Major: How to Make Up a Piano Blues
In this course, I’ll do my humble darndest to cover the basics of creating your own blues song: writing lyrics that tell a story, to standard and non-standard chord progressions, interesting melodies, riffs and “hooks” (use with caution), left-hand lines and patterns, and finally, rhythms and rhythmic feels. Students will create their own ditties, possibly in teams (depending on class size), and perform them. If you’re one of those geniuses who can read and write music, you can write all this down; if you’re like me, you’ll have to keep it in your head. If you like, bring some sort of recording device so you can take away a record of your accomplishments. But we’re playing blues: beware of over-arranging. We’ll cover some ideas for improvising, keeping it loose and expressive. Finally, you put it all together, go out in front of a live audience and pray. I mean, play.