http://www.billspianopages.com/cocktail

Here's another in-depth tutorial for those of you who love cocktail piano. In this particular tutorial I'm taking a basic chord progression and explaining in detail how to enrich and substitute the individual chords to give a more distinctively cocktail sound.

For reference, here's the basic progression I'm using (in 4/4 time):

Eb, Cm7 | Gm, Eb7 | Ab, G7 | Cm, Abm6 |

Eb, Bb7 | Eb7, Fm7 | Eb, Cm | Fm, Bb7 ...

As always with cocktail, the trick is to take those basic chords and extend them. The most common way of doing that is simply by adding thirds on top of the basic chord, so Eb becomes Ebmaj7, Ebmaj9 or Ebmaj11; we can also add ninths, blue notes, and use techniques like tritone subsitution to give a really authentic cocktail sound.

As I've said before, one of the really great things about cocktail piano is that it's incredibly forgiving: it doesn't have the firm rhythmic discipline that a lot of jazz piano demands, and the chilled-out approach means it's easy to take your time and rescue yourself from mistakes.

As ever, the secret with this stuff is to spend time at the piano keyboard, practising, experimenting and discovering what different chords and combinations of chords can do. Happy cocktailing!