I felt a strong desire to branch out and explore the Blues and Rock keyboard styles that I love listening to and luckily I found Dave Limina. Dave is a professor in the Berklee College of Music Piano department and has had extensive experience as a pianist, organist, composer, and arranger. Dave teaches Berkleemusic’s online Blues and Rock Keyboard Techniques.

Through video, interactive exercises, discussions and audio examples, Dave easily took seemingly complex musical ideas and made them understandable and attainable for our class.
We learned how to comp and solo in the Chicago Blues, Texas Shuffle, Slow Blues, Rock & Roll, and New Orleans styles (my favorite). Common blues licks such as the cascade lick and professor longhair’s licks are also intertwined within the core content so we can add some virtuosic flare to our playing.

In my opinion this is the perfect course for any players who have been playing the keys for a while and want to branch into Blues, Rock, Gospel, and other modern styles of music. Students should have good basic keyboard playing and reading skills along with knowledge of major scales, 7th chords, and basic rhythmic notation. You will be submitting recorded assignments as .mp3 files. Since I am new at recording, I opted to use a free and easy to use program called Audacity to record my playing. I now have several great recordings I can share with peers and fellow musicians. You can download the program to make your own recordings here.

I created this .mp3 which showcases the “Slow Blues” and “New Orleans” styles. The New Orleans piece is an original tune I wrote for one of my lessons…

Blues & Rock Keyboard Recording (MP3)

Be sure to check out Blues and Rock Keyboard Techniques. You should also watch this amazing performance from Berklee Professor’s Dave Limina and Russ Hoffman below.

Happy Playing!

- Michael Moyes