You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Working Out Your Left Hand

Episode Date: July 18, 2019

On today's episode, Peter and Adam answer a SpeakPipe on how to build strength in your left hand for pianists. Wanna send a SpeakPipe of your own? Just go to https://youllhearit.com/podcast-contact/.And for more tips on building strength and independence in the hands, check out the new course from Open Studio: Jazz Piano Jump-Start! https://www.openstudiojazz.com/jazz-piano-jumpstartLet 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? Bonacera. Ah, prego, an café. Uh, see. Uh, what do you know about the mano sinestra? Uh. I'm Adam Anas.

And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear a podcast. Daily Jazz advice coming at you. Coming at you with terrible Italian, uh, because Pete's in Italy and I'm in the pod cave. And that was bad. I did. That's the only thing that I really, that really, uh, absorbed from, from my trips to Italy was how to order espresso.

Very important. Oona cafe. Yeah. A cafe. Yeah, actually, that's interesting because I just got to Italy today. And we drove up from, we drove down from Rome, down to Naples, or kind of outside of Naples. And we stopped at the truck stop with our driver. The auto grill.

The auto grill. And shout to Michael. We stopped at the auto grill and I went in Oona Cafe. But I got to tell you something, something's changed about Italy. It was always one euro for an espresso. Yeah, yeah. It's one euro 10 cent. It's going on.

Lame. It's getting expensive. Yeah. And all the old guys protested for sure. They shut down the government for two weeks. Of course. They shut the whole country down. They shut the whole country down.

As you do. Okay. So today we have another speak pipe. Again, if you want to leave us your voicemail, you can go to yore.com. This one is from a member. This is from Bill. Let's check it out. Okay.

Hi, Adam. Hi, Peter. This is Bill Freese from Tampa, Florida. I want to say I love the podcast, but even more, I am loving the Jump Start Jazz Piano course. As I go through it, though, and working on the guided practice, which I love, thank you, Adam. I'm learning very quickly that my left hand could use a little extra physical fitness. The strength in my fingers, I think, needs some work, and I'm wondering if perhaps there's some advice you may have, exercises, and or perhaps, the practice routine maybe that would help build some strength in my left hand.

Thank you for all you're doing. Appreciate the advice and enjoying the program. Thank you. Awesome question, Bill. That's great. Yeah, thank you, Bill. It was a very good question. And thanks for the shout-out to the jazz piano jumpstart, man.

That thing has been popping off. And people seem to be digging the practice routines. They seem to be digging the whole course. Bill is not the first person to tell us that. Maybe we got a couple people in Italy. I don't know if you noticed that. been enjoying it and have written in. It's gone international.

It's going international. Not just in Tampa. So per Bill's question, Peter, do you remember when we were talking to Jeffrey Keiser when he was in here shooting a course about how he has such a phenomenal left hand? You remember what he said? Well, it was something to the effect of like everything you do with your right hand, it's simple. Just everything you do with your right hand, do the same thing with your left hand. And then eventually it will be just as good as your right hand.

Yeah, it sounds simple, but it so is not. I mean, like actually doing that is not. But Bill, that is really the key, though. So everything that you do with your right hand, you want to do with your left hand. You just can't ignore it. That's the problem. You know, that's why in those guided practice routines that I included in that course that we put in there, I'm working everything I'm doing with my left, with my right hand for scales. Even for voicings, I do with both hands.

I want to make sure that we're getting worked out for both hands. But I have some places you can start. And I kind of alluded to this in those practice routines in some of the warm-ups. I like to start my sort of technique practice small with a chromatic scale, small intervals, and then do larger scales, maybe like go up to a seven-note scale or an octatonic scale, like a half-hole scale, and then maybe do a pentatonic scale and then do some arpeggios. So that I'm spreading myself out as I go. But the key is, Bill, is you have to do that with your left hand.

hand. And if you are feeling like it's weak, just take a couple days to just do it with your left hand. See how that gets you. It's weird, but you're going to connect with it in a way that you probably haven't yet. Yeah. And I mean, look, all due respect to my brother, our brother, Jeffrey Kieser, I think he may be, he's so advanced, he may be forgetting. No, I'm sure before he got to the point where he could just do everything with both hands, there was a lot of left hand or offhand. Look, most of us are right-handed, but I would imagine it's the opposite of your left-handed.

But extra practice is not even just enough to do the same amount with both hands, but extra practice with your left hand. And I think just some very basic things that we do with the left hand alone. You know, sometimes practice with both hands together is not as beneficial as we want them to be for that left hand because the right hand has a way of kind of pulling along the left hand. know, almost like a lazy eye kind of goes, you know, and look, we mentioned this before. We are not medical doctors.

No. We are doctors of jazz, kind of. But even that's questionable at this point. But the other thing I was going to say, I just remember it at it was, and hopefully this might help you build this kind of a mentality thing, is that remember, like in terms of building up our left hand, it's not as much, it's more mental than muscular. So what I mean is like, like what we're really looking at is agility, control, and independence of the left hand. It's not about building up the muscles. There's not a lot of muscles in your hand, actually. And so what it is is our minds are controlling what our hands do.

And so we have, you know, normally more agility in our dominant hand or control, more ability to execute what we want to do with that hand. So we have to train the left hand. And I think this is kind of what Keezer was saying. It's like, get it to be as good as the other hand. And then you'll be fine. You'll be able to do anything at both hands. That's right. So that's as much, if not more of a mental challenge as it is a physical one, I think.

Yeah, you know what? Open up my left hand for me in the last few years even more than it had been, was really taking the time to work on melodies and soloing with my left hand only. Not, you know, I've worked on it as like octaves or, you know, spread apart in two or three octaves or whatever with the right hand. But I think to your point that. sometimes that just covers up some flaws in your left hand is true. And that I found that actually like playing melodies and like take a chorus and play the melody

with your right hand, comp with your left hand, and then play the melody with your left hand, comp with your right hand. Solo with your right hand. Solo with your left hand. Practice going between. Practice finishing your lines from your right hand coming down to your left hand. That kind of stuff can really break that feeling of partitioned hands. One is doing one thing and the other is doing one thing.

the other thing, you know, we have 10 fingers, not two hands to work with here. And they can pretty much go in the same places on the piano. Yeah, I mean, there's some limitations just as far as how far you can turn your shoulder. But in general, I can get my right hand all the way down to the left side of the piano without a problem. Same with my left. Like we can get down there. We have 10 fingers. Let's use all those 10 fingers.

I think if you think about it like that, it can be game changer. Absolutely. And if you, you know, I was. think about the analogy of if you're running, if you're starting to run, and let's say, you know, at first you can run for three minutes before you have to stop and rest or walk, but during those three minutes, you're running equally, just by the nature of running, you're forced to work out your left, right, left, right, left, right. Like you can't, even though your right side might seem more dominant, you can't take two

running steps with your right and then one with your left. Right. So you have to alternate it back and forth. But when we play the piano, we don't necessarily have to do that. So there has to be a certain amount of just almost like putting your right hand under your butt and just practicing with your left hand. Well, you're really listening to your deficiencies, what you need to work on, but putting in that extra time. Same thing. If you're going to the gym and you're working out your biceps, you're going to alternate.

Or you're either going to do it at the same time or you're going to alternate right left, right left because nobody needs to be off balance with how they're building up their muscles. I mean that I just work on my left hand for my tennis game, just the left arm. So that can be, Raphael and the doll, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That you can do. But I mean, I think with the piano, even though the end, you know, in terms of what, yeah, we want to be equally, we all want to be Jeff Keiser in terms of equality of the hands. But we also have to be realistic in terms of like, you know, when we were always talking about like when you sit down to practice, especially if you're not like independently wealthy and just have all day to sit around at just nine way nine foot. Yeah.

you have to think about efficiency and what you're working on. Like how much time are you going to spend on stuff that's fun for you versus how much time are you going to spend on things that you can't do what you want to get better at? So, you know, in your practice, what you're right and left hand, how much you're going to sit down and practice scales on the right hand that you know you can nail them? But maybe you can't on the left hand.

How about a little left hand alone practice on that stuff that you can't nail to start to pull that left hand along? Yeah, dude. Super important, very good ideas. I would say, too, for any advanced, more advanced player, listening to this, Bill, I know you're kind of a beginner on this if you're on the jazz piano jumpstart, but this is a problem even for intermediate, even for professionals, jazz pianists. If that's the case for you, make sure to throw in some left-hand soloing, some left-hand melodic playing

on your gigs. Don't ignore that. Like putting that, like, making a point to do it on the gig every time you play will force you to acknowledge that it's something that needs to be worked on. And then you're going to naturally just take it back to the practice room because you're going to embarrass yourself if you don't work on it. So make sure to get that. I totally agree with that. I don't know if you can hear me all the way from Naples here. I'm clapping for you and I'm saying gratzimele for saying that. A thousand things. No, and actually it's interested. I've done that the last couple gigs on this tour. I've been doing, and I got a keyboard, I got a little Nord thing happening, and the piano on the left and the Nord on the right. I've just been playing the Nord a little bit

some organ and some road stuff. But one thing I've been doing, like we've been doing this, Gio Gibretto song with Diane and I'm playing like some kind of pad chords on the roads and what I've been trying to do with my left hand on the piano at the same time is do like some octave melodic things

and it's really been a challenge because it's like you're switching the hands around but I've been taking that as a challenge every night to try to play something it doesn't have to be anything flashy technically but something interesting and cohesive every night with my left hand during that section

as opposed to flip in that I could kind of flip the hands round, but I'm like, you know what, let's let the left hand do a little bit of melodic work now. Yeah, you got to, you got to consciously try to throw it into your game if you want to elevate it. That's just, that's the fact for anything. And for some reason, I think with a lot of pianists, that left hand, melodic content gets overlooked on the gig more than anything because we don't feel ready or whatever. You just got to do it and then figure out how it's going to fit into your playing. So, Bill, thank you so much for the speak pipe. That's awesome. And we really love

here and people are enjoying the jazz piano jumpstart. Hey, Andrew, why don't you put a link to Open Studio Jazz slash Jazz Piano Jumpstart so that people can check out this course for yourself? You can watch a free lesson there. You can also kick the tires on the site. We have these awesome things that Bill mentioned, the guided practice routines. There's 28 of them, Pete.

I don't know if you know this. It took me like four days to record these things, but they're like kind of a cross between a workout video and a guided meditation where I actually practice with you with the metronome, doing some scales, doing some tunes. It's really, really fun. I think it's kind of a game changer for the course.

So check that out. Tons of transcriptions and stuff like that on the site. So go there. You can go to you'll hearth.com to leave us a speak pipe. You can go to Italy to see Peter Martin. Well, no, and you know what? Yeah, you can't. But the guided practice routines really are.

I knew when you came up with those. I figured it was going to be a game changer, but people have literally responded to us. This is a game changer. So that was fun to see that. And I think that it's just that mount. I mean, it's great. They're guided.

So you're still like, you've guided them along with these routines, but there's still that room and necessity for you to practice it and for you to take this guidance in a way that develops. It's not just like copy and paste kind of like, oh, I got to do this. You know, it's always kind of what we're trying to do with this course. But I think it's like, you know, developing the practice and the guidedness into. musical and swinging situation where you're always being able to sort of try these things out within the context of actual jazz music

and hopefully be able to play that all the way as you're going through this very basic level. That's the goal. Well, man, I enjoy the tour tonight. Are you playing the night? No, no, no, we're off tonight. We're kind of traveling all day, so we play tomorrow

and then actually playing the next three nights, which is fun. That's the way I like it. That's what I'm out here to do. I'm not just out here eating Napoleon pizza. the Neapolitan pizza rather. That's right. Napoleon pizza.

That's different. Very short slices. Oh, my gosh. Dude. All right. Well, until next time. You'll hear it.