Right. But you can do really anything then with the right hand, melodic or not. Cobby? Man, that's such a great exercise because you get to practice those syncopations against that steady rhythm. I would also say to flip the script on that. Okay.

Practice that the other way. No, man, that doesn't count. That doesn't count. No, but you can practice keeping some kind of steady, whether that's a bass, like, you know, a baseline. Yeah. Whether that's some kind of constant quarter note melody or chords. I like that. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. See what I'm saying? Can I do that? You could do that, sure. Oh, that's going to be really bad. And it's sound, whoa. So there I'm actually flipping my hand over. I can't believe I gave PM some to practice.

Wait, I thought we were talking. Banner Day for me. I thought we were starting basic now, though. Banner Day for me. Like my mind is blown. I thought we were starting basic. We are starting basic. That's not basic.

That's basic. Wait, show the more basic way because that was not basic to me. No, I'm... To just do... Oh my gosh, that's what I'm not basic. All right, I take it all back. I didn't show them anything. No, but that's...

I mean, that would be a good goal to go towards. Yeah. We could do that next week. But, well, the point is, though, is that, you know, these things of trying to confuse yourself. It's always good to try to do. Maybe if it was like... Well, that's what I was kind of getting at

is that you could do anything, steady to flip it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And this is not easy, but I think this is doable. Not with talking though. Yeah, that's a good one. So then you're just kind of octaves or single notes. You get the added bonus of your neighbors and friends to hear you just go. Yeah, all the time too. Cool. I could. Yeah, very good. Um, okay. So what else can we do for in a pen? I'm thinking like, um, you know, this is getting us into obviously doing two different things at the same time, which is the end result, but in a very simple way we're starting. But I think also just the call and response between the hands can get us into a lot of the actual application. So it

might be getting a little closer to, you know, almost kind of trading. That's great. But that's getting, you know, I mean, you're developing a little bit of independence, but it's not the simultaneous kind independence, but it's the interplay. Some things that maybe seem obvious, but practice melodies. If you're practicing a melody with your right hand, practice with your left hand too. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Always practice whatever you're improvising. If you're improvising over a tune or something, practice trying to improvise over it with left hand alone, I think is important. Yep. And then the second level of this is putting those together, either an octaves or two octaves apart. Right. You know. So if you go to like a two field, that could be. That's right. Getting into the tense there. So we talked about this last week with the drop two thing, but then you start to get into more of a tenth situation where you can work out. A tenth, you know, like, where you can play. Yeah. And that was. And I was. You know, and I was. You know, you know, and I was. And I was. You know, you know, and I was. And I was. Yeah. And I was. And I was. And I was. And I was. And I was. Yeah. And I was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. was also kind of just trying to wait and then go to a place where, you know, it's kind of next level in a way, but what you're thinking of independence, you know, call response to melodies, counterpoint, two things, kind of polyphony going. And then when they come together, that's a

great thing. Same like we use in arranging and composing a lot, is once the hands come together. And that's the beauty of like doing the solo piano, but you can also, if you're in the right range, you can do this with a rhythm section as well and go in and out of that. It's a lot of fun things there. Something that I think both of us use quite a bit with a rhythm section is to start, and our buddy Jeffrey Heiser mentioned this too, is to start some kind of pattern in your right hand, whether, you know, and then start a melody with your left hand over that, under that. You can, you could, you could, you're almost casino like licking it there. It's a very casino lick kind of sound. Yeah, I mean, look, the whole thing is like once you start to get a little

bit freer, I think there's two main parts of it, you know, freedom to be independent with the two hands, which never gets totally, but I mean, you want to uncouple them so that when you, you know, we're not like like, you're saying, you know, locked in together. But there's also just the left hand needs more time because we don't spend a lot of time with it being melodic. So I think, you know, practicing some simple classical pieces for sure kind of puts, you know, some of those two-part inventions. Yeah. That's like such a great way to get independence.

Because you, it focuses you to work on fingering, dynamics, phrasing, all the things we don't work on. with our left hand as jazz musicians, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And then, but over the blues, you can, you know, or, you know, whatever. Kind of a little funky there on you. Look out now. Look out now.

Actually, if you do some funk bass lines. Damn right. There's little meters there. Absolutely. Don't be afraid to do some transcribing on some great organ players, man. Those organ players have good left hands, you know. Good left feet, too. They're all left feet.

Dr. Lonnie, little Joey D. That's right. A little Jack McDuff. Damn right. A little Jimmy Smith. Absolutely. Yeah. Cool.

Well, hope this helps. folks, thanks for tuning in for yet another episode of the You'll Hearer Podcast. You can go to you'll hear.com to leave us a question. You could leave us a voicemail. Hey, listen, we are ranked on the iTunes podcast list fairly high or at least higher than we thought we would be. We're ranked. We didn't know that. But you know what?

Because we're in the future a couple days now, future Adam, future Peter. And because we're vain as hell. Yeah. We don't even want to say the number. We might very well be in that top 100 now. We might even start a contest where we did like a giveaway. with some of our sponsors. Well, I don't even want to say it yet.

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That's right. Let's get in the single digits here. That's right. We might even get like a podcast. Do they have a podcast Emmy? Oh, I'm getting ahead of myself, Arne. It's called the potty. The potty.

The potty. All right, cool. Well, you'll hear.