Blues Piano Lesson: Blues Piano Tone Clusters

Lesson Goal: To add some tasty Blues Piano Tone Clusters to your bag… by ear, intellect, eye, and muscle…

Table of Contents

---

Prerequisites

Basic music reading skills… the LOVE of music… and the discipline to study and practice.

back to… Table of Contents

---

Study, Practice, & Performance Tips

1. Never play these mindlessly and mechanically. Always aspire to play them musically.
2. Your goal is not to merely memorize them, but to study and practice until you internalize them using all four musical intelligences: ears, intellect, eyes, and muscles.
3. Every time you practice something, you are programming your brain. So always play accurately.
4. Practice with a Click Track or a Rhythm Track. Doing so will give you immediate feedback on any rhythmic misconceptions or places where your timing gets sloppy.
5. Record Yourself. Always. Listen to the playback immediately. And ask yourself: Is that what you intended to play?”
6. If anything feels tense or awkward, stop immediately and experiment with alternative fingerings or choreography.
7. Play the keepers in other keys you expect to play in. By the way, once you see the patterns (which is guaranteed if you know your scales and chords) finding the notes in other keys will be a piece of cake!
8. If you feel stuck or overwhelmed, realize that anything can and will be mastered if you slow things down or break things down to small enough pieces.
9. Although it take time to talk about all the above practice habits, practicing them takes almost no time at all because they can all be done simultaneously!
10. Mastering all this takes no special talent. All it takes is a wee bit of knowledge and the discipline to employ a very short list of productive study and practice habits.

back to…Table of Contents

---

Blues Piano Tone Clusters

Tone Clusters are edgy chords that typically consist of blue notes played simultaneously with their respective chord tones.

Here are some fun and interesting examples of tone clusters built on a C chord (or at least a C-ish chord!)…

Major Triad Chord Tones

These blues piano tone clusters are simply the primary chord tones of a C major triad (C-E-G) played simultaneously with the note a minor second below, which works well in major blues tonality. The highly dissonant interval of a minor second gives each note an extra edgy sound that really pops…

back to…Table of Contents

---

Minor Triad Chord Tones

These blues piano tone clusters are simply the primary chord tones of a C minor triad (C-Eb-G) played simultaneously with the note a minor second below, which works well in major blues tonality. The highly dissonant interval of a minor second gives each note an extra edgy sound that really pops…

back to…Table of Contents

---

Minor Blues Scale

These blues piano tone clusters are simply the notes in a C minor blue scale ( C-Eb-F-F#/Gb-G-Bb-C) played simultaneously with the note a minor second below… great for both a major and minor blues tonalities…

When played out of context (as is done above), these minor seconds may sound pointlessly dissonant, but when played in a meaningful context with a sense of form, phrasing, rhythm they have the potential to really get the listeners attention.

back to…Table of Contents

---

“1 & 5”

These blues piano tone clusters are “power chords” (because there’s no “3” or “b3”)… which works great for a simple, but impressive sound in almost any tonality, major or minor…

back to…Table of Contents

---

“1 & 3”

These blues piano tone clusters emphasize the chord root and “the 3”, which happens to be the tone that defines any chord as major… which works great when you want to highlight the major-ness of what’s going on, while simultaneously adding the minor-ness provided by the “b3″…

back to…Table of Contents

---

“1 & b3”

These blues piano tone clusters emphasize the chord root and “the b3”, which happens to be the tone that defines any chord as minor… which works great when you want to highlight the minor-ness of what’s going on…

back to…Table of Contents

---

“3 & 5”

These blues piano tone clusters emphasize “the 5” and “the 3”, which happens to be the tone that defines any chord as major… which works great when you want to highlight the major-ness of what’s going on while adding some of that tasty major-minor mixture…

Experiment with a variety of ways to voice each cluster by playing the note you’d like to emphasize by playing it louder than the others.

back to…Table of Contents

---

“b3 & 5”

These blues piano tone clusters emphasize “the 5” and “the b3”, which happens to be the tone that defines any chord as minor… which works great when you want to highlight the minor-ness of what’s going on…

back to…Table of Contents

---

C7 Chord

Dominant Seventh chords provide lots of interesting possibilities for blues piano tone clusters…

Don’t try to memorize these. Instead, internalize the pattern by identifying the structural notes before adding the embellishments…

back to…Table of Contents

---

Your Homework

The blues piano tone clusters above are not the only possibilities. Experiment and invent your own to add to your blues piano bag… and practice them in all keys you’d like to play in.

---

Improvisation Example using Tone Clusters

Listen to Frank play a major 12-bar blues swing improvisation that uses lots of tone clusters…

back to…Table of Contents

---

learn more… Blues Piano Lessons