Stride Left Hand Style For Ballads
In this lesson we introduce a left hand stride style for the A Section of “Misty”. The stride left hand style drives forward the pulse of the tune and also frees up our right hand for melodic embellishment and decoration and we will explore in the next module on improvisation.
How To Play A Stride Style
To play a stride piano style, our left hand performs 2 roles; it plays the chords and harmony and also establishes the pulse of the tune. We establish the pulse by playing the root notes in the lower registers on beats 1 and 3, and on beats 2 and 4 we play rootless chord voicings.
What Are Rootless Voicings?
Rootless voicings – also known as left hand voicings – are chord voicings where the root is omitted from the chord. This frees up one of our fingers to play more interesting note choices including chord extensions such as the 9th, 11th, or 13th of the chord, or we can play a chord alteration to add tension and colour to our dominant chord voicings.
Rootless Voicings Course
If you are new to rootless voicings, we have a full course on Mastering Left Hand Voicings which includes theory lessons and practice drills to learn these voicings in all 12 keys. You can find these lessons below in the Related Lesson section below.
If this theory is new to you, just copy the voicings that I am showing you in this lesson and you can find a PDF download which contains the exact voicings that I am demonstrating. The full understanding will come with time.
Lesson Downloads
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Stride Left Hand Voicings File Type: pdf
Related Lessons
In this lesson we will create the major 251 progression with a left hand stride and rootless voicings exercise and drill.
We will work on our recognition of major 9th, minor 9th, & dominant 13th rootless voicings using a left hand stride drill.
To play a rootless voicing we leave out the root of the chord and play one of the upper extensions to get a richer, more colourful sound.
Practice Tips
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Move the melody up one octave to create space for the left hand to play the bass and then the rootless chord voicings.
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Rootless voicings sound best when played as close to the middle C of the piano as possible.
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Cycle around the 1st bar of Ebmaj7 by playing the root and then the rootless voicing.
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Next break the 8 bars into smaller chunks and practice these chunks individually by cycling around with left hand isolated.
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Once you are comfortable with the different sections, add the melody and play the whole 8 bars together.
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Experiment with changing the chord qualities, in particular changing the minor chords to dominant chords in the 1625 and 3625 progressions.
Is there a download of just the rootless voicing you were playing?
Hi Michael,
The PDF download has been added for this lesson, and also a PDF download for the first 7 lessons in the harmony module.
Cheers,
Hayden
Hayden — in the description of adding stride to MISTY you say: ” just copy the voicings that I am showing you in this lesson and you can find a PDF download which contains the exact voicings that I am demonstrating.”
Hayden Where is this PDF found?? Can’t find it?
The PDFs have now been added to the lessons in the harmony module.
The notation for the improv module is coming shortly.
Yes. The pdf would be very helpful.
Hey Wendy 👋
The PDFs downloads have been added to harmony module – you will now see these in the “Downloads” section of each page.
The notation for the improvisation module will be finished shortly.
Cheers,
Hayden