Practicing the Barrelhouse left hand

Barrel House Left Hand Techniques

To get back to this barrel house left hand, a lot of people play this very detached.

If you're doing that, try and work on getting more of a drone sound. Make sure the little finger is doing its job. If you're playing with flat fingers, that's not going to work. You need a strong little finger so that this bottom note is repeated four times a bar.

Some people have very lazy little fingers. For instance, you might find that you're doing something like this and not repeating it with the A.

Tips for Effective Playing

• Nip that in the bud. If that's the case, we need to have a completely legato sound.
• Don't want to be coming off the keys; if you come off the key, the sound will disappear.
• Pretend you're glued to the key.

Recommended Exercise

There's an exercise that I recommend for developing your ability to negotiate the changes in the barrel house left hand:

• In the key of G, we might be going from G to C.
• Just alternate those; maybe one bar each.
• Do that slowly, and listen.

Listen to the sound you're making. There shouldn't be any gaps in the sound, even when you jump down.

How is that? Because if I take my hand off, the sound will go away.

• Can you hear? I'm holding that E down while I stretch down.
• This is a little trick to help you give the illusion of jumping without there being a gap.

Same Technique Going Up

I do the same thing. I hold the A down while I move up.

Although you can't hold both notes till the last minute, you can actually hold one of them.

Alternate Exercise

• Same exercise from C to G to D.
• Here are the notes that I'm holding down there.

If you don't spend time perfecting that, your barrel house isn't going to sound as effective as it could be.

Additional Resource

There's another tune in the book, incidentally, which uses this top note of the chord fragments idea.

• It's in chapter two, and it's on the sixth chord.
• Instead of using v7 root like we did, it uses v6 root.
• So you could check that one out if you like. It's called Sunday Afternoon Blues.

Upcoming Lesson

In the next lesson, we're going to look at how you thicken a melody again with the barrel house left hand, but this time incorporating the seventh.