Rolling Blues Chords for Funk Piano Solos

Video Transcript

Hi. My name is Jonathon Wilson on behalf of Expert Village. com. We're learning how to play an advanced funk groove on the piano. The last time, we learned a pretty challenging right hand lick for solos and we had to actually reach up with our left hand to get some help. This time, we'll make things a little bit easier. Again, we're going to borrow a chapter from blues piano and use something called a rolling blues chord. You hear this a million times. It's something where the blues player will play a chord in his right hand and then roll down the notes of that chord kind of loosely on the way into another solo pattern that happens next. It works great; it's a really classic blues sound that happens to also work very well in a funk context as you'll hear here. The way I like to do it, I've got one particular example where when you go up to that F-7 chord in our groove, you'll roll an F-9 in your right hand and then do this little kind of a chord pattern that I've got written out. Now let's do this really slowly with the metronome so you can hear what I'm talking about. Okay? Nothing to it. This is a lot easier than the last one. But very useful. In general, this kind of a rolling chord is something you should work out. Almost any chord you can play, you can also roll down. It adds a little bit of a lilt or for lack of a better word, you know, it just sort of breaks things up and it adds this sort of, "hmmm, that was kind of cool." That people will kind of just go, "oh, what was that?" And you can throw those in almost anywhere. It's a good pattern to learn. To keep in mind, you want your rolling to be very subtle and relaxed. You shouldn't hear the notes of the roll itself, as much as just this sort of a rolling that happens. And again, a lot of that can be done with the way you kind of work your hand. Everything should be very relaxed. You don't want stiff fingers when you play those chords. It's not a finger move at all. You play the chord and then just sort of, sort of flick your fingers back through those same chords again. Okay? So let's hear that same pattern that we just heard up to speed with the bass and the drum. Okay, pretty cool, I like that one. It's a good one to throw in. The main reason I wanted to show it to you is so that you could go off and learn some other variations on this. Almost any chord that you can play, you can roll and then turn into this kind of a classic blues lick. It works blues, it works in funk, it works in rock. Anywhere you need this kind of a flashy little lick, it's a good one to throw in.

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