Jazz · boogie-woogie · 4/4 shuffle

Boogie-woogie left hand

120 bpm Loop: all
triplets
Kick
Snare
Hi-hat
Piano

Mixer

Keyboard

Boogie-woogie — the eight-to-the-bar blues left hand (Pinetop Smith, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons). Transcribed from Scivales' Jazz Piano: The Left Hand, Part III, Ex. 108-3: a two-bar walking line 1–3–5–6–b7–6–5–3 (C E G A Bb A G E) where every bass note on the beat is answered on the swung "and" by a fifth-plus-octave dyad above it — the "broken octaves" that make a single hand sound like bass and rhythm guitar at once. The eighths are a shuffle: the off-beats are written at triplet positions (0.667) and are short.

The right-hand staff is empty — riffs, tremolos and blues licks go there. A shuffle kit (kick on 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4, hat playing the same long-short eighths) shows where the hand sits in a band.

Listen for the walk-up and walk-back: the line climbs through the sixth to the flat seventh and comes down the same way, every two bars, for the whole twelve-bar blues. Practice: bass notes alone first, in time, then add the dyads lightly — they are the short note of the shuffle, never an accent. Ex. 110-3 is the simpler version (one repeated top note); Ex. 111-1 the rolling-octave version.

Sources

  • Scivales, Jazz Piano: The Left Hand, Part III, Ex. 108-3 (verbatim, C); Ex. 110-3 and Ex. 111-1 for the related forms

Keyboard

Space
Play / pause
← →
Loop the previous / next bar
1–6
Mute layer 1–6
[ ]
Tempo −5 / +5
?
This sheet