I love 10ths — broken 10ths literally opened the Pandora’s box of intervallic patterns for me. They’re a bit of a stretch at first (especially major, especially with accidentals), but once you’ve mastered them, your left hand accompaniment will never be the same. One annoying thing with broken 10ths, though, is that because of their span, there’s often an overlap with the right hand. Whenever my hands overlap, I get all panicky and screw everything up. In order to avoid this, I used to play right hand voicings 2 octaves above — just to be safe I have enough space to work on my 10ths. But, really, you have to face your fears, right? So here’s an exercise I’ve invented for this:
- Play broken 10ths with the left hand
- Play shell voicings (3-7-9) with the right
- First note of the right hand voicing will be the 10th for the left hand
- By the time you get to it with the left hand, move your right hand to 7-3-5 voicing of the same chord, octave above
- No more fear of clashing-o-phobia! (Is that a word?)
Black Hole Piano 