I take the time, up front, to learn about the goals of every student and craft a lesson plan unique to the student. Some love broadway music and some want to learn jazz. Some want to play classical piano and some want to rock out with a band. They have different goals and skill sets. I am Jeff Lantz, founder of Picasso Piano Academy ™Īll my students are unique individuals. In the next lesson we will start working with more chords and variations of the left hand pattern. This completes Lesson One of the Stride Piano Course. Notice that ALL inner notes come from a C Major triad (C-E-G). Work on these five left-hand patterns until you are ready to add a single-note melody with your right hand.Įxercises F-J: In these five exercises, the left hand will toggle through the five previous stride patterns while the right hand plays a simple one-note melody on top of them.Įxercises K-O: Same as exercises F-J except that the right hand plays the melody as octaves.Įxercises P-T: The last five exercises in lesson one are the same as exercises K-O except that now we are inserting two inner notes between the melody octave notes. The rest of the exercises in lesson one repeat these patterns with the left hand while gradually adding new patterns with the right hand. You’ve now learned all five of the left-hand patterns for lesson one. This is the first exercise where the left hand is beginning to “stride” back and forth across the piano keyboard, due to the increased distance between the beats.Įxercise D: Now the strong beats are being played as octaves while the weak beats are the same as exercise C.Įxercise E: Same as before except on beat 3 we play one octave lower than in exercise D, increasing the distance of the “stride.” This is the widest distance traveled between a strong beat and weak beat in this exercise. Fingerings are provided in the pdf for all the exercises.Įxercise B: Building on the first pattern, we increase the complexity slightly, playing the same pattern as exercise A except that for beats 2 and 4 we now play an interval, E and G, instead of a single note.Įxercise C: Same as exercise B except the #5 finger (pinky) plays the single notes on beats 1 and 3 and fingers 1, 2, and 3 play a first inversion C Major triad with C4 (middle C) being at the top of the chord stack. Play this exercise SLOWLY and slightly staccato. As in all the stride patterns in this exercise, the strong beats are beats 1 and 3. Finally, in the last exercise, we are playing the most complex of the five left-hand patterns, while playing four-note chords with the right hand.Įxercise A: This is the most basic version of a left hand stride pattern. Then we continue with two more sets of five exercises as we gradually add complexity to the right hand patterns. In the second set of five exercises, we add a simple single-note melody with the right hand, and play it with each of the five left hand patterns. We start with the simplest left-hand pattern and gradually add more complexity with each exercise. The first five exercises are for the left hand only. Stride Piano: Lesson One / Stride exercises on a C-Major Triad To explore the basics of the left hand stride pattern, we will start by using the C Major triad and its component parts: the notes C – E – G.Īfter completing the first twenty short exercises ( see accompanying pdf), you should be able to play a basic left hand stride pattern in C Major along with a right hand melody. In later years, the stride style was borrowed and applied to popular songs from other genres, as we will do now also. The first ragtime piano pieces were published in the late 1890s but the most famous was Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899, featuring the left-hand stride style.
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