Blue Fifth Boogie Lesson

In the next piece, Blue Fifth Boogie, we're going to stay with the idea of adding the flat three and the flat five in front of the ordinary third and fifth.

Expanding Your Practice

But we're also going to take it outside the five-finger position or the expanded five-finger position and go to the fourth and the sixth. So in F, that's B flat and D.

You could practice this as a preliminary exercise:

• Two and four on the chromatic notes
• Thumb on the root
• Third and fifth on all the other notes

Demonstration

I'll play Blue Fifth Boogie to start with a barrel house. The left hand should always be your port of call when you're first learning something; it helps to sort out the right hand properly.

That last bar, by the way, is an off-on rhythm (one and three). So just get your fingers around that, and get the rhythm tight, so that when it comes around, it's only one bar.

You want to get that right the first time.

Upgrading the Left Hand

Let's upgrade the left hand now to an eight to the bar boogie rhythm. There's a whole family of these left-hand eighth bar rhythms with eight notes in a bar. I call them the "rocks." This is one of the most common.

Practice Makes Perfect

So you need to practice that left hand until you can do it in your sleep. Basically, I'm using my third finger on the blue third sliding off. I can do that in this key because it's always black note to white note.

In B flat, take care that you get those double notes cleanly in place. The only single note in the second half of the bar is the D.

Looping for Mastery

Let's practice that left hand around a 12-bar sequence. This bit is probably worth looping, so you notice how it changes to the B flat a beat earlier than you expect.

Play that slowly with the correct fingering as given. Slide off the black notes, but you can't slide off this bit. That's where you have to use 2, 4, 3, 5 when you do an improvisation.

You could use the expanded five-finger position that we did in the last lesson. Use it more flexibly than we did in Sad Blues.

Final Thoughts

With this eight-to-the-bar left hand, it could sound something like this.

To finish off, I'm going to go for an improvisation with this left hand using some of the ideas from pieces we've looked at so far:

• Happy Blues
• Sad Blues
• Syncopated Boogie
• Blue Fifth Boogie

And so on, with this eight-to-the-bar left hand.

If you find it a bit tricky, you could try the whole piece with the easier eight-to-the-bar left hand we looked at in part one in On Off Boogie, and so on. I'd recommend doing that and then upgrading to the eight-to-the-bar rhythm we just learned.