How to play like Fats Domino – Left hand piano tutorial

Fats Domino goes down in history as one of the greatest rock and roll pianists of all time, and if you’ve admired his style of playing for as many years as I have then you’ll obviously be keen to learn how to play those amazing rock and roll left hands that Fats Domino made his own.

So grab yourself a keyboard or piano, and get ready to amaze your friends with this awesome left hand…

Let’s start with the basics

Rock and roll, blues and boogie woogie is often played in 4/4 time. This means there are 4 beats per bar, and you’ll typically play a total of 12 bars. You may have heard someone say the term ’12-bar blues’ – and if you’d like more information on this, please go to –

12 bar blues chords for piano

The secret to playing piano blues with only 3 chords

How to play an amazing left hand like Fats Domino

Now that you’re familiar with the 12 bar blues progression, let’s take a look at the notes we are going to play –

And here’s how it sounds –

Which fingers do I use? 

In order to play this correctly you would need to use the following fingers –

C – 5

C – 1

E – 3

G – 2

E – 3

G – 2

So from the above we can see that we span an octave between two Cs using our little finger and thumb. Then when we play the Es and Gs we use our middle and forefinger. You could also consider using the fourth finger for the E, as this is sometimes easier to stretch depending on your hand size.

Here is a picture showing where the keys are on the piano or keyboard. I have also marked the location of middle C so you can navigate your way to the correct notes. The finger numbers are underneath each.

Here is the complete 12 bar

And here’s how it sounds –

I’ve always wanted to play rock and roll piano – how easy is it? 

If you’ve always had the desire to play rock and roll piano, boogie woogie and blues – then now’s the time!

Like me you have probably spent many hours scouring Youtube to find piano tutorials revealing the secrets of how to play like Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jools Holland, and so on. More often than not you will come across a video with poor quality, or that is played too fast with little explanation – this sound familiar?

It’s very hard to find decent piano blues tutorials online, and that’s why I decided to create my own video tutorials which also include sheet music and handy notes. For more information – see below.