Love Nat King Cole Piano

The Real Way to Learn Nat King Cole's Piano Style

You can spend weeks trying to copy his sound by listening to recordings and playing along, but honestly that approach hits a wall pretty fast. The issue is that Nat King Cole's piano style isn't one thing you can summarize in a few chords. It's a combination of specific voicing choices, a particular left-hand approach, and a rhythmic feel that most tutorial videos completely miss because they're too busy transcribing individual notes. I spent about three years working on this before it started clicking. Here's what I actually did differently from the usual advice floating around.

Love Nat King Cole Piano

The first thing you need to understand is that Cole's left hand does something most beginners never notice. He rarely plays root position chords on the beat. His left hand is almost always playing either a walking bass line a step below the chord root, or it's playing a third or sixth interval (not the fifth) while the right hand carries the melody and harmony. This creates this open, spacious sound that's easy to identify even when you don't know who's playing. Take any standard Cole piece like "Unforgettable." The left hand walks down: for the C major section, you might see C-G-A-A-flat, not C-E-G. The G and A are the left-hand bass movement, while the right hand is playing a Cmaj7 voicing somewhere above. If you play this with left-hand root position chords, it sounds nothing like the record. It sounds like someone playing jazz piano for the first time over a Cole tune. The right hand voicings are where most people also go wrong. Cole frequently uses drop-2 and drop-3 voicings with the 3rd and 7th in the lower part of the right-hand cluster. He avoids the root in the right hand entirely unless it's serving a specific melodic purpose. So instead of playing C-E-G-B for a Cmaj7, you'd play G-B-C-E, which puts the 3rd and 7th (B and F if you're in another key) in the inner voices and lets the root breathe in the left hand. This is why his chords sound so clean on piano rather than muddy.

I ran into a specific problem that took me months to solve. I was trying to play "Nature Boy" and my hands kept colliding in the middle register, especially during the bridge. The score I had was simplified — left hand playing block chords, right hand playing melody — and it was physically impossible to execute at tempo without my wrists cramping. The workaround was to break the left-hand chords into single-note bass movements and spread the remaining chord tones into the right hand, essentially splitting what the left hand was doing across both hands. This is closer to how Cole actually played it, and it cut my practice time for that section from roughly 45 minutes of frustration down to maybe 10 minutes of actually making music. Here's the counter-intuitive part that nobody mentions in beginner lessons: the swing feel in Cole's playing is almost straight. It's not a heavy "da-DAAA da-DAAA" triplet swing. It's what musicians call a "lilt" or a medium swing — closer to 55-60% swing ratio than the 66% triplets you hear in bebop. When you try to play it with a heavy swing, it sounds like you're mocking the original. When you play it more straight, with just a slight delay on the off-beats, it lands closer to what he was doing. His right hand actually plays quite straight; the swing comes from the interaction between hands and from slight rubato. Another thing beginners miss is the dynamics. Cole played at a consistent mezzo-piano volume throughout entire songs. He rarely went forte. This is deliberately restrained. The expression comes from voicing and timing, not from loudness. If you're practicing his pieces and you find yourself playing loudly during the chorus to add "feeling," you're probably doing it wrong. Pull back to MP and work on making the inner voices speak instead.

Where to find the actual sheet music: Most of the Nat King Cole piano arrangements you'll find online are either lead sheets (chords and melody only, no left-hand pattern) or overly simplified versions that strip out everything that makes his style distinctive. The Hal Leonard Nat King Cole Songbook is decent as a starting point but it flattens his left-hand movements into basic block chords. If you want arrangements that preserve his actual voicings and patterns, the best sources are either direct transcriptions from the original recordings (available through subscription services like Songtradr or from specialist pianist transcription services) or the Jerry Coker method books on jazz piano vocabulary, which cover his style-specific patterns in isolation. For tablature or sheet music downloads specifically labeled as Love Nat King Cole Piano arrangements, you'll want to check sites like Musicnotes, SheetMusicPlus, and some dedicated jazz piano transcription communities. Be careful about free PDFs from random blogs — the transcriptions are often riddled with errors in the left-hand movement, which will send you down the wrong path entirely. There's also a bottleneck you should know about. This style works beautifully for standard ballads and mid-tempo swing numbers, but it's not a universal solution. If you're trying to play fast bebop tunes or harder straight-ahead jazz, Cole's approach will sound thin and rhythmically vague. His style is built for harmony-first, melody-forward material at moderate tempos. Don't expect it to translate to every piece in the jazz repertoire.

Start slow, maybe 60 BPM on any tune, and focus entirely on keeping the left-hand bass notes smooth and connected. Once that's automatic, add the right-hand drop voicings. The dynamic restraint comes last and it's the hardest thing to maintain because your instinct will be to play louder on the high notes of the melody. Don't. That's where the real Cole sound lives — in the quiet parts.