How to Play Piano: FULL 10 Hour Course & Easy Tutorial (For Beginners, ANY song, Fast)

piano keyboard lessons online free Now it's YOUR turn to be the life and soul of the party!. Click Here 👈 welcome to this ...

piano keyboard lessons online free

Now it's YOUR turn to be the life and soul of the party!. Click Here 👈

welcome to this piano course we're going to take you from an absolute beginner level up to an intermediate level in the piano and by the end of this course you're going to be able to start learning any song on a piano with confidence quickly and self-sufficiently we're also going to go through a couple of songs as case studies together step by step since all the songs that you're going to want to be able to learn on the piano are notated as either chord songs or on sheet music we're going to learn how to play chords read music play the music together and you're going to learn how to to improvise your own songs now you don't need any previous musical experience and your age group does not matter now if you like the idea of being able to learn a couple things once and then apply across many other areas of your piano learning and songs that you'd like to learn then you're going to like how this course is taught rather than learning and memorizing hundreds of different things individually so remember not to skip around unless you've already covered that part and a pro tip is to watch in 1.5x speed so you can save yourself some time and along the way we're going to learn all of the major skills that you need to be able to be a confident well-rounded piano player that can start to pick up any of your favorite songs and learn it quickly all of the common mistakes that beginners make in their early days are covered here too now you can find all of the separate sections of the course Below on the timeline and after each lesson you're going to have a task that's going to help you solidify what you just learned so that you're never left wondering what to do next and finally if you have any questions along the way or you want some more personalized feedback from me directly you can join my free community in the description you're also going to find the entire course there along with some extra resources that you'll find quite helpful I'm very active on there everyone's questions will be answered and there's also some extra sessions with me there too all completely free with that all being said let's get into it and enjoy the course okay welcome everybody to lesson one and in this lesson I'm going to teach you the note names I'm going to show you um the white notes and the black notes I'm going to show you the finger numbers explain all of these things that are going to basically warm you up to the piano in case you have absolutely no piano experience whatsoever so if you feel like you already know the note name is black and white you you know you're comfortable with your finger numbers and you know octaves and all that then you can move ahead but if you don't you don't know what I'm talking about then watch this video okay so we're just going to start right away and firstly you can see that we have white notes and we have black notes right and again if you've not really seen or played um the piano before or you're not musically experienced this looks a little bit intimidating but um once you start to understand that you'll become more confident all these notes are based on a letter from the alphabet and those letters go from a until G so a b c d e f g so a is over here I'm just going to demonstrate for now you don't have to play anything or memorize this but a is here b c d e f g then it goes back to a b c d and it keeps on going up like that and it goes the same way down so we have a g f e d c b and a so now you can look at the white notes as actually a cycle between the same pattern so we have a over here if you kind of like limit your vision to between my hands over here every note in between my hands right here here are the white notes right and then it basically gets like cycled right so in that sense really the only notes that you um you know the only section of the piano you have to be um quite confident in is just this one little cycle here because then it's just repeating so the most important um letter that you have to always know where it is is called middle C and the reason you have to know it is because it's a reference point for everything else so now when you're starting out when you're beginner you're most likely going to be counting um from C so that you can find the other notes right so how do we find C so you can see we have um the black notes and you can see these black notes are grouped into either groups of two or groups of three okay and that's it so groups of three three three three you have two two two two so what you need to do is find the group of two that's in the middle of your keyboard or piano just you know if you kind of like move your hands towards the middle it should be in this area and there's only going to be one group of two in this area so you're going to go to this one and you're going to count one to the left okay that is how you find middle C but you can also use this to find any c so because we have these like Cycles right um this c will be repeated so you have C over here C over there there there here and so on so how am I able to find that quickly well I'm just looking for the groups of two and I count down by one so groups of two count one one that's how you can find anyc quickly but importantly you must know that this particular C is called middle C and it's in the middle of your keyboard and this is it doesn't actually really matter if you're um on a 61 key keyboard and 88 this is a fullsize keyboard This is 88 keys which is the same length as a actual piano now if you're using smaller sizes that's okay um it's still G to be around in the middle of your keyboard so if we know what c is if we know where it is and how to find it then now we can move on to finding the other notes so for example let's say that I asked you to find e okay you would find C right so you just look for the two black notes and you count one to the left to count to find e you count up right because e is obviously after C so c d e and that's it so we're going to do this little exercise just to kind of um warm you up to the piano and I'm going to ask you to find G all right now what now you can play any G right it doesn't have to be the one in the middle you can play you can play any G at all so I'm going to play a g that's kind of in the upper regions of the keyboard just to prove that this works with anywhere I'm first going to find C so I find two black notes all right I go one to the left that is C then I'm count up D E F G okay so we're going to do one more and this time I'm going to give you the task and then you pause the video try and do it and then when you think you have the answer you unpause and then I will show you how to do it right so I want you to find any a okay so pause the video now and find an A okay so to find an a let's say that you picked um an a in a lower register right um you would find C so two black notes one to the left you can count either up to a or you can count down right if you count up it's c d e f g then a or you count down so C B A and that's how you find the notes now hopefully this that simple exercise just you know shows you that you have a set amount of letters and basically repeated so you have this word that you're going to hear very very often called an octave an OCT coming from octagon OCT octopus meaning eight right so what you need to know is if you pick any white note and you count eight notes either up or down including the one you started on you will land on the same note at a different pitch okay so let me demonstrate so let's say we took D if I count eight notes up I'll land on d 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 so these two are the exact same note and you can do that going down right those are eight notes apart so if I say play c one octave below middle C that means that you find middle C which is over here one octave below so you could count eight notes down or and this is the method that I prefer you learning um which is to recognize the pattern okay now the pattern is that for example this C you just immediately look at two black notes and you look one to the left you know that c over time this is going to get obviously much more stronger and um you don't actually have to um consciously practice this because you know either way you will get used to it but the way I want you to learn this is to try and actually focus on the pattern because you're going to learn this way faster promise you way faster if you actually focus on on on doing this so we have the C I'm looking the octave down just based on pattern I'm not even going to count so I just look for the next pair of two one down that's it right so let's say it's a note that you're not so accustom to right so let's say I wanted you to find an F so you would first find F so c d e f and you look at the pattern so you can notice here that we have three black notes and this is the first okay so one to left here from this is the beginning of these three black notes so then if I look at any other group of black note I just look at the beginning white note that starts off this little sequence and that way you don't have to count you're really just looking at the pattern so I'm going to give you two or three notes and I want you to try and memorize what position is just like the pattern of it so we already know so the first note I'm giving you is C the second note is f and the third note is a now the reason I want you to memorize these three positions is because I want you to have sort of anchors to the piano something that you can look at and say okay that is my reference point that is where I'm going to be working with so I want you to memorize these three positions we have C you go two black notes one to the left we have F you have three black notes one to left and then you have a which is you could memorize in different ways you could either find C and count two down right so you have c 1 2 um or you could look at these three black notes and say it's kind of like 2/3 in so you count one black note two black note and then you play the a there I want you to memorize those three positions just pause the video right now and take a couple seconds just to play around with it um but it is more important than you would think that you are at least comfortable finding this and once you've memorized it I want you to just just for a couple seconds um you know play those three notes at different octaves okay and once you've done that then continue this video okay great so the next thing that you need to know is your finger numbers so your fingers have numbers attached to them so let me explain the right hand we have the thumb will be number one the index finger will be number two then three ring finger is four and Pinky is five right so it's pretty intuitive um so we have 1 2 3 4 five and your left hand is the same your thumb is one index is two then three then four then five so make sure you're not confusing it as pinky being one then two then three is your thumbs are always number one okay then two then three then four then five so they're kind of symmetrical so that being said I want you to play middle C with number one one on your right hand which means your thumb okay now I want you to play D with number two which is your index finger then play e with your third finger play f with number four and then play G with number five so have a go now and just you want to fill out each finger per white note right so you're not make sure that you're not kind of um overlapping fingers so you don't want to have two fingers in one note and you don't want to have one finger in between two notes so you don't want your thumb to be playing those two or your index finger to play those three you want that's what you want okay now finger independency um is something that we're going to obviously work on and you're going to find that much more comfortable to play that but for now I know it probably feels very awkward for your fingers because intellectually and you're going to hear me repeat this a lot as a theme in this course but intellectually you already and you might find it very easy but your mind to muscle connection um will be has to be strengthened right and for that reason it's it's kind of a bit frustrating to to know that you should be playing it better but um it doesn't feel like it's at that level so you really just want to practice that okay and just really repeat it and once you're done with that you're going to take your left hand and your pinky will go on the c one octave below middle C right so this is Middle C octave below you're going to play that with your pinky so you can let go of your right hand for now [Music] then four will'll play on D then three will'll play on E two will'll play on F and one we'll play on [Music] G so have a go at practicing that just a couple times until uh you can do it kind of consistently right and uh you do want to avoid your fingers kind of flying up like this cuz I see that very very a common thing when I when I'm teaching new people one to one um they tend to do this with their left hand and right hand they go it's a very common thing but you want to try and keep them on the notes right now that's to do with form which I'm going to cover next lesson but um right now I want you to just focus on playing that sequence [Music] and that's that okay so now we know um the white notes I'm going to introduce to you now the black notes so before I play them there are two things that you need to remember one is called a sharp and the other is called a flat so I'm going to go to the Whiteboard now and explain this so a sharp I'm going to write over here and we have a flat now um there are symbols and meanings attached to these the symbol for Sharp is that it is not a hashtag it is a sharp okay try not to get that confused because it's it's always really funny when uh musicians they talk to other pianist and say oh yeah play the hashtag but it's a sharp okay it's a sharp now this means plus one and I explain this in a second and a flat the symbol is this and it's not really a lowercase b but it does look like it and the symbol for this would be minus one so now you know that sharps are + one and flats are minus one but plus one want so I'm going to explain that now you have things called tones and semmit tones so and keep in mind that when I'm saying all of this terminology most of it is going to be in the British system not the American system because Americans don't call it tones and semitones they call it steps and half steps so a tone is comprised of two semitones so if I play a semmit tone up from C I'll be at C Shar if I play another semitone I'll be at D another semmit tone I'll be at D Shar another I'll be at e so if I play every single note in only semmit tones it would be and so on but if I play it only in [Music] tones okay so when I'm saying go up plus one and minus one it is a semitone okay keep in mind that a semmit tone is actually essentially the next possible note you could possibly play okay that will make things a lot more simple a semitone is the next possible note you could play so a semitone from this note would be here and then another and another because nothing in between them so that would be a semitone let me apply Sharps and flats if I go to D and I say play A D sharp the sharp is plus one so I would go up and now I'm at + one so this would be a D sharp if I say you play a d flat you go to D and you go minus one d flat now if you want to remember Sharps and flats you know um which one's plus one which one's minus one um what some of my students like doing is visualizing a meaning to it okay so sharp they might say you know the sharp mountain right and that's kind of going up you go up a mountain higher um but and then they say flat you know like flattening the ground they're like flattening whatever and it's kind of down so you can associate meanings to it you can pick whichever you like but trap and flats will come naturally to you now let's take another example if I go to an A so I'm going to pick this one and I say a sharp I go a sharp if I say a flat we have a flat now I'm playing two notes like this to demonstrate the process but if somebody actually asked you play an E flat you wouldn't play you would just play the E flat okay so anything sharp or flat would you know signify the black note you don't actually play the white and then the black I'm only doing that in this video to demonstrate you know the logic behind it so quick exercise for you I would like you to find F which hopefully you have memorize the position of it you go to three black notes and you go to the first one so that is f i want to play an fshp so play that now and that is what it sounds like okay next one I want you to play an A flat all right and you can pick any a flat let's say Pon over here I'm going to find a and I'm going to do a flat so flat minus one I'm going down by semitone I am going to go more in depth into tones and semitones in the future so if you feel like there's a lot of information here and you can't grasp it confidently yet that's completely fine um because we are going to go more in depth into it so you have only two exceptions to this um strategy and that would be the letters e and B so if I go to a b and I say B B Sharp sometimes most people would say okay it's this one but it's not a B Sharp is actually a c okay it's it's a natural C C natural so B Sharp a B Sharp is actually C then you might think well why on Earth would people call a c a b SHP sometimes you find that in very very complex pieces but um I just want you to know that a b is not a black note because Sharps you're adding you you cuz when I say sharp it's Plus One semmit Tone and a semitone is the next possible note so if I go to B the next possible note is C now what about e the next possible um note up so an e sharp would be an F because sharp plus one semmit tone from E this is next possible note I could play right and the same thing you know vice versa if I go to F and I say F flat flat is minus1 semmit tone the next possible no I could play is here so that's actually e again C flat C flat is B those are the only two exceptions so now you know every single note on the piano you might not feel very very confident but intellectually you do know every single note and let me prove that to you so I want you to find a G sharp okay so first you can either find a c and then count up to G or down or you can find F and count one up um or you can find a and count one down like there's many ways you can do it whatever you prefer but first find the G G sharp so sharpest plus one semitone that's a G sharp also called an A flat so for now I'm going to going to give you a note I'm just going to point at it and then you're going to identify it you're going to play it on your keyboard or piano then I'm going to show you what the actual not is it's kind of like a quiz okay so I want you to find and identify this note okay so think about what that note name is so this is a c or a d flat because you have two black notes C then you're going to count up by one semitone which would be a sharp C sharp next one okay that is a b so you're going to count C go down by one or if you picked a you go up by one or if you picked f and so on I'll do one more with you and then we're gonna wrap up the lesson this one right over here so that would be a D sharp or an E flat okay so hopefully now you're able to look at a piano in a different perspective and you can say okay so now you have some strategy to it now you know where C is you should know where f is you should know where a is um you should know the you know how to identify any white note how to identify any black note and you should know the finger names it sounds like a lot but if you pretty much follow this lesson then those are the things that you know and that's just a matter of building on top of those um in future videos the task I'm going to leave you with that I want you to practice before you go on to next lesson is play this with your right [Music] hand and this with your left [Music] hand and once you are comfortable doing that you don't have to be very confident but you just have to be comfortable doing it right it doesn't have to be like very very scary um then move on to the next lesson and each lesson I'm going to leave you this little task that you must do before you move on okay great job this lesson and I'll see you in the next one okay welcome back to lesson two and in this lesson I'm going to teach you about posture I'm going to give you some finger exercises and just continue laying down the basics um to get you started on the piano so when it comes to posture um this is a very overlooked thing with beginners so posture um there's a couple things that you need to keep in mind the first thing is your body's posture so you want to keep your feet generally flat on the ground you want to keep your um shoulders relaxed you're want to keep your elbow also relaxed and probably the most important thing is keep your wrist relax but in a specific shape so for example when you're playing from last lesson you could be playing it like and you want to avoid that you want to keep your wrist much higher but don't do it so high that it's kind of it's strange right so you want to kind of Envision that you're holding a ball like if you if you held a tennis ball in your hand right now um your hand would make a certain shape so your wrist is kind of relaxed but slightly levitated in the air um but the most important thing is that you're not doing this because this like almost EV every single person I've ever taught has come in and started playing like that right and it's very important that you correct the um the bad habits at the start because bad habits are much harder and takes a lot a lot longer to undo in the future so make sure that you have this kind of shape just like [Music] that so you you might find that when you're playing something that's um uncomfortable to play uh just because you know it's difficult and you're still getting used to it you're going to be tensing especially your shoulder and very typically your your dominant hands shoulder right so if you're right-handed it's going to be likely your right shoulder so being aware of the your tension is important because you're going to have that a lot another thing is your fingers your fingers might be tense because you're now asking your fingers to you know mechanically play something that you've not done before it's probably going to be uncomfortable and you might be have you might have this tension in your fingers so you might be paying this like and you probably can't tell from my playing but there's actually a lot of stress and and tension in the actual um tendons of the hand and you want to avoid that so the very first step is just to be aware of that in the first place you want to try and be aware of of tension in your body okay that's just a principle um that is a very very very good habit to have especially at the start so we remember from last lesson that you know I asked you to play on the right hand and this on the left [Music] hand now I don't know what speed that you currently have it to but if you have that at that speed you're doing you know much much better than expected so um the next step is to actually put them together so you're going to go on you know the right places and you're just going to play one by one and this might seem tricky and very strange but that's because you're you're asking your brain to combine both halves right because your right brain controls the left side of your body and your left brain controls the right side of your body and your making new connections and that's why [Music] it's it's going to take some time before you can become that confident it doesn't take that long but it does take a little bit of time so be patient with yourself and just take it step by step literally one note at a time that slow literally that slow it seems counterintuitive because everybody wants to go really fast at the beginning right like I was there everyone wants to go fast F cuz it sounds nice it sounds cooler makes us feel better that we're doing good but just take it one by one it's not about what it sounds like it's about the brain um changes that you're you know that you're [Music] forming have a go at practicing that so pause the video now and just try that okay so you may have noticed that one of two things probably happened your timing is probably um syncopated which is the opposite of synchronized so if that is the case just take it even slower than whatever you just did and if it helps you can count to yourself kind of like a beat right so you can count 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 for example 1 2 3 4 1 1 2 3 4 1 2 so now you have something to actually keep you on Beat the other thing that probably happened is that you had some tension in your wrists fingers or you just generally might not have had great posture if you did have good posture then that's great so remember that both wrists have to be in this you know ideal position where it's kind of as if you're holding a ball a tennis ball or or just like an umbrella shape with your with your [Music] hands now don't be so you know strict and to the dot about it don't be too harsh on yourself here don't you know try and exactly keep your wrist exactly there exactly for that right time um it's it's much less about you know always doing the exact ideal posture and it's it's more about avoiding the bad thing right so it's more important to me right now that you're not keeping your rist too low or even too high um it's more it's more about avoiding that than it is to exactly keep it in an ideal situation does that make sense so um just keep that in mind and that's something that you're going to want to develop over time the thing I said about shoulders is that you might find some tension in your shoulders as you're playing that you want to just be aware of that tension and just relax the shoulders as soon as you feel tension relax it when you feel tension in your fingers relax your fingers a little bit more if you think your wrists are too low because it feels you know a bit strenuous you want to also relax that bring it back up one one more thing I'm going to point out is that your elbows you want to make sure that they're not kind of to the side like this you probably can't tell with the camera view but you know um you don't want to have your elbows kind of like this because you're going to be collapsing in the joint in your shoulder and it's also going to cause you tension so if you feel like tension is always there it might be your elbow so going just keep your elbow relaxed kind of tucked you know into your body in a natural [Music] position so that's what you're aiming for in a relaxed sense now you might feel that everything I'm saying here about posture relaxation awareness and all of these different things is a bit over the top for such a simple exercise um and that's intentional it's intentional for the exercise to be so simple and I want your um attention to actually be on your posture now bear in mind when I say simple I don't mean exactly easy because um for most people [Music] playing with two hands with such you know coordination is going to be a step it is a simple task but it might not be easy okay so just just be mindful of that so the purpose of this lesson to remind you is to build in these foundations that you can remember and apply to every single time that you're practicing so the next thing I'm going to ask you to do is kind of jump between the octaves when you're doing that same pattern let me show you just to remind you an octave is that e note distance it's the same note but different pitch so we have this um little five finger um pattern of if I move that an octave up and an octave [Music] down so that's what I want you to do um but what I definitely can say that will help you is focus on what you're going to be doing next rather than what you're doing right now so you might be focusing on each note that you're playing at that moment um but you actually want to be thinking ahead what you're going to do so once I'm at this stage about to hit the C I'm thinking okay I'm looking over here so I'm like okay I'm going to move over [Music] there and now I'm looking here so you want to look ahead so have a go at doing that take it as slow as possible slow enough that it's impossible for you to make a mistake that's how slow I want you to take it then for your left [Music] hand that's going to be your task and then you just go back down take it you know one hand at a time and then um if you're really feeling confident you can do both hands [Music] so I know that is a big that is a bit of a jump but you the key here is to take it step by step nothing's too hard if you take it in enough small easy steps okay nothing is too difficult remember I was in your exact position I was still learning all of these Basics I am obviously never got to the stage I'm at right now without being in your position but what you have to know right now is simply to be relaxed before you play and this has a huge effect on your playing your performance your composing your um you know your connecting with the music connecting with listeners all that stuff which I'm going to explain but what you need to practice right now and have make a habit of is to just take a deep breath in before you play okay so and just relax your body sometimes we come in a piano and we're um full of like you know itation and um our body is very stressed and you really want to calm that down so all you have to do really is take a deep breath in before you start practicing and take a nice long controlled breath out okay that being said have a go at those tasks that I set you remember to keep the right posture especially avoiding the wrong posture being aware of tension in your body and finally before you practice resolve to take a deep breath in and out every time before you play until it is an unconscious habit okay good luck and I'll see you in the next lesson okay welcome everybody to lesson three and in this lesson I'm going to teach you all about chords and I'm going to teach you the basics about you know what are chords Melodies harmonies um I'm going to show you what chords are and I'm going to give you a very very special um technique that's going to allow you to construct any chord and that's really going to put you um really in a different bracket of musician than you know just people who try and memorize positions and um kind of play robotically but I'm going to give you some some ways and tools that you can use to apply um so that you can start learning literally almost any song that has chords and by the end of this you're going to have a sense of confidence and direction in exactly what chords are and how you can as I said create any chord so I'm first going to start off by showing you an example of a chord so [Music] this is a C major chord now I'm playing a bunch of notes at the same time this is called a Harmony now you also have Melody so what's the difference well a Harmony sounds like this doesn't matter what you're playing as long as you have two or more notes playing at the same time that is a Harmony okay I'll say it again if you have two or more notes playing at the same time that is a Harmony so doesn't matter they don't have to have any correlation with each other it had absolutely no difference then you have Melody so Melody is when you have several notes playing one after the other so here are some examples of melodies or it doesn't really matter what it is as long as you have several notes playing one after the other that is a Melody so a chord this like the c major chord I'll explain why it's called major why it's called C major and all that stuff but C major chord would be called a Harmony because you have two or more notes playing at the same time but why would it not just be called a c Harmony well because a chord is structured it has some structure to it so what a Harmony is is that it could be two or more of anything it could be it doesn't it actually does not matter at all but as soon as you have um structure to it it's very specific type of structure so this is based on the C so now I'm going to actually start to explain what these chords are so C major you have what's called a root note right so if you take the c major chord c major so C would be the the chords based like it's root all right so it's based off of c and I'm going to kind of show you what you know traditional um onet toone teachers would show you and I would say okay this is C major remember those notes you have C you have e and you have G great so you can have a go at playing that c e and G you're playing that with number one 3 and five at the same time and try and keep the correct form make sure your wrist and you know just be aware of any attention and just relax it and just try and play that in a relaxed manner so you want to play F major for example okay go to F with play that with number one could be any F doesn't matter but and then play a with number three and C with number five play it together and you have F major so now we know a bit more about chords now we know that it is a Harmony that has some structure and you might have already guessed what that structure is it's normally in a um 135 five fashion so 1 3 5 and it's not only talking about the actual fingers but the um pattern on the on the actual keyboard so generally um you're playing one note skipping one playing one then skipping one and then playing one so you have a 1 three5 pattern so if I go from C so I play it skip play Skip play now you have C major what about f major skip play Skip play great now that um is really about as far as um most teachers will teach you partly because most um teachers are classically trained and they will teach students classically um and I'm not saying that to hate on those techniques or teachers or anything I'm just saying that um the people who go to to one to one traditional learning ex you know they are going to learn classical training but um and In classical training you don't find a whole lot of chord knowledge so the other thing about chords that you might be wondering is why is it called major are there any other options so it's called major um C major for a particular reason you also have some C minor for another reason so you have major and minor this is called a tonality okay so a tonality ities it is either major or minor that's all you need to know so if I say play C major you're playing c e and G if I say say if I say play C minor you're playing c e flat and G now that traditional one to1 teacher will just tell you remember those notes with no sense of like actual understanding it's just you're memorizing the notes which it does you know work to a certain degree but that's not really what you want one other thing that you need to know and that are that is called Cote progressions so of course progressions are the most common way of movement in a in a song in a normal pop song or in fact you know most songs in general so a chord progression might sound like [Music] this that would be one of the most common chord progressions ever right um and you can have other chord progressions so it could be they are normally u in groups of four so you can kind of bundle it up like that um and you also have a lot of songs which repeat this same group of four and then they just changed it so you have and then they repeat that for how many other times and then they get to like a new verse or something like that and then they change it and then maybe a different chain so you can see kind of how that works so why am I telling you this well there are a couple reasons why core progression knowledge is um going to benefit you so let's say that for example you wanted to go and learn the chords to one of your favorite songs like right now like for example like um someone you loved by Louis capoli is very popular so I don't know what the chords are but I'm just going to give some random example let's say that it was a minor F major G major and D major so it might look like what what did you just play but it is simply just you know the right notes to that chord so a minor I know that is a c and e I know that F major IS F A and C and just like that I know that because I played enough times and because I actually understand chords which I'm going to show you in just one minute right now so you go on Google and you find these chords and you look at their names and you're like wow okay now let me go and find um how do you actually play them and then you spend a lot of time trying to play the right notes and getting used to it and in reality it shouldn't be like that and I'm going to show you a great way how to overcome that so here is this technique I'm going to show you it is based on the use of tones and semmit tones that I taught you in the first lesson so just to recap a tone is made up of two semmit tones and a semmit tone is the next possible step that you could take so if I starting on c a semi- tone up would be C Shar or d flat then semone again D so I play two semmit tones which is equivalent to one tone so one tone from C would be D another tone that's a tone so if I play from E to F that's going to be a semmit tone because it is the next possible note that I could play although by ear it sounds like a tone but in reality there is nothing in between for it to count as a tone since a tone is two semmit tones but it's a semitone Gap so hopefully that makes sense again I would recommend that you have a notebook of some kind or um that you can just refer back to when you finish the course so that you have everything in a way that you can understand so how to make any single chord ever it's a very bold statement but it's very simple and very easy to do and the reason that people don't learn it or you know they don't teach it is because this is a part of music theory that um it has that you can apply but in reality most teachers don't apply Theory to the practicality that's simply just because of the nature of classically trained um teachers they were trained in a classical way and they teach their students in a classical way so let's say you wanted to make a D minor chord okay how do you do it first you take D because D is your root note of the chord why because it's called D Minor if it was called F minor you start on F if it's called C minor you start on c c major start on C if it's called you know E flat major start on E flat same principle okay so for you to create any chord there are two numbers you need to remember as I said you have three four okay I'm going to put a comma there and you also have four 3 so you're remembering only two numbers but you just have to remember the pattern which is not that difficult you just reverse the numbers so you have 3 4 and 43 now what does this mean so if you want to make a minor chord you have 34 if you want to make a major chord I'll write chord here you use 43 but 3 4 what and 43 what so these are semmit tones okay now what can we do this if you want to make a minor chord any minor chord let's take d right so you can look at your piano right now you hit D okay so you count one semmit tone up we're going to count three semitones first okay so you have dsharp or you can call it E flat but I'm going to call it sharp just for the sake of it so you have D sharp that's one semit tone so you don't count the initial one right so D is zero D sharp is one e natural is two um then you have F which be three so we're going to stop there we're going to mark that F so it's I'm going to demonstrate this on the piano but you're going to mark that F so it's going to be D and then F Okay so we've done three now count four from F okay so f is zero and then F Shar is 1 G natural is 2 G sharp is three and a natural is four so you have d f and a and that is the D minor chord um constructed it's very very simple it's very very easy um it's going to take you like just like literally one or two tries to look at it and do it and then it's going to be very easy and in future you're going it's going to be so fast and there really are only a set amount of chords that you can play so in the very near future you're just going to be able to play the chord without having to calculate it like how I do so if you want to make a major chord you count four and then three semmit tones right make sure they're semitones right the next possible note right so if you're on an e natural um an E2 f is not a tone it is a semitone right so think of semitones the next possible known very very important cuz a lot of people in the beginning they get confused because it's not explained um very clearly to them so I want to be very clear semitone the next possible note and when you counting chords you don't count the actual note you start on right so I'm going to show you um what this looks like on a piano and we're going to do some application and you're going to impress yourself so I'll see you in a second okay so hopefully that you have that written down somewhere that you can remember and I urge you to write things down because you're activating different part of your brain you're you're activating the prefrontal cortex which essentially you have to actually process what you're writing now if you want to remember this you know even more easily you want to add some meaning to it right so with the 3 four that's how you make a minor chord right so minor you're starting with the minor number the smaller number okay minor smaller kind of similar meaning so 3 four that is the minor um formula and if you want to make a major chord you start with the major number which is four major bigger greater so 43 okay so minor is 34 major is 43 so we said that D Minor is DF and a so let's use this technique and see if that's actually right we got a D so this is zero we're going to count three because 3 four 1 2 3 okay so now I've got D and F then I'm going to count four 1 2 3 4 okay so it works especially so we know for absolute certain it works with minor chords now very important that you get used to playing chords with 1 three and five I see way too many people play it with two three and five and although it does feel more comfortable to do it if but that's only because your wrists are flat and you're going to very rarely actually play chords with that um with this form unless you're doing some extra stuff like something like that but for the sake of chords and when you're going to play pop songs that is how you do it make sure you're playing with 1 three and five with the correct form you know wrist at a good level just like that shape and we're going to move on to a major chord so we want to make F major okay so so we go to F we count four 1 2 3 4 then count three 1 2 3 and there you go so we have D Minor F major there are your examples well what about the black notes that work on black notes so let's check so let's take for example A C minor chord it sounds intimidating but don't let that get you you are simply you know applying the exact same formula to the note that there's absolutely no difference here so CP minor we go to C Shar we're going to count three 1 2 3 three because it's minor then we count four 1 2 3 [Music] 4 that is C minor the only difference that you that I would note that is actually quite um significant is that you're not playing the chord so far away from the from the Black Keys cuz you've playing it um on the white notes you're over here right you're kind of like on this line is but when you're playing Black notes you can't like do that because it's uncomfortable and as you can see your wrist contorts in a in a very bad place and you don't want to do that make sure you're not you know getting used to this you want to push your fingers in you want to slide it in so that you're able to maintain this curved um shape make sure that Arc um is visible in your fingers and that you're not kind of um flatting it out like this you don't want to be doing that you want to keep it [Music] ared okay so now you're going to have a go I want you to make a e major chord all right so first of all you're going to go find e and I'm going to leave the rest to you pause the video right now construct that E major cord um make sure you playing the right notes make sure you're playing with the right fingers and form and then play back the video and I'll show you what it looks like okay so with E major you got to e and you can count four cuz four is for major major bigger starting with a bigger number so e0 1 2 3 4 1 2 [Music] 3 playing that with 135 because you're playing a black note here you might want to tuck your fingers in a little bit but don't do it so far in that you're like this because you only go this deep when you're mostly black notes like with the C minor your pinky and your thumb are on the black notes so it makes sense with E major you can just play that normally whatever feels comfortable but just don't compromise um a good form with your you know with your Arc here okay hopefully you got that right and if you didn't that's completely fine it is just really down to practice and if you got it right then your next challenge is to do it maybe a bit faster you know you can decide but in the meantime here's your next one I want you to make an fshp minor chord okay so you're going to go find F and then you're going to make the chord it does not matter what octave you use you can do it okay well I'm not going to play the chord but for example if you have C minor you can do it here doesn't really matter you can use your left hand or right hand if you're using right hand it's 135 if you're using your left hand it's 531 okay so a C minor with your left hand 531 um G Major G minor right any octave whichever hand you prefer so please make an fshp minor chord and play back the video when you're done okay after m that's what it sounds like now the only thing that's remaining here is for you to practice those chords which I am going to give you tasks for um but the only you know really the only other thing that I would suggest for you to really the only other thing that I would like to explain um that could further improve your understanding of this is the kind of difference between the major and the minor um tonality and at Le at least as far as the chord structure is is concerned so if we wanted to play a C major generally speaking when you play any major chord the only difference between the major and the minor for most chords not all but most chords if you want to go for major to minor you take your middle finger the three and you go down a sem tone that is usually the case right so let's take a D Minor up to a D major D Minor so I know it's D Minor because 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 to D major now I want you to listen for that [Music] difference the oversimplified version major is happy and minor is sad so now you you really have the tools to create any chord now you do have more complex chords but there are based on that Foundation chord that you have just learned how to create um for any major minor minor chord so you know for example extended chords right I'll explain this in future videos um we have um [Music] inversions you have um you know seventh chords you've got a bunch of stuff but like I said I'm going to go more in detail into these chords in a future lesson because because I want to give you the the basic the foundation a strong foundation so that we can just get onto that case study as soon as possible which is going to be literally next lesson but here are your tasks so do not move on until you've done these to a satisfactory level so you and you know write this down um so that you don't forget but you I want you to create C minor create C major then create E major and E minor and then create C minor and gsh minor I want you to create all of those chords and then just practice switching between the major and minor and check if it's right so for example if I say you know C major switching from major to minor would be [Music] okay like I said you're mainly moving that middle finger the third finger up or down so if you're going minor up into major you're moving the middle finger up if you are already in major you're already up and you're going down to minor your middle finger goes down for example D major I go down to minor okay you don't go go from major up to minor major major would be up and minor would be down so major this is up going down to D Minor now you know is that right because you might practice and you might say okay I moved my middle finger but I don't know if it sounds right so you check it if you went from D major to D Minor but let's say for example you did [Music] this you need to check it so so D Minor so that's the note so you see how this works so those are your tasks and I want you to also practice um every single chord that you're doing with the left hand and right hand and then your extension would be to do both at the same time so for [Music] example whatever you want okay so hopefully you um get started on that I'll suggest you do that you know right now or just wait until whenever you're free but I will see you in the next lesson and great job today I'm very excited for you okay welcome back everybody to this very quick lesson I'm not going to spend too much time on this because it's really meant as an introduction for um the type of music that you're going to be playing which is that which is going to be that Hall case study and I want to take this opportunity to explain the way that those kind of pieces work um how you can read them and how you can go and basically find um your own songs to play and learn but what you should look for and the thing that you should be aware of that if you're not aware of you're not going to play the song accurately and you're not going to play it well so I just wanted to give you a bunch of these tips that's going to help you for sure by the end of this lesson you're going to be confident in what you're looking for what you're not looking for and how to actually understand what you're looking at and be able to play it so I'm going to give you an in-depth example of that next lesson where we're doing that Hall case study as I mentioned but I needed to just give you this introduction so the first type is sheet music and Sheet Music obviously you just go and buy it or you download it or you print it whatever but you get in front of you and you practice it you read it and obviously you play it by the end so that you achieve a s result the second type is Chord music it's just a very loose term to describe music that you read of usually pop songs that you go into Google and you find piano chords to and you play along so I'm going to show you what that looks like in a second but to quickly compare when you read sheet music you have you know a lot of information now once you're able to look at and understand this information then you practice it your end result is going to be much more rich and complex than if you were to just read chords which does not actually have much instructions at all except just the note name depending on what kind of music you're going to want want to be playing on a particular day or if you know if you want something to study as an actual piece or if you want to very quickly play a nice pop song it would vary so I'm going to show you this example of what you're going to find on Google there's going to be two symbols that you're going to see that you need to understand the difference of so I'm going to give an example of a G chord so if it was wanting you to play a G major it would just leave a g it would not have any other signifiers of major anytime you just see the letter name it automatically means the major chord of that okay so to find how to actually play that you're just going to play obviously four then three semitones and you construct it so if it wanted you to play a G minor you're going to see a small M and the M signifies the minor so no matter what letter you have at the beginning as long as it has an M there it means minor so that's going to be three then four semmit tones so that could be a or a minor it could be a B flat major or a B flat minor you have you know it could be a G sharp or a gsh minor so no m is Major m is minor those are the only two things you're going to see there is one exception to this Rule and that our seventh CH but you're not going to learn that right now you're going to learn that in a future lesson but these this is the basic knowledge that you need to know before you go and find some music to play because most pop songs out there are going to follow the structure you're not going to find seventh chords um very commonly okay so the next tip I want you to keep in mind is the actual markings now like I said I'm going to show you example of this in a second but let me just explain this first so you know what you're looking at if you were to go and find a song and let's say it was Hallelujah these are some of the lyrics it's like an lyrical extract of the song goes um well it goes like this the fourth the fifth so that's part of the song Now what you're going to find is that you have a certain chord over these lyrics I don't know off the top of my head so I'm just going to make them up so don't take this seriously but do take the actual positionings seriously I'll show you here is an example of what you might find well it goes like this the fourth the fifth we have a c on top of the goes so that's a C major we have an F major on top of the and a G major on top of the again so you can see that it's asking you to play a C major on top of the word goes now it's at the beginning of the word so that means that you play at the start of the word you don't delay it so you play well it goes instead of where it goes right now sometimes and this is the reason why I'm actually explaining this to you sometimes the markings are not accurate there's not really any particular clear reason as to why but I can tell you as an absolute fact the markings are not 100% accurate so what do I mean by that sometimes it will tell you you know well it goes like this the fourth the fifth and it's saying play the F on the but in the actual song you don't hear the chord change until 4th so this is actually early so when you're practicing the song um you're actually playing it wrongly and obviously you don't want that because you're you're developing a bad habit and when it comes to you singing along to it when it comes to um you know singing with your friend who knows it that's going to cause some confusion so what should you do about this well you should listen to the song that you're going to be learning don't just you know throw yourself into you know the deep end without knowing what it's supposed to sound like because one of the major flaws with you know this system of reading reading music is that you don't get any type of Melody you don't get any type of you know what to actually play how often you know am I playing the c major once or am I repeating it several times you know am I playing both hands like there's no information whatsoever you only get chord name that's why you should listen to the song first because you can hear it in the song that the c major goes you know du du du du instead of just playing it once and then holding it so what she do when you find situations where the markings are wrong and you know that it's wrong well don't follow the exactly as it says just go with your with your knowledge of it so if you know that the song is supposed to be well it goes like this the fourth the fifth then move this F up to Fourth and move the G up to the fifth just look at it as a reference of what you're playing but don't look as a reference for when you're playing it so I'm going to show you online exactly what you should be looking for and how to gauge um if the song that you're picking is actually within your means to play okay so you can see here that I have typed in Hallelujah piano chords now I've got a bunch of links here I have this one that pops out where this little example of what the website will be but I've got a link to go check it out I've got some videos I've got some um other websites and links now what I want to make you aware of is that sometimes when you type in Hulu piano chords or if you don't even type in piano you just put chords you're going to commonly come up with piano or guitar and you have to be aware of what you're actually reading so for example here you can see it says tabs ultimate guitar and the title of Hall chords but these chords are actually for the guitar and obviously you can see that from here that's obviously not for piano although guitar chords and piano chords are similar and you could definitely play this on the piano you should generally go for the ones that are for piano so I'm going to go back up here I'm going to try this one [Music] out so I'm looking here and I can see that we have all the lyrics and we have the chord name above them so you have the C the a minor we got F major G major C Major G major and so on um you got the only change from here um is this e major so it's a very simple song and definitely within your means to play because there's nothing very complex here so you could definitely play this now this is an example of a more difficult song this is I'm still standing by Elton John and here there's a lot of new information you can see we have you know a minor which is fine but then you have these like stroke chords you got two different chords at the same time time which doesn't really make sense when you first look at it but I'm going to explain this down the line you also have seventh chords which I mentioned again I'll expand it down the line and generally more complex chords than if you were to play a more Simple Song so why am i showing you this well by looking at what you're going to be playing you can quickly and very easily tell if this is something that you could play quickly or if this is something that you're going to have to practice because let's say you're with your friends and family and somebody recommended you a song and you look at this and you still don't know how to play all this yet then that's going to be a different decision than if you were to try a different song Now by all means I'm not saying don't attempt hard songs because that's obviously not what I'm trying to say because attempting harder songs is how you improve what I'm saying is depending on the situation you're going to make a different decision and let's say that you weren't time constricted and you just wanted to be able to play a song If you don't know what some of this stuff means then you would just go to the relevant point in this course and practice it so if I go back to Hallelujah we know that for sure we have this option because all these chords are very very simple now the version I'm going to be using for you is this one here and the reason is we also have some very simple chords the ruct is very easy to read but also because we have this B7 chord which does not come up very often which gives me enough time for me to teach you um what that looks like websites like these you can literally click on it and it will show you how to play it um and you can just type in whatever song you want so that's really it um the point was to introduce you to these Concepts so that um you can understand what you're doing from now on but to summarize when you're searching for chords for a song make sure the chords are for piano and and the reason simply is that some websites will have um variations of chords which you can only properly do on guitar it's not impossible to do in piano but when you're at beginner stage you don't want to be doing um complex piano chords which are actually easy on guitar now the second thing is that when you're going to go and check these websites for piano chords um check this check the actual chords to see if you can play them depending on the setting so let's say you know very common example that you're with your friends or family or some kind of get together and they ask you for a song you go and check the chords let's say that most of the song are all black note major minor chords you might not be comfortable playing that yet so you might check a different website that is the same song but it has different chords you might be thinking how does that even work but it just means that whoever did that sheet has taken the entire song and just shifted it down or shifted it up um so that the courts to play are easier but it still sounds the same and the last thing is that you should be aware that when you're looking at these cour sheets they are not Melody based it is simply to accompany a singer or to accompany some kind of soloist or to accompany you if you're singing um to accompany something just be aware that the point is to accompany rather than to actually learn to play the song because that's more of a sheet music thing okay that's pretty much it I'm just wanted to introduce this to you and I will see you in the next lesson okay guys welcome back Lesson Four and this one's going to be a case study where we are doing hallelujah we're pretty much just going to be taking the chords and we're going to play along I'll do my best to sing along and so you can get an idea you can sing along if you want as well um you just type in uh the song piano chords and then you can do it but we're going to stick with this one and we'll do that one together and we'll go through it together and it's going to really feel amazing because you're going to feel like this is a staple of your progress this is literally you know it's results so if you enjoy this song then all the much better and if you don't enjoy this song then you can still take these exact same um method and apply it to whatever song you'd like to do so we'll get straight into it we can see that our introduction um chords are G major E minor C major and D major and remembering that they're all major except the E minor because there's an m to symbolize the minor so we're going to find um G major so we're going to find G we know it's over here so we're going to stick to the um section just above middle C the right hand that's generally where you want to position your right hand and you want to generally position your left hand below middle C so in this area so we have G we're going to count four semitones up 1 2 3 4 then we're going to count another three 1 2 3 so we're playing that with 1 3 and five with the correct form now next we have E minor so that's going to be over here now from G major if we take G major again it's the same you're keeping the same form in your hand you're just moving your wrist down by two steps that's going to be E minor and just to verify that it actually is E minor and not a different chord we're going to take e we're gonna count from three to four because three is a minor number one two three one two three four so that is E minor so from G major keep the same form just move your wrist make sure you're not moving your fingers now C major you're moving it down by two and for D major you're moving it up by one except the middle finger is going to be playing F sharp so for D major it is from d 1 2 3 4 then playing three 1 2 3 so this is the only one where you're going to be moving your finger very very slightly just make sure not to break your actual form so this is what you should not be doing so going from C and then moving your fingers and then doing D major you should move your wrist by up by one and just moving your middle finger up that's all your you're doing so together they [Music] are those are your introductory chords and those are the only chords you're going to be playing through the entire song except one exception and that is a B7 chord and I'll explain how that works in just a minute but what you have to know now is that for the first verse which I'm going to be playing for you the progression is slightly different so it goes from G to E minor then G to E minor and then C to D back up G so I'll play it for you to see what it sounds like I'm going to add in the left hand just so that you can get a better idea of how it's going to sound by the end but you know don't worry about that we're just going to stick with the right hand when we play together I've heard there was a secret chord that David played and it plays a l but you don't really care for music do you and that's it so you know I was moving my um hands from chord to chord fairly fast um especially for a new player so again don't worry if you feel uncomfortable with that what you should be trying is just practicing that transition so we're going to transition from G to e then back up to G then to e again then C and back up to D and then back back up the G so we're going to play that just that first half of that verse together and I'm going to sing along to lyrics so that you have a sense of time I'm also going to stop my fingers so I'm going to count in four and then we're going to play on one so remembering you're just moving your wrist and slightly changing your finger for the D major hopefully you are comfortable playing each of those chords um to begin with and just memorize those patterns on how you're going to change between them 1 2 3 4 I've heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord but you don't really care for music do [Music] you three four okay so hopefully that's not too much of a challenge um what you might be struggling with is the speed in which you're transitioning and just generally having confidence um in doing that but that's really okay you just need to do that for just a couple minutes and you should be fine with that so either take a second right now to just practice doing that it doesn't have to be particularly loud but just make sure that you're not playing so softly that the some of the notes are not even you know dis distinguishable so I'm going to quickly go over how to play the last um chord which is a B7 chord the rest of the chords you know now this is a chord that is um you know a bit more complicated than the rest and they have different fingerings but it's not um a huge jump it is just slightly different this is how you play a B7 chord so it sounds very unique and that's because of that I did seventh so all the chords you're going to be learning in this lesson and playing is G major E minor C Major D major and that B7 chord now you won't actually learn seventh chords and extended chords there's much more other types of chords such as sustained chords and you're not going to need to know that right now because we're going to cover that once we do scales but um in terms of how to actually you play it you put your thumb on B and this is going to be the B just below middle C so middle C is here you're playing the B with number one you're playing an E flat with number two an F sharp with number three and an a with number five now this is going to be one of those occasions where instead of playing a chord with 1 3 and 5 you're playing with 1 2 3 and five now an easy way to transition from the D to a B7 is when you play the D major you keep number three and five exactly where it is you don't move it at all all you're doing is moving two fingers your number two your index finger is moving one semitone down and your thumb is playing B that's it so if you pay attention to my fingers [Music] here so look again look only at my second [Music] finger and I look only at my thumb it's not that big of a difference so have a go at playing that until you're you're okay with um playing that chord and remember that it's okay to feel that your hand is a little bit uncoordinated or uncomfortable just try your best to maintain the arc um in your fingers and that your wrist is slightly elevated as if you're holding a ball so I'm going to sing and play um the second half of the verse so that you know what it sounds like and that what we'll be doing together one 2 3 4 well it goes like this the fourth the fifth the minor fall the major lift the baffled King composing [Music] hallelu so you can see um when I did the D major to B7 it flowed very very nicely and there's two reasons for that because I anticipated the change because this is what a lot of beginner people do they change too late and it sounds laggy like and you know it's forced or it's a bit behind you know what have you so I'd like you to practice just um transitioning from the D major to the B7 that's the main thing the other transitions are very simple you're only moving a wrist by two or one notes before we play This Together pay attention to the pattern that we're going to be playing you have the chords on screen so it's going to go from G major down to C major okay you're not going up you're going down to the middle C up by one for D major up by one for E minor back down up by one to D and just transition to B7 and then back up so notice that you're not jumping across a piano you're not playing G and then C over here that's not what you're doing so we're going to have a go of playing this together just make sure that um you're you're okay with the transitions so hopefully you've done a bit of practice of that and you know you'll find if you haven't already been doing this that you should be kind of playing along the video so you don't want to be watching the entire video first first and then practice um because the nature of how I've designed it is that you play as we go so that you're not spending too much time on this and that also your productivity goes up so we'll have a go it's just going to be your right hand on from the G over there 1 2 3 4 well it goes like this the fourth the fifth the minor four the major lift the baffled King composing [Music] hallelu four good make sure they holding that e at the end for the full um four beats so I'm going to play the entire verse for you and you can either pause or play along with it so that you can get down where those transitioning are and you can become more confident and comfortable with that because then we're going to be adding in the left hand to add some more richness so you do not have to play along with this but you should be practicing this part either way 1 2 three four I've heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord but you don't really care for music do you three four well it goes like this the fourth the fifth the minor for the major lift the baffled King composing hallelu three 4 okay try that um you could sing along yourself which I actually recommend I'm going to play now with the left hand so it's going to be the same concept as last lesson where you're playing the root note of each chord in the left hand but on the entire octave so for example when we're playing the G we're playing the G in an octave there and for E [Music] minor and so on so I'm going to play that for you and then you can have a go with that and try practicing that it's really the exact same principles as last lesson and this lesson so I'm not going to spend too much time explaining how to do that you're just moving your wrist in the same Direction at the same time so you can play along with this one if you like or listen to it first and then go back and play along 1 2 3 4 I've heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord but you don't really care for music do you 3 4 well it goes like this the fourth the fifth the minor four the major LIF the baffled King composing hallelu three four okay so have a go with that if you haven't already that is pretty much um the entire song actually because the rest of it repeats The Only Exception is the chorus which I'll play for you very very quickly because it's quite simple if you want to have a go practicing this as well then go ahead and do that and you can also do the rest of the song if you like so I'll play um from the end of the last verse the ba King composing hallelu hallelu hallelu hallelu [Music] Hallelujah that's how you do that all right welcome back to this lesson and in this one I'm going to be sharing with you something called inversions and how you can apply them and why they are important so so far we know you know we've done just recently about chords we know how to you know we know what they are we know how to make them and hopefully you should already have some practice practice on actually you know being more comfortable creating these chords and in this lesson I'm going to show you um what inversions are so an inversion is simply put a variation of a chord so for example if I were to play C major this is you know the normal you know natural version that we know and if I were to make a first inversion what I'm going to do is I'm taking the lowest note of this chord right so we have c e and G I'm taking the lowest one which is the C which is also the root note because it's C major so C would be the root you know since that's what the chord is named after I'm taking the C and I'm putting an octave higher right so I'm taking the C putting here so I can play the other other hand for now and then I'm going to let go of that note I just moved so you're not you know adding you're replacing it or you're actually moving it up the next octave right so now you've left with these now if I just rearrange my fingers to make it actually [Music] playable this would still be a C major chord but it's a first inversion now you can actually tell it's got the same kind of tone to it now you can actually do another inversion here so I want to take this E I want to throw it up here and move my fingers around so that I can actually play these so this would be a C major second inversion so we have the root position the first inversion and the second inversion now what if I try to do another one well we're going to take the bottom note throw it up and rearrange and we have the root position again so why is that we can only have a maximum of two in inversions well it's because you only have three notes that you're working with here you can only swap it in that order so many times now this obviously works with any chord let's take E major I'm going to do a first inversion taking that throwing up here definitely a more difficult chord to play than C major so just remember that you're going to be moving your fingers inwards when you're playing chords with black notes now that's the first inversion second inversion taking this throwing up [Music] here that's still an E major second inversion and a third inversion will be back to root while you are learning this and how you can apply this um is what I'm going to explain in a moment but first I want you to just get to grips with actually doing this this process so it's very very simple you make your original chord and you take the lowest note and move it up an octave then rearrange your fingers in ideally 1 three and five so that you can play that chord and then you can do that a total of two times so you know just to alleviate some confusion here this is called root position not first inversion this is very common misunderstanding with beginner people but this is root position now you might hear it be called um natural position or initial position anything like that but anything that kind of gives you the meaning of root position it this is it right you can tell it's root by the chord name and the bottom note so root this is C major and my bottom note is C therefore this is root position if I were to play a different chord like this and I asked you what is the sord I'm playing you might think okay well you're starting an e therefore it's probably an E major or E minor or something but going by just the sound of it you might say major well you'd be wrong and here's how you figure out the answer all root positioned chords follow the technique that I showed you earlier about chord Creation with the semitones so let me resay that again all root position chords major or minor follow that process of 43 or 34 so if you have a chord that is not following that it is not a root position so let me show you this sounds like a major so let's check if it is this is where're starting note then we going to count four 1 2 3 4 we are already on the wrong note so it can't be a major let's check if it's minor 1 2 3 okay 1 2 3 4 again wrong note if we were playing this one instead of that we would be having an E minor but because the note is not the B and it's the C it is not an E minor it's a different chord so that was just to clear up some common misunderstanding so let's get to the actual exercise here I want you to create a first in version of G major okay so you're just going to pause the video right now and have a go with that on your own then unpause when you feel like you're ready whether you think it's right or wrong and I'll show you how we do it okay so we're going to take G major so first we're going to find G Count four then three so 1 2 3 4 One 2 3 right first inversion so we're going to do this process one time we take our bottom note which is the G throw it up here this is the note you're left with and you're going to rearrange your fingers so that you can play it with one hand cuz when you're actually playing something you don't want to play chords like this you want to play it with 1 3 5 so that's what it should sound like um this is not obviously specific to this octave you can do it down here or you can even do it with your left hand down there okay next one I want you to make an F minor second inversion all right so pause the video now and have a go with that all right so I don't expect you to just instantly play F minor just by your memory right now um so I'm assuming that you're going to be counting so let's do this F we're going to go to F we're going to count three then four one 2 3 one 2 3 four F minor all right so second inversion first we do the first inversion bottom F throw it up here play that kind of an awkward chord to play because it's quite stretched out but as long as you're putting your fingers kind of into the black notes it'll be easier to play especially if you have the arc you know nice form in your wrist that's our first inversion now second inversion we're going to take this G sharp and we're going to throw it up there we're going to rearrange so we have 1 3 5 that would be an F minor second inversion so why am I teaching you this well let's say that online you went to go find some music to play like cordal based like we just did with Hallelujah um you're going to find some things called stroke chords which we're not going to cover right now but those do include using inversions now also when you play actual pieces from sheet music you're also going to find inversion chords and it's just good to have an understanding of what you're actually playing rather than robotically kind of going through note by note and playing you instead want to have an actual understanding so that you can grow as a musician not just a player the other use for it is when you are composing or improvising you know any kind of activity where you're just kind of freestyling on the piano not you know reading from something um it's you know use of inversions is very very good and this is actually the reasons why songwriters use inversions because songwriters are you know sometimes they are composers you have some who just write lyrics and you have some who do lyrics and Accords and when they do do that they use these inversions that you are learning right now so their purpose is to give more richness more variety some kind of dynamic that is different to the very basic and you know quote unquote plain chord um harmonies that you find normally so you let me kind of demonstrate this normally uh with songs you might find C major played like this you I'm adding the left hand here because that is what you're going to be aiming for soon then you go to a [Music] minor now you know um most people will play chords like this and don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with it but sometimes people want to add a specific you know um change so they would add inversions in the right hand for example so instead of playing C major as the root position they will do it as a first inversion so we take that up throw it here and now you're left with this but you still keep the left hand on the same you know note because you're playing a C major you know chord you don't want to play you know an F because that's not really considered a C major that would be a completely different chord that is the alternative so just you know to show you instead of playing you might be playing instead head and it instantly sounds you know better so if I demonstrate for you that little you know chord progression there um with you know mostly using inversions compared to the normal way of doing it this is going to be the difference so here is this normal [Music] way and here is the inversion way [Music] now you might have been able to spot that not only does it sound different and it sounds kind of more flavorful but it also is easier to play on the right hand because you're not jumping around so much with your wrist so let's say I play the root position C down to a minor then F then G you can see I'm moving around like this which is again nothing wrong with it um but if I didn't want to do that I could use inversions so now first inversion C is very very close to a second inversion a minor all right so a minor first inversion and then second inversion now if you take that first inversion C again we can see that it's so the a minor all you're changing is one note so that's another use for inversions and does not only apply to right hand but you can also use it in the left hand but we're not going to cover that right now for this lesson I just wanted to introduce you to inversions and give you some practical exercises to kind of develop your understanding and confidence with actually you know playing this because you are going to be finding some instances where you'll be playing them not only in this course but once you are going to go out and learn your own songs so I'm going to give you five different chords that I want you to play both possible inversions and do this for each of those five so for example you know if I said fshp minor okay so you make the F minor and then just by me doing quickly I know it's this then a second inversion would be that so I want to repeat this process for five chords and do right hand and then left hand I know we're not giving the left hand that much attention right now but most people are right hand dominated even left-handed people somehow find their right hand more relaxed might be because their left hand is more used so they kind of stress it up a bit more but either way we are going to get to left hand you know quite soon but remember to practice these things I'm giving you on both hands and it is for your benefit remember because I know you know by strengthening these muscles and the Brain connections and and you just being confident and seeing your progress how much that's going to help you in the future things to come in this course and for what you want to learn so trust me just follow the stuff I give you and um you're going I promise you're going to be very happy with your result so here are the chords C major E minor E flat minor G sharp major and a major so you're going to do those inversions for both you know hands and for each of those chords and remember that in total you're going to have three positions your root first and second inversion so in a total you'll have three positions for each chord that is your task and if you want to do an extension task which is optional you can play the chord on your right hand so root position but your left hand is just going to be playing an octave on the root note of the chord so here's an example of what it's going to look like for the extension task C major root C major first inversion major second inversion you're going to repeat that for each of those chords okay good luck with that and I will see you in the next lesson all right welcome back everybody to this lesson and in this one I'm going to be teaching you about arpeggios and why they are so so important and how to play them them so before I explain what AR pedos are these are AR pedos are like one of the most fundamental concepts in music it's not a difficult concept but it's a very very commonly used um technique that you're going to be finding in a lot of piano music you're going to find it in literally any other instrument that you're going to go and learn if you want when you're listen to music you're going to notice that our pedes are used a lot in the melody you're going to notice that they are used you know in other instruments in a track so they're very commonly used in all sorts of ways and for you to develop as a musici is very important for you to know what they are what they're used for and how to play them so an arpeggio is when you take a chord and you play each note separately so for example if I take C major if I play each of these notes the c e and G separately that would be an arpeggio and this goes with any chord if I were to play you know F major arpedio [Music] and this can go on for major or minor chord does not matter and our pedu is very simply playing each note of a chord one by one there's really not much um construction here you know you don't need to know much to be able to play r Edo cuz when you were learned how to create a chord you had to know the 43 and 34 technique but with here once you know the chord you can instantly play the arpeggio so if I ask you to play a G major arpeggio you would create the G major chord so G Count four and three 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 now we have these notes you're going to play them one by one there are many many ways to play arpeggios um but for now the most basic one is simply one three and five on just one hand so I want to have a go at this I'm going to give you like um I'm going to give you one to play so have a go at it so go to C major and play that c major arpeggio right so go to C and you're taking the c major chord C and G and you play 1 35 and you play them one by one you notice that the you're going to notice that they have similar intervals so the intervals are equal it's not like you're playing one note for a bit longer and then the other note for shorter you're not doing any of that so make sure that your timing is is kind of um Regular [Music] just keep it at that speed for now just practice that for a bit just with your right hand to get comfortable with it you want to make sure that your form is you know allowing you to play this as easily as possible because if your fingers are like really flat and your wrist is down here and you're trying to play this it is uncomfortable like I mean this is very hard to play in so just make it easy for [Music] yourself now we're going to do the same thing in the left hand so go to C major on the left hand and you're going to play 5 3 1 so I'm going to count for you first 1 2 3 and then we both come in on the one I'm going to explain this more in detail you know soon but for now just come in on the one and then we play together so here's an example 1 2 3 1 1 2 3 1 2 3 so let's try that together you're going to go on your left hand on the c major arpedio so I'm going to count three first and then we come in a one 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 for some of you that might seem a bit too slow or like you know is too easy but the purpose of this is just to get you used to playing you know equally in in time because we're going to start to make it harder now do the same thing on your right hand so you're going to go C major again and we're going to play right now so I'm going to count three first and then we plan one 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 okay so that I would call that level one now please go through that again if you're not comfortable doing that yet with each hand separately because it's best that you are comfortable doing that before we move on to the next level so have a go with that again if you're not already comfortable and if you are then we'll just move right on so here's level two we're going to play both hands at the same time might be a bit intimidating but I promise you it's very very easy so you're just going to put both your hands on C on the correct places so your left hand will be one octave below middle C you're going to put your pinky there 5 3 1 on the C and G and the same on right hand from middle C 1 3 and five and here's what you're going to be playing so here's you know the example one 2 3 1 2 3 one 2 3 that's it so have a go of practicing that just now um before we play it together you can pause the video right now if you want and all you're doing is playing the arpeggio left to right going upwards you want to try and keep the intervals the same and very common beginner um tendency is to play you know very Softly on some notes and then suddenly play you know very loudly or come into you know too suddenly um these are very normal things if you're doing these it's completely okay like really um because you're going to definitely improve that over time so just try your best to keep everything in a medium level not too soft and not too hard or fast so just pause now and just practice that for a second and then we're going to do that together and just try and keep in time okay so I'm going to count three and then we're going to play together on one all right so get ready one two 3 1 2 3 1 2 three good we'll do that one more time and we're going to do that twice so that time we did it you know once through and then now we're going to play it twice so that's the fast version obviously we're going to take it much slower so 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 okay no matter how you did there I can guarantee it was better than you did at the very beginning so either way now you know kind of what to expect and this is the level that I'd like you to be you know playing at comfortably so if you're not comfortable with that yet then you know take some time just now to practice that and then we're going to move on to a level three so in level three we're going to do the exact same thing as level two but we're going to up the speed a bit and we're going to go up and down rather than just up so here's an example I'm also going to be counting it slightly differently so see if you can Spot the Difference one 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 and then you go again so there once you go up you know you're counting 1 2 3 1 2 3 then when you get to the last note you hold it for two beats rather than one so 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 and then again 1 2 so on the last not you're playing it twice if you're going to go back up so take a second just to practice going up and down and Counting you know in the right time so it'll be one two three just as you were practice that and then we're going to have it go together okay so we're going to go together remember to keep the right form you know you don't want to have flat fingers or a low wrist you're want to be comfortable and just relax your elbows and shoulder so we're going to go one two 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 so you might be uncomfortable doing that yet because you've yet to you know build the strength in your fingers but arpegios is one of the best things you could possibly do to increase your finger strength because [Music] here you're individually playing one note after the other and you have to actually think about your time you have to think that and you you have to strengthen your individual fingers so that you're not playing anything way too softly or way too loudly you know you have some control you're actually hitting the right note and you're not you know playing two notes at one for example and you're absolutely going to find it in pieces that you're going to learn I can guarantee you that in some form or another you will see arpeggios in a song that you're going to want to go and learn that you know has Melody now speaking of Melody I did briefly touch on this um a few lessons ago when I was explaining what Melody was compared to Harmony and I'm going to quickly recap and the reason I'm teaching you this is because you're going to be playing them quite differently from each other you're going to play them at different times in different ways they're kind of in separate categories but they're both incredibly incredibly important and it's also quite good to know how they relate to each other so to recap Melodies are when notes are played one after another and harmonies are when notes are played at the same time so an example of Melody would actually be an arpeggio because you're playing one note after the other now with harmonies if you were to play a chord you know one hand two hand doesn't matter chords are also harmonies but again it's not just chords that are harmonies anytime you have two or more notes playing at the same time that's a Harmony so again they could be completely unrelated or they could be related and I'll explain you know this relation thing also later so now that hopefully you're more comfortable with arpeggios we're going to play an exercise that I will create for you like I you know I'll compose it for you and then we will do that together now this is going to be a very common thing that you're going to see throughout this course where I will compose something specific to the exercise and you know Concepts that I want to be teaching you um because frankly a lot of materials out there um that teach you know Concepts like Melodies and harmonies and you know arpeggios versus chords the sound of them is quite you know like cheesy almost you know like it's it's way too simple um there's no like middle ground it sounds you know too childish even so what I like to do is compose something that will sound really nice that you can actually enjoy playing um but you'll also benefit hugely from the actual exercise itself that's based on where you are if you're following this course chronologically so here's what we're going to be playing together we're going to do a C minor arpeggio instead of a C major arpeggio so C major would be this and a C minor right cuz that's C minor chord and and then we're going to raise this pinky up to this a flat and then back down to C minor now I'm going to explain this so that you can actually understand and not just you know robotically follow everything without having any idea why that works so when you playing this C minor AR pidio this is you know very naturally the C minor arpedio there's nothing different about it but when we raise this pinky here the sound quality kind of changes it's moving in a different direction but the reason that sounds that way is because it's actually an inversion this is an arpeggio inversion now let me show that to you if we go to C minor that we're in our natural position then I'm going to go to a flat major which is [Music] here why I picked this one is another concept of Music Theory which I'm not going to explain now but we're going to go to the A flat major here then I'm going to do a first inversion so I'm taking this a flat and I'm throwing it up here now that with the notes I'm left with and there you go that is a first inversion a flat major which is very close to the C minor so for that reason that's how that works so here's where we're going to be doing together and this is the right hand I'm going still be counting in three so one two 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 back down 1 2 3 1 2 3 back up 1 2 3 1 2 three so very simply for each arpeggio so for the C minor and the a flat major you're playing the arpeggio twice and then shifting so if I were to do it very very quickly now that's not what you're aim to do right now but that's just to you know prove my point so practice doing that on your own for a second and then when you're ready unpause the video and we'll have a go together okay let's have a good this together 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 move up 1 2 3 1 2 3 back down 1 2 3 1 2 3 back up 1 2 3 1 2 three okay so hopefully that should be fine so your left hand is going to be playing the root note at an octave for each chord so let me explain because the arpegios are based on the chords it's very easy to know what the left hand is going to be doing because it's going to be the ACT ual root note for the chord so in c minor the root not is obviously going to be C so your left hand is going to be playing [Music] C then because we're in the a flat major arpeggio it you know a flat the root note would be a flat so we go to a flat over there even though the lowest note in that inversion is still C if we were if we were in the root position we'd be playing this as a lowest note but no matter the inversion whatever the chord is called that is the root note and there's there's really no time where that's going to be not applicable so here's what you're going to be doing your left hand 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 two three and then you repeat that in proportion to your right hand so if you are not yet comfortable using a full octave on your left hand or you have a smaller keyboard then here's what you can do you have two options if you have a smaller keyboard then you can move everything and octave up if you know the left hand doesn't if you don't have the space on the left hand so you can do up here but if you're simply just not comfortable doing the octave yet so you can just use one hand you can play the C on one and the a flat on [Music] three and you're going to switch like that okay here's what it's going to sound like together one 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 and then you go again okay so pause the video and practice that on your own for a while and when you're ready come back but I would suggest that when you're practicing you try and keep a time right so you can either use your foot like one two three I don't even know if you can see or you can say out loud or even both okay so come back when you're ready all right so we'll have a go of this together one 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 and move 1 2 3 1 2 three and move 1 2 3 1 2 3 and move one 2 3 one 2 3 okay so good job and you might have noticed that I was you telling you to and move you know significantly earlier before the actual one beat so this is because you want to anticipate the movement you're going to make to make it much much easier on your brain because you don't want to have like too much things that you're thinking about at once and you know there's like this pressure of the time always moving forwards you want to kind of prepare yourself so that it's a very very smooth TR position if you wait too late to decide when to move and actually have a plan on what you're going to do then that's where a lot of mistakes come from and this is actually a problem that a lot of musicians face so anticipation is very very important and it's a skill that we're going to definitely be building on so just before you next have your big move decide like look exactly what you're going to do and decide so when you're playing the C minor arpeggio you you know now you can decide okay I'm going to just move my pinky up or on your left hand you know you know you're going to go that to the a flat and it makes it much much easier if you plan ahead so if you had trouble staying in time do that again but with the anticipation you will see an improvement now arpeggios combined with in left hand can go many many different ways in many different complexities now you know obviously what you just played is you know quite a basic um version it can go much more in depth uh for [Music] example so you can see I'm using a lot of different things I'm using the pedal which you'll learn about different Vari of that arpeggio but we're definitely going to work you up to that higher level but we got to take it step by step first now I'm saying this because it's very common for you know people at the start especially to to make things much more rushed than they have to be because it sounds cooler like of course it sounds cooler when you do of course it sounds cooler but if your you know mind to muscle connection isn't there yet you're asking your brain and body to do too much before you can actually do it comfortably and for that reason when you go really fast you might not have control so you might be doing and getting the wrong notes and you're off time different strengths which also we're going to get to but you know for now take it slow and you know do the tasks that I say do them because everything is planned in a specific way to get you there efficiently now for your actual task there are two things I would like you to practice your first thing is to do the both hand arpeggio up and down for C major so this is what it looks like 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 I want you to practice until you can do it at that level comfortably and in a controlled way now the second thing is just basically to practice that exercise that we did together of 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 two 3 1 two 3 1 two 3 1 two 3 1 two 3 now ideally it would be great if you can get it up to that level it might take you you know a little bit longer than your previous exercises have been but if you can get up to that speed and control then that would be going above and beyond what you know people at your level will be doing right now so um take your time with both of those and your extension task is to do the arpeggio run but on a different key that you know is more difficult so I'm going to pick for you D major so instead of the c major you're going to do on D major and it's the exact same concept of you take the chord you know the 135 and you just play that one by one CU that's the chord you do it on left hand and back down and that would be your extension task so that's all for this lesson and please watch the next lesson once you're comfortable with those initial two tasks and obviously your extension task is optional all right I'll see you soon all right welcome everybody to this lesson and I'm going to be talking with you about rhythm time signatures and chord variations so this is going to allow you to play chords in a more interesting way in a more enjoyable way you know actually playing it but also for the listener give you an all round confidence boost when you play anything not just chords but this will also translate into your other upcoming skills especially when you go and try and learn cordal based songs online and you just see chords but you don't have a sense of you know how quickly you're playing it in what way this is going to help you massively with that so to start off with let me explain what Rhythm Is it is a very important component that you find in all music so a rhythm is describing how fast you're playing um certain sounds and the gaps or silences that are in between those notes you might have a bunch of notes that have short gaps of Silence in between and you might have other groups of notes with long gaps of Silence in between and this collection of playing and not playing notes and how fast is what makes up Rhythm so to give you um a demonstration I'm going to play something that has a very very simple Rhythm now I'm going to play something which has a more complex [Music] rhythm so you can see there the second one I had more variation in how close those gaps are in between the notes and then I elongated those gaps afterwards so it's really Rhythm can be very very simple or it can be very very complex one other thing to note about rhythm is that it has a sense of beat like it follows a steady beat there's usually this consistent movement about it you can you know like snap your fingers to it you can clap your hand hands to it you can move your body to it you know that Rhythm that you feel when you're at the dance floor for example or you're just listening to music and it makes you want to move your body or you know you're moving your head to it that's what I mean by the steady beat to the Rhythm so this beat I'm describing can be counted and this is essentially what time signatures are now time signatures I'm not going to go into huge depth into right now because that's going to be coming later I'm just going to give you enough for you to understand the concept in a way that will be very useful that's also not going to confuse you because if I give you too much information now it might be a little bit too much for this stage so to keep things simple there are two types of Beats that I want you to be aware of you have four and you have three so you can clap like one two three four or snpp your fingers whatever you want like one 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 that's a very very very common beat that you find now you have the other type of beat which is in three so it would be 1 2 3 one two 3 or maybe a faster version 1 two 3 1 two 3 1 two 3 1 two 3 you find three times mostly in Walt songs like in classical pieces but you also do find them in a bunch of modern music as well so when I'm describing this beat with either four or three these are called time signatures I'm just going to refer to them as times just to avoid you know any confusion of you know signature whatever because again I will explain that later so I might say okay I'm going to count in four time or I'd say okay I'm going to count in three time and the only difference there would be if I'm count in up till four and repeating or if I'm counting up till three and repeating that's the only difference so to explain this I'm just going to create something in four time and then I'll make you something for in Three Time 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 and here's an example of Three Time 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 now that we have the foundations down we can start to explore more interesting rhythms for chords now so far you may have been playing chords in one of these ways so either like this or like this or this full version now ideally you're at this full version like you can come Poss L play this but if you're not yet and you still need to practice that obviously that's fine and you could just follow in whatever form you're comfortable with right now so I'm going to play this one four time in a very very simple Rhythm Every Beat is going to be a note okay so one 2 3 four every time I snap that finger the beat will be when I play that chord so here's what that would sound like one 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 and you would just repeat like that now if I want to make it slightly more complex I could play twice every time I do the beat so for example 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 now I could also simplify it so for every two beats I will play once so to demonstrate 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 and I just want you to pay attention that I'm holding the notes down for you know the full length of that I'm not cutting it too short so instead of playing 1 2 3 4 I'm extending it to that full length of the beat so 1 2 3 4 so let's actually start to look at your options for when you're going to go and look at chords for you know online songs so let's say that the sequence of chords you saw online for a song that you like had C major a minor F major and G major this is a very very common sequence or progression and this is what they sound like C major a minor F major and G major now when you're online you know kind of like how we did for Hallelujah and you're just seeing chords um it does not tell you how to play Rhythm it does not tell you how fast you're going to be doing it it does not tell you when to have more complex rhythms when to have simpler rhythms when to hold back doesn't give you any information like that so in those situations it's really up to you and just the general pace of the song because you might know the song itself so if you know Hallelujah and you know how it's supposed to sound then that will be your kind of guideline for what verm to play here's how you may have been playing chords online up until now 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 so we're going to slightly increase the complexity there where we're going to leave the left hand exactly as it was but we're going to double the time we're playing on the right so this is now what we're going to sound like one 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 that's that's also an option another option is to make the right hand very simple but make the left hand a bit more complicated so here's what that sounds like 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 four now if you wanted to make it a lot more complicated and take a huge jump this is also an option 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 so now you have a sense of what your options are how you can make more interesting rhythms when you're playing chords you could try making your own was kind of comfortable so here's what I would suggest you start from where you are which is playing 1 2 3 4 You know as you were very simply uh and upping it so that it's the next small step that is not too big of a jump so here is the order of rhythms that I want you to practice separately so here's the first level 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 what you can do is take it right hand first and then left hand and this is always a good process to have to separate your hands so first you can go 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 and Just practice moving from chord to chord maintaining the beat this is the most important thing that that you must always be aware of and that's being on time not being too early and not being too late now I don't mean being so robotically precise that you are exactly on the millisecond but it means that you're not lagging far behind enough that it's disrupting the rest of the piece and you're not early enough that it's also not disrupting the piece obviously you're going to make these mistakes so you know don't hold it against yourself I'm just saying be aware of keeping in the time now a great tool to help you stay in time is called a metronome now metronomes are they come in various shapes and sizes some of them are built into a digital keyboard so like this one I've got a button that allows me to start a metronome and then I've got buttons that decreases the tempo which is basically speed other buttons that change the time from four time to three time so those are you know things that you can have on actual keyboards built in um but more commonly is that you would go on to Amazon or something and you can buy an an electronic metronome if you don't want to you know go on BI metronome or if you're on an acoustic piano that does not have built-in metronome obviously that's completely fine um a great way is to just go online onto Google and just type in online free metronome and you set your settings and then you can use it that way and this is something I highly highly recommend you get comfortable using because being able to stay in time is without a doubt in the top three most important skills a musician must be able to do because if you're playing along to a singer if you're playing along to a song If you you know end up you know learning a different instrument and you go and play in an orchestra if you play in a band staying in time is very important important and if you're really adamant on not using metronom at the start at the very least I would you know count out loud I would you know use your foot I'll do something to keep you in time so once you're done with level one this is going to be level two you don't have to go through all of these right now but this is going to be your task for the end of the lesson so you can either do it now or after the lesson is done 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 Once you're comfortable with that here is level three 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 and you can go as long as you want one thing I'd like to add is you might find yourself with a very very firm wrist this is something common I see where they just play with their fingers alone rather than moving with their wrist so you can see how my wrist is kind of dropping I'm not like throwing it up and down but I'm letting it play in a relaxed and natural way maintaining the The Arc and good form is also important now level four is going to instead of using four time we're going to be using three time now this is going to be a little bit bigger of a jump than the previous levels so be patient with yourself when you're practicing this 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 you can call out what number you're going to be playing on so it's actually 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 so you're only playing on a three and one okay so now that that is you know more solid in your head it's just a matter of doing it I would practice the left hand first and then just add in the right hand slowly so 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 now you can go as slow as you want as long as you know you have the steady beat you can make that beat ve you know really really slow if you want it to one 2 3 1 2 3 1 doesn't matter how slow you go as long as that beat is moving you know equally and forwards then that is completely fine go as slow as you need to and then you can gradually move the speed up until you can be able to play something like 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 remember that for each of these levels you're playing the entire sequence not just on the C so doing levels one to four is going to be your task for this session try not to rush through take it one hand at a time and go slowly at the start until you can go comfortably and only move on to the next level once you've done it five times through comfortably now level five is completely optional that is if you're very confident in levels one through four and you want an extra challenge this is going to be it one 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 one two 3 1 two 3 one two 3 and there you go so if you want to just practice that and figure out that yourself by chance you can obviously do that but if you want me to explain an easier way to to get this done then here it is you can subdivide the counting into saying one two and three one two and three because the end is that extra beat that we're adding so it would be one two and three one 2 and three 1 2 and 3 1 2 and 3 1 2 and 3 1 2 and three and so on so that's how you would count it um it's much easier that way take it slow and if you're really confident then you can go faster but maintaining the same beat that is going to be the hard thing to do 1 2 3 1 2 and 3 1 2 and 3 1 2 and 3 1 2 and 3 1 2 and three that's what's going to be challenging if you do want to take this challenge but either way if you're doing one till four and you're fine with that you're more than prepared to move on so good luck and I will see you in the next lesson okay welcome back everybody to this lesson and I'm going to be explaining to you scales now scales for those of you who had previous lessons or you know somebody who's taken piano traditional piano lessons scales might be quite a trigger point for you and it is rightfully so for a lot of people and the reason is that most piano players started you know when they were younger and they were aiming to take an exam held by you know absm Trinity these different examination boards but all in all they have to practice certain things assigned by them from the syllabus amongst those things are scales now the way that those exams work is that you have grades grades that increase in difficulty that you take you know most commonly every year now whether you're at grade one grade five grade eight you'll always be practicing scales and it's a requirement that you have memorized a certain amount this is where the dread comes from the those exams because especially when you start to go higher higher up in those grades you take lessons for a few years you're going to realize that you have to memorize perfectly you know tens and 10 you know like 50 60 different scales and you have to memorize them perfectly and in these different variations these different forms of playing them now I'm not just sitting here bashing on those exams it's not I don't actually have anything against those exams because I did them myself and I learned a lot the only concern I have is when people realize that the traditional route is not what they want they feel like they have no other option but to just you know YouTube some tutorials um and just kind of recite but you're not actually learning one thing I wish they did in those exams is teach Theory but because I have studied Theory I can show you this technique which you have like no idea how much time this is going to save you have no idea before I just explain what even scales are or why you should learn them let me just quickly preface that there are obviously benefits to memorizing perfectly every single scale I'm not saying that's something that you should not do because of course if you are able to do that you're doing amazing I'm saying that for you to be able to understand music better and to gain the benefits of scales your only option is not to practice 50 60 scales perfectly so now that we have that out the way let me explain what scales even are it is simply a rule set that tells you what notes you can play and what notes you cannot play so for example a C major scale is comprised of these notes we have eight notes right so all scales are made up of eight notes and we cannot play any black notes we can play any of these white notes now you might have guessed already but you you can have a C minor scale so this is what that would sound like now don't worry about you know wondering why is it specifically these black notes um because they're is Theory to that which I will teach you soon but for now you just need to know that in this specific minor chord that is simply the order of notes you play like there's there's no other way of going about it that is simply C minor scale if we take another look at this Zone we have here of these 12 different notes that you have okay one 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 this is C again it's not different so these 12 different notes we know that each of them repeats but now you have to know that each of these notes have their own scale and each of those scales could either be a major scale or a minor scale I will say that you can have variations like there are actually three different types of minor scales that you could play but we're not going to focus on any of that right now but I just thought I'd mention that just so that you're aware so let's take a look at the actual scale we know that for C major we're playing these notes but one of the mechanics of the scale are called degrees of the scale so you're simply taking those eight notes that order of the scale and you're counting it from the distance of the root so if I take C which is the root of C major obviously that would be a second a third a fourth fifth sixth seventh eighth the eighth is obviously also an octave and the root chords come from the scale okay it's not that scales are simply just related to the chord or that scales come from the chord chords originate from the scale because the scale is a rule set chords are constructed from that rule set which is why they have this sense of order about them like when you're counting four semitones and three semitones it's consistent well here is another way you could create those chords you can count 1 35 of the degrees of the scale put them together and you have the [Music] chord now you might be thinking well what if I wanted to make a minor scale well here's where that differs from the 43 method with this method you are taking the scale itself now if it's major if it's minor it does not matter no matter the scale you take one three and five and you have the chord but the chord cord tonality whether it's major or minor is specific to the tonality of the scale you cannot play a C minor chord from a C major scale because a C minor chord is outside of the rule set of C major C major that's the rule set if you play anything outside of these notes it is not in C major because a C minor chord has an E flat it's outside of it so you can't play that from within a C major scale now let's take a C minor scale I take the 1 three and [Music] five that's a C minor chord the actual principle is the same it's still 135 but because I did it in a minor scale I got the minor chord if I do 13 5 in a major scale I get the major chord it's that simple so that is an alternative way of creating chords I would primarily use the 43 method because in most cases that's just more convenient but in a lot of situations you also do find yourself um it's just more convenient to play it from the scale now the very important question why do I need to learn this why do I need to understand this these are questions that are asked by people who are practicing scales so in my personal experience and the experience of some people I know who took the same exams as me we didn't really think about why we just thought about doing it properly because we want to get good grades from the exam the exams and lessons are not typically structured in a way that teaches you why but if you have a great teacher then I'm you know obviously they just explain it but when you understand scales you are understanding the core Foundation of 99% of music when you understand the scale What notes you should be playing and what notes you should not be playing you instantly have more confidence you instantly know this piece I'm playing is in C major scale therefore I automatically know I'm avoiding black notes you see what I mean now if you're in a different scale which has black notes by you understanding which notes are played and which notes are not played within that scale your fingers are magn ized towards the correct notes not only is there the physical benefit of that you just have more consistent playing more enjoyable playing because it's easier you're focusing on less things but your general understanding as a musician has gone up so much music that you're going to want to learn have scalelike Melodies in the right hand or leftand and by you practicing these skills you are not only more prepared to play them with more understanding but you already have the muscle memory to play that more confidently you can also simply not improvise without having knowledge of scales you need to know how these rules interact with each other for you to improvise well because if you don't know this of course you're going to hit all the wrong notes and not only that but your Melodies will not be nice to listen to even chords like I just mentioned you can create much more complex chords from these scales like you know a C major 7 chord okay so let's get to some actual playing I'm going to teach you how to play C major scale in your right hand and in your left hand I'm going to be counting in finger numbers all right so you go to C which is the root and you play one 2 three then you move your thumb underneath two 3 4 5 so again you're playing 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 now you can go back down 5 4 3 2 1 3 2 1 now if you're a more uh visual learner you might want to look at it in terms of blocks so these three notes will only ever be played in your right hand by the one two three you will never find yourself playing this F with your fourth finger right you're never doing this it is 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 five you're playing this with 1 two 3 and then 1 2 3 4 5 when you come back down it's the exact same thing you're playing 54 3 2 1 3 2 1 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 you need to make sure that you're bonding your fingers to certain notes and that does come with some practice but as an absolute Baseline three notes you have to be careful of the root you always start and end with one you always play e with three and then you make your transition and you always end on the C with number five so I'm going to play through the scale again and watch for those checkpoints of c e and C you may find yourself mixing up the finger numbers which is very normal it is a very natural thing to do almost every single student I have ever taught has done this mistake the key here is to help yourself by preventing these mistakes from even emerging and if they do emerge you make sure you correct it you must correct it because if you don't you're allowing your brain to accept that as an option one quick tip that's definitely going to help you is to tuck your thumb underneath in advance right this concept of anticipation is going to come up time and time again but you have to be prepared you don't want to find yourself in a position of one 2 3 oh I forgot to move it and then you do it again because that takes away from the smoothness of it the grace so it's one two as soon as you're done with that as soon as that lifts off you start moving it to the F okay so pay [Music] attention you can see this wrist movement as well moving in this Direction all right so pause the video now and have a go with that a couple times until you can run through it up and down at an even pace and then when you come back we'll have a go doing that together so here's what I'm going to do I'm going to say and one and we're going to come in on one right so normally I would say one two three 4 one two but I'm not going to do that this time because I don't want to confuse you with me counting one two three four as in the same as one two three four on your fingers because that tends to influence them to play that with four and that you definitely don't want to do that so I'm going to say and one and I'm going to count the fingers so and 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 1 3 2 1 okay so let's try this together so get ready relaxing your wrist and your shoulder and 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 1 3 2 1 okay so no matter how you did there good job for trying to keep in Pace this is obviously something that you're not going to get perfectly in the first time so be a bit patient with yourself make sure you're going steady slowly in an even Pace right the worst thing you could do here is just try and do it really fast like and you get the wrong notes and you're forgetting which fingerings you're using and you're developing those bad habits and as I mentioned a lot we're definitely trying to avoid those something that commonly happens when I I'm teaching people one to one because they don't have this finger independency control this finger strength they tend to play their scales [Music] like like that and that's completely normal don't you know hold it against yourself if you're playing like that because this is normal it's not because you're doing you know worse than average or anything like that it is simply the actual mind muscle connection that you have in our daily lives we mainly use our fingers in this motion right you're opening a door you shaking someone's hand this is the motion we usually use but now that you're learning the piano you're learning to control your fingers one by one and you're not used to doing that yet so creating this fingered control takes some time to develop so if you're seeing these kind of Tremors or that you suddenly play a note much louder than the rest these are are normal things I'm not saying ignore them I'm saying be aware of them and correct them when you can to try to keep even pressure not playing anything too loud or softly out of nowhere like that and that will help you greatly so now we know the basics of how to actually play a scale we're going to do the same on the left hand but it follows a slightly different pattern instead of playing the first three notes and then switching you play the first five notes and then swap so it's 5 4 3 2 1 1 3 2 1 and you go back down 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 try and keep your wrists relaxed try and keep that good form this Arc shape and relax your shoulder as piano players it's very common for our shoulders to to tighten up for now at least be aware and relax it when you can similarly to the right hand you're having bench marks on when you're transitioning What notes you must play with what fingers so the root so the root C is with [Music] five you get to the G you're always playing that with one so every time you see a g you're playing that with one then then the top C is with number one so your check points per hand left hand is C with finger five G with finger one and C with finger one then for the right hand scale you're playing one on you're playing root C with finger one e with finger three and top C with finger five this process that you've just learned on how to play a scale with your right hand and how you to play a scale with your left hand applies to 98% of all scales that you learn no matter major minor B flat minor F major no matter what it is it still follows the 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 for right and 54 3 to 1 3 2 1 for left take this slowly be patient once you are able to go up and down five times in a row at a steady Pace right hand and left hand separately then you're ready to move on to the next lesson your extension task for this it is completely optional for now but that would be to try and play both hands at the same time which is going to feel a a bit strange because different fingers are doing different things at different times this is what it sounds [Music] like that's your extension task again completely optional and if you want to take that challenge I would advise you to become very fluent with one hand separately very fluent with the other and then put them together note by note incredibly slowly so slow that you cannot make a mistake like this slow literally that slowly and then very incrementally get faster until you can do besides that great job with this lesson and I'll see you in the next one all right welcome back everybody to this lesson and here I'm going to be teaching you a couple more scales and introducing you to key signatures now key signatures is very very important because this is going to come up time and time again when you're learning new songs when you're improvising when you're reading music when you're playing with other people with scales with just being confident and relaxing on the piano key signatur is a huge part of that because it's one of these foundational Concepts that when you get good at it I promise you like there's a 50% jump in how easy it is to understand the piano and then the second half of that comes from the actual technique that you're using so when you employ the theory and the technique together you get to where you want to go now before I start explaining what key signatures are I want to say and acknowledge that yes you know scales and these basic um foundational exercises and Concepts may seem tedious to some people and you can trust the process I'm using because everything is designed with your progress in mind especially with the enjoyment of the of the journey and this is coming from somebody who had a 10 plus year journey and is still on that Journey so I know what the annoying parts are I know what the amazing parts are I know what's exciting I know what's tedious I can understand where you're coming from if you do feel like these things are a bit of a pain to practice you really do just have to think about this as sharpening the axe so a key signal signature is referring to the sharps or flats that you're playing in a certain scale remember that it's not just black notes that can be sharps or flats white notes occasionally can also be sharps or flats an F could be an e a b could be a C flat it is it is very rare that you find this but it just it is something that you should be aware of so let's take C major you can see that we do not have a key signature we're not playing any Sharps we're not playing any flats and in fact C major and one other scale are the only scales in music that don't have any sharps or flats that one other scale is a minor which is played like [Music] this so really if you can play C major comfortably you're in a very good position to play A Minor because it's literally the exact same scale but you're starting and ending on a different place no black [Music] notes every other scale however follows a particular rule which I'm definitely not going to go into much detail in this lesson but I'm just going to introduce you to this all scales are either sharp scales or flat scales what I mean by that is that when you look at the key signature of these scales they won't be some Sharps and some Flats they're either all sharps or all Flats so with C major and a minor there is no key signature but let's say with C minor which I did briefly show you but I don't expect you to be able to play instantly I've got this one this one and that one now for C minor we call this an E flat this will be an A flat and this will be a B flat the key part here is that you're not calling it a dsharp you're not calling this a gshp and you're not calling this an AAR because C minor falls into the flats category and anytime you have a scale in the flat category you never call the key signature by its opposite name let's say D major the key signature for D major is f and csharp meaning anytime you would normally play an F or C we're making those Sharps you replacing them you're not adding them to the scale because remember a scale can only be eight notes so this is what it's going to sound like I go from [Music] d and you can see how I'm playing these two sharps now again I am not calling this g flat or d flat this is FP and CP because D major falls into the category of sharp scales the reason it's so important for you to understand this is because there are scales which have very similar black notes and if you call them by the opposite name you could be confusing it for a different scale or the scale that you're playing is just straight up wrong when you're talking to other musicians who are familiar with scales you might not understand what they mean or they don't understand what you mean so you can see it can cause a lot of confusion so just so just be aware that you're calling the sharps or flats by the correct name not the opposite one this is much easier to follow when we start reading music soon but just for now it's important that that's clear okay so let's say that you are learning a new scale let's say that we did G major so G major obviously we're going to start on G and end on G but you need to know two things the key signature and the pattern you're using the pattern you use which is what fingerings you're using so right hand as we saw last lesson is always going to be 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 right like 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 no matter the scale it's always 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 but there are one or two exceptions but just for the most part think about it like that and the left hand is 54 321 321 so like I said the pattern does not really change but the key signature does change from scale to scale and it can change quite vastly at the stage that you're at right now you're not going to be able to just calculate or figure out the key signature of any scale until I teach that to you in a circle of fifths so for now I'm just going to tell you the key signature and you're just going to practice the scale with the right notes so let's move right into it we're going to fly through a couple scales I'm going to introduce them to you I'm going to give you a bit of time to practice that and then at the end I'll show you everything we did and how to do it and that will be your task so the first thing we're going to do is G major and the key signature for G IS F sharp so we're going to play 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 notice that I'm not adding the sharp to the scale I'm replacing it from the natural version so this is what some people [Music] do like obviously that sounds wrong and it is wrong a because you're adding the sharp instead of replacing it and B because now you're transgressing the8 note scale remember that one of the rules of scales is that they always have eight notes so by adding that extra note you now have nine and you shouldn't have that in a scale so just remember that key signatures replace the natural versions of their notes one quick tip that will make it easy for you to practice is to say aloud the letter that you're playing and just pay attention that you're not playing F it's F sharp so example G A B C D E I know what's coming next is f in the alphabet but because this is G major and the key signature is FP I'm not playing F I'm playing FP and then I can come back down not this the 5 4 3 2 1 and then 3 2 1 so pause the video now and just have a go at that a couple times on your own until you can just get the gist of what notes you're playing and how you're doing it remember just to relax your shoulder elbow and wrist and to go slowly okay you do not have to go that fast in fact you don't have to go at any particular speed the only thing that matters is that you are at the steady pace and that you're hitting the right notes so go so slowly that it is impossible for you to get a note wrong even this slowly [Music] it really does not matter because you're going to be making it gradually faster over time anyway so really just start slow and go at a steady Pace pause video now and have a go okay so we're going to play this together so that you can get used to this process I'm going to be counting the finger numbers not the beat right so I'm not counting 1 2 3 4 1 2 I'm not counting the beat I'm counting the finger number okay so get ready get into position I'm going to say and and then we come in and one 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 1 3 2 one now once your right hand is comfortable and by no means does it has to be perfect at the stage I'm just introducing you to the scale you can get a gist of how to play it once you've done that you're going to do the exact same thing on your left hand okay so you're going to go five 4 3 2 1 3 2 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 now when you're playing right hand or left hand just make a mental note of what finger is playing the sharper flat so with G major on the right hand it's going to be four on the right hand and that will be one of your checkpoints for the left hand it's going to be your number two so right there so to recap your process as we move through each scale you're going to identify the key signature make sure you're replacing the natural versions not adding to them okay so you only have eight notes total you play the right fingerings slowly until you can comfortably play the scale at a steady Pace okay go as slow as you need to and then step three is to play the left hand once you're done with the right hand so we're doing that process for each scale okay that's G major now the next one we're doing D major the key signature for D major is f and CP again you don't have to Commit This to Memory right now but it is obviously very helpful if you do I know that anytime I would normally play F or C I'm making those Sharps so I'm playing the right pattern because I'm on the right hand so 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 1 3 2 1 I'm making that mental note okay what finger am I playing these Sharps on on the three okay on the four same okay your your ascending scale and your descending scale should look exactly the same in terms of fingering your left hand [Music] that's what that looks like now it's very natural for your left hand to be weaker than your right that's because most of us are right-handed so your left hand might take a bit more time than your right hand but just give them both equal patience and try not to rush through things because a great quote by an incredible pist goes by so somebody asked him how do you play every single will note correctly and he answered with because I only practiced the right notes now it sounds obviously like okay yeah sure it's obvious that just don't mess up as I'm telling you go so slowly that you can't make a mistake and if you do make a mistake of course that's fine don't you know hold it against yourself set yourself up for Success that you can play it easier don't just try and go on the first try on the right hand or left hand okay so pause the video now and have a go at playing D major until you can do it with some comfort does not have to be perfect right now just so you can get the gist of it now the last scale we're doing together is a major notice that these are all major scales so far and the key signature to a major IS F sharp csharp and G sharp so these are the sharps we're playing again don't call them Flats if I play a to a replacing the natural versions of those keys with the sharps this is what I [Music] get I'm using the same pattern of 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 and I'm making that mental note of what finger I'm playing these Sharps with 3 3 4 4 3 three so again you're not changing any of the fingering when you're going up versus down the exact same thing just the other way left hand [Music] now I do not by any means expect you to be able to play a major at that SC at that standard right away in fact that's the level which I would ask you to aim for but take it slow so you can [Music] go and then back down now see there I'm keeping that steady Pace it's very very important Pace this pulse this beat that you're playing to it's so important that you are able to stick to it as a musician so if you can play all the notes correctly at a good Pace while still you know relaxing your shoulder relaxing your elbow and your wrist with good form that is more than a past and you're doing great because naturally even if even unconsciously you're going to be playing these things faster now that you have the the Mind muscle connection your fingers are improving I want to give you a couple tips that's going to help because now now that I'm giving you a couple more things to practice it is easier to feel frustrated when you're making mistakes it's easier to just say no I can't do this I quit that's it it is easy to say those things and everybody is going to have these thoughts at some point no matter what you're doing scales pieces anything like not even just music any other thing you're going you're going to sometimes experience that thought from time to time the thing is that you want to set yourself up in a way that you're not experiencing that all the time because if you just off the bat just start playing with two hands really fast like and you expect yourself to actually play it properly of course it's not going to work so take it step by step go right hand first go very slowly even at the beginning you don't have to go to any beat at the beginning just focus on getting the right notes focus on playing it with the right finger go so slowly truly like take your time with this and before you know it you're playing something like you know two-handed a major scale one octave up and down you know really smoothly to a pace it's all great you have no idea how much that's going to help you in literally everything that's coming down the line for me who knows everything that you're going to be learning everything that you're going to even want to learn the things that you don't even know are options trust me when I say that if you just spend a little time getting good at these things I'm giving you it's going to help you out so much in in the long run so that's your task to play all of these new scales along with your C major for both hands separately so to quickly run through them all with you this is what they all sound like with their key signature so C major no key signature [Music] go as slow as you want as long as you're consistent with a good Pace G major key signature of [Music] FP remember when you're playing try not to lift your fingers up in the air too much like that keep it relaxed so G major has one sharp D major has F sharp and C sharp so two [Music] sharps now three Sharps a major FP csharp and G [Music] sharp you don't have to play at this octave you can go up here doesn't matter give your left hand equal amount of time as well because you want your left hand to be developing with your right hand just like if you go to a gym and say you want to work on your arms but if you don't work on your legs it's going to be disproportionate so that's your task and only move on to the next lesson once you are comfortable doing those you're extension task um if you really want to challenge is to just to do one of these scales two hands at a Time start with the easier one of G major and go very very [Music] slowly because you have to get used to the different patterns that you're using only do this if you are very confident with the previous task though don't just jump to this okay great job this lesson and I'll see you soon all right welcome back everybody in this lesson I'm going to be showing you how to play a really nice melody and Harmony just this little exercise that of composed for you that will match the level that you're at it sounds really nice it's very fun to play and it's going to be a bit of a challenge because it's going to let you grow it's going to apply some of the things you've been learning rhythms scale arpeggios all that stuff I'm very soon going to be giving you the formula that's going to allow you to create any scale and that formula is going to be hugely hugely useful for you even more than the formula for all chords but I know I've been giving you a lot of information and you've been learning a lot so a bit of a break here of explaining and we're going to be doing more playing together um and like I said this one's going to be applying a lot of information so I'm just going to demo it for you what is going to look like by the end [Music] so and then it's going to repeat so you can probably see a couple elements here that you might already know you can see that we're playing a scale that scale is a minor and you would know that because we're starting on a and we're obviously not playing any sharps or flats and again a minor and C major are the only two scales that don't have a key signature you might have also noticed that we're doing a chord progression which I touched on a bit when we did our Hallelujah case study and that is simply repeating four chords that go in a certain order so in this case [Music] it's now if your piano does not go down that low you can just do it with one [Music] hand or you could move it up an octave whatever works for you you're playing that with one 3 2 and four leaving your hand in the same position that's if you're going to play with one hand now if your piano does go down the slow then use the octave version you may have noticed that I said chords but I'm not actually playing those three fingered chords I'm playing an octave chord well here's the difference a chord can have multiple variations as we saw with inversions but in terms of the terminology a Triad is when you're playing the 135 structure or 531 depending on the hand so if you're playing um left hand 531 this would be called a Triad and you can remember this as try from triangle because there's three notes you can see we're playing them at equal um intervals so it's play note Skip One play note Skip One play note but what we're going to be playing is just that octave version so with the five and the one so this is what your left hand's going to be doing 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 and that's it so you can memorize it by the pattern so you going from a Down by two up by one down by two again you should obviously be aware of what note you're actually playing so a f g and e that's the chord progression we're we're going with today now your right hand is playing the a minor scale which hopefully should not be a big challenge to play if you practice the things I said last lesson but just remember you're doing 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 now I know I've been saying this a lot about the fingering exactly what you're doing I know I've been repeating it a lot to the point you may have been sick of hearing it but it's so so important that this is something you're comfortable doing because your focus should not be on the fingering um your focus should be on staying time should be on the on the right notes it's most ideal that you are comfortable enough eventually that you can do it by muscle [Music] memory so in our song we're playing that twice so we're playing the scale up and down once and then we move to f and then you play a second time now obviously don't go this fast I'm just demonstrating um now the second part of the song you're playing 2 3 4 5 2 3 4 5 right so you're just going up you're not going back down you're just going up so like that none of this because that's going to throw your counting off which which I'm going to explain so that's with the [Music] G and then this is the tricky part you got to e and as soon as you play it you play one with the G Shar and you can see I'm playing these notes the G sharp or a flat the B the D and the E now if you're more ual you might look at it like this you look at the notes what you're playing so the B C D E from the with the G now you don't move anything you're just no longer playing the C you're replacing it with that a flat and you're going to tuck your fingers in slightly to be able to play it comfortably and that would go with the E and then we go back to a so the last thing you need to be aware of before we start practicing this step by step is how you're going to be counting we're no longer counting in 1 2 3 4 we're actually going to do a variation of it which is one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and so you're saying and after each beat that passes remember to add an end after the four as well cuz some sometimes people say one and two and three and four one and but that would be wrong because we're basically splitting the beat in half and the last beat is still a beat so you also have to remember to split that in half one and two and three and four and one and two repeats like that so that's how we're counting I'm going to be snapping to the main actual beat so it's my snapping will be still on the 1 2 3 4 but I'm also going to be aiding you with that and and so one 1 and two and three and four and so our first step that we're going to practice is playing the a minor scale in time so this is how it's going to be 1 and 2 and 3 and four and 1 and 2 and 3 and four and so you're holding that last a for two of these half beats so you're saying four and rather than four okay you're leaving it four and so to demonstrate a little bit faster 1 and 2 and 3 and four and 1 and 2 and three and four and now the only tricky part here in terms of that scale and the counting is this last bit over here so watch very carefully what beat I'm saying with which note one and and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and three and four and and four and one so this G will be both four and it's also going to be the one so the primary beat it's with the snap make sure you're not playing one on the a this top a is going to be and so really quickly again 1 and 2 and 3 and four and 1 and 2 and three and four and so pause now and practice that on your own just the right hand stay in time and count out loud I'll see you back here in a second okay so hopefully you're comfortable with that now the next small step we're going to be practicing is our left hand we're going to be holding this for four beats and then four beats again for a total of eight beats so to show you 1 and 2 and three and four and 1 and 2 and three and four and 1 and 2 and three and four and one and two and three and four and so you're counting till four twice and then you move to the next chord there's not that much to practice here because if you're keeping your shoulder elbow and wrist relaxed while you're playing this you're not going to have that much trouble um besides maybe if your fingers are a little bit shorter and you find it difficult to reach all the way to an octave but in terms of technique there's not that much going on here but that's when you're looking and focusing this as you're playing when you're actually playing both hands at the same time it becomes a bit more complicated because naturally your focus is going to go to the thing that's most complicated which in this case will be that a minor scale so what might happen is that you're playing this and then you go to the wrong note or you spend too long here finding which note to play You're delaying the beat and like we always say staying on time is very important so here's an example of what some of my students might do when you're making this mistake they're focus on the right hand not anticipating here and then they stop for a couple seconds and you can see that they're not on time so for that reason you should anticipate the move look at your left hand and just as a reference so what you're going to do so this is going to be what it looks like I'm going to go very slowly so that I have time to explain what's happening I'm focusing on my right hand here and now I know what's happening here so I don't have to focus so much on my right hand cuz I know that all I have to do left is this so so I don't have to think about it much at this point I'm no longer looking at my right hand I'm looking my left hand so that I can gauge okay where am I moving two steps down just as a reference for how much I'm moving my hand because if I don't look at my left hand I might get it wrong and I go down there so you really just look at your left hand as a reference then move move back to the more complex thing back on my right hand left [Music] hand and left hand back to right [Music] hand so you can see that there's this decision making that's happening quite fast and you want to do it ahead of time so for that reason I create to this exercise so that you can develop these anticipation skills being able to stay on time putting together Melodies and harmonies scales arpeggios so our next small step here is to do a transition from this section to this section because if you can do that the whole song is going to go a lot more smoothly so you're playing this four times and then I anticipate move my fingers in to make it easier to play also play that four times then from here back to the a minor so it's a [Music] recap you don't at all have to go that fast I'm just demonstrating what that looks like all put together you know at a fast and smooth pace so pause the video now and practice those elements so that you can become more comfortable playing them I'll see you back here in a sec all right so now we're going to be putting them together now we're going to go very slowly here cuz you should not be rushing at this stage you're still forming those connections in your brain so we're going to be building step by step so we're just going to play the first half of the song that's it now we're going to go slowly you can either play with me now and I'll count for you or you can watch first and then go back and and play with me or you can practice on your own whatever you prefer one and two and three and four and 1 and 2 and three and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and four 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and three and four and so that's the first half that we're just practicing definitely don't move on to the next half until that first half is comfortable you don't at all need to go fast you just have to go steady at a pace that's not too difficult when you're practicing this on your own count out out loud that's going to help you a lot so for the second half I'm going to go as slowly as you should be practicing remember you're not performing you are practicing 1 and 2 and three and four and 1 and 2 and 3 and four and 1 and 2 and 3 and four and 1 and 2 and 3 and four and then to the A 1 and 2 and three and four so you can see there so practice slowly and work your way up gradually until you can go at around this pace [Music] and so on that is your task have fun with it there is no extension task here except maybe if you want to go a bit faster but make sure that you're not compromising your steadiness and your time all right great job this lesson and I'll see you soon okay welcome to this lesson and here I'm going to be explaining how to create any major or minor scale so you already know how to make any major minor chord using the 43 or 34 method but with scales this is going to be a lot more useful because like we already discussed most of the music that you're going to go and learn has a key signature which is another way of saying it's in a scale so for you to instantly become more confident in learning and practicing that piece you should know the scale but there are loads and loads and loads of scales normally in traditional lessons you would just be memorizing how to do it so you just you just memorize that that is D major and you play it with those two black notes there's not really any system to follow there there's no Theory being involved and when they go to learn pieces yes because they know that scale of by heart it is going to be much easier to learn and play that song but the only issue is getting to to that point of memorizing all those scales cuz it takes a very long time so alternatively there's a formula in music theory that you can use to create any scale no matter if it's the first time you play it or the 100th time you play it so I'm just going to give it to you right now to create any major scale you need to follow TTS ttts the tns's stand for tone and semitone so to demonstrate that this works we're going to take C major a scale that we already know how it sounds like if this system works and we follow it we should get that scale note for note so TTS T TTS you do not count the first note you don't count the root that you're starting at so this will be zero I'm going to count a tone so D because this C Shar that would be a semmit tone so C tone tone semitone tone tone tone [Music] semitone so a bit faster I go to my root note whatever the name of the scale is that I'm trying to make C okay t t s t t t s so you can see that works we'll do one more very quickly we'll do a major I'm going to a and let's figure out how you play it t t s t t t s so alt together you don't even have to play it with the fingering if you're just trying to figure out the notes then you can just play it like that now if you're ever stuck on where to make the tone jump and where to make the semitone jump just remember that two semitones is One Tone so for example you want to make the a major scale start on a that's zero tone why is this a tone because this is one semmit tone that's another semitone so far we made two semit tone jumps which means one tone so from A to B is tone so t t so from B this is one sem tone another sem tone so that's a that's a tone a t t s t t CU there's two semitones here t two semones here s so now we know that this strategy actually works there is a system to this now let's introduce the minor formula it's t stt stt so I should have it on the screen for you now and let's check this through so let's take a minor which we already know how it's supposed to sound we're not playing any new sharps or flats here and we know that's our goal so let's apply this and double check that it works so it's t St t t St TT we go to a t s t t s t t let's take a much more complex sounding scale let's go for C Shar minor okay start on C exactly the same principle t s t t s t t so Al together that would be the C minor scale you have no idea how much time this is going to save you this method is going to be very useful in three major occasions the first is when you're trying to practice a new scale and you want to find out what the notes are you can use this the second is when you're learning learning a song when you're reading the sheet music you're going to see that it's in a certain scale and by being good at the scale you're going to automatically get much better at the actual piece because now your fingers know okay these are the notes I can play and anything else is not in that scale so that takes your mind off of so much options because now you're limited in your parameters and the third biggest occasion that you're going to be using this for is when you're improvising or composing because once you've decided on a scale it's going to be very easy to improvise from there but we'll talk more about that in that module now by no means am I telling you don't practice scales anymore yes of course if you did apply this and you just figured out what the scale look like it's going to benefit you but there are so many benefits to actually practicing the scale itself you have better independent finger strength which is a huge huge deal because that's going to allow you to play the more complex more beautiful sounding rhythms and Melodies a lot easier your fingers are already used to moving in a certain pattern they're already used to making these transitions with the thumb going underneath and then continuing these are things you come across a lot and once you have developed the muscle memory to do that playing them in actual songs or improvising makes it a lot easier everything goes a lot smoother it's also a really great warmup by actually playing and passively memorizing how to do it you're building very slowly a bank of scales that you become quite confident in and that is going to serve you very very well so although you can use this technique to just create any scale don't just like neglect actually practicing it okay cuz I know that is very tempting but trust me you don't want to just skip out on this so we're going to do an exercise here where I'm going to name you a scale and you're going to create it and play it that's going to kind of help you set this in stone into your mind about how this works and how universally applicable this is I'm going to do a quick example of what we're going to be doing together I will name a scale like B flat major so what you're going to do is go to B flat and you're going to apply the correct formula to make the right tonality of the scale so I'm not asking for B flat minor I'm asking for B flat major so you're going to be doing TTS ttts if you want to remember these formulas more easily I personally memorize better through sound so for me it helps when I think of it like TTS ttts and then for minor T stt stt that's how I remember it but you can also do it just by visual like you can picture you can picture the pattern itself in your mind and see how it's laid out so for example with a minor especially you just have a te at the begin beginning and and then it's stt stt it just repeats in a very easy way to remember so for B flat major we're doing a major scale so you're going to apply the major formula we're going to go to b t t s t t t s then you're going to play that with the correct fingering so right hand is going to be 1 2 3 1 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 five and then come back down if you [Music] can so I want you to try constructing and playing E major scale pause the video now have a go and then unpause when you're ready okay so E major we're going e we're using TTS t t TS t t s t t t [Music] s we'll do one more then I'm going to give you your tasks so I want you to make an E flat major scale pause the video now and then come back when you're ready okay so evat [Music] major that's what that sounds like so hopefully you got some of that right and if you didn't that's fine it just comes down to practicing this process more um but just in case it was a small mistake that you know led to everything else being wrong remember that the first note you start on you do not count it so that you can count that as zero so if you're making a B flat major scale B flat call that zero then T that you know that would be the T and the other thing remember that two semitones is one tone and make sure you C in carefully all right so hopefully that makes sense your tasks are basically a list of some scales I'm going to give you specifically ones that you have practice that much from the other lesson and you're just going to be constructing and playing them with your right hand and your left hand separately your extension and this is going to be really an extension I would actually would avoid practicing this unless you're very very confident with a right hand and left hand separately but I'm going to give you the following compulsory scales to play right hand and left hand separately so you're doing G minor E minor C major and B major I'm not going to play them because I want you to actually construct them I don't want you to just copy from what I'm doing so if you follow that formula and you know obviously making sure you have actually eight notes in the scale then you should be fine practice it slowly one hand at a time and your extension is to do that both hands at a time now this is going to be a huge step for like 99% of people because some of these are going to be more complex scales and playing them two-handed takes a bit more time than the easier scales that we started off with so don't feel like you have to do that make sure you're not moving on to the next lesson until your primary tasks are done okay good luck and I'll see you soon okay welcome everybody to this lesson and I'm just going to be explaining how to use the metronome and how you can practice using this so metronome is a tool that will help you stay in time by doing the counting for you so that you can focus on what you're actually playing rather than trying to count it out loud to practice going at an even pace and you can actually set it to go slower or faster depending on your needs so I've literally just typed into Google here metronome and you can see this pops up you can do this yourself so here we have our BPM and this is basically how fast we're doing it so you can see it's just going to be this beat that repeats at the certain BPM that you've set now if you go higher of course going to go higher and the same with lower now you have this entire range to work with um and this is a very very simple metronome you don't have much controls and when you're just starting out this is more than enough all you need really is something to keep you in time but let's say that we went to this website and we can see that we've still got our similar BPM range um but here we also have some Italian words which describe roughly how fast you're going this is there because when you start to read sheet music you will have these instead of your bpms when you're learning classical stuff when you're reading sheet music of more modern songs usually the composer or whoever actually wrote the sheet music will have the BPM set um rather than simply the Italian the reason the Italian is here is because back then they did not measure things in BPM because that didn't really exist so they measured it based on these words you don't have to pay attention to them so much because we're going to learn those later but you can see how they change depending on the BPM so it is obviously nice to um get a rough idea of what words mean what so we're at 90 BPM right now and there's a couple things that I want you to pay attention to the first is that we have these two circles and you can see that the beat is going through these and repeating now the other thing is that this control here will increase how many of these circles you have before it goes back to the beginning now we're going to set it to four this would be the equivalent of four time so when we normally count in 1 2 3 4 this is how a metronome displays it now the only issue so far with this metronome is that you have no idea of when is one because obviously he's not counting the numbers you need some kind of audio cue to tell you when we're back at the beginning of this Loop so that's why you want to have this selection on and here you can see it's a lot easier to know when's the first beat you don't need to pay attention to any of these controls they just give you subdivisions of the beat so for example this one they give you these smaller beads underneath the main beat but again don't worry about these symbols or what they mean or even actually selecting these controls you want to stick with this one you want to have this first beat on and you usually set it to four four because most of the songs you're playing are going to be in four time but if you're practicing something in three time you want to put it to three so so let's say you're practicing scales and you want to count in four you can set it here and you want to start slow so let's say you go to 80 and you have the first be on and you go once you're comfortable playing it at that pace then you can increase the speed to maybe 86 or eventually 977 or you can go higher and higher to increase your pace and stepping up the challenge each time you get very comfortable now metronomes obviously are not just used for scales they're also for arpeggios cords and most commonly used when you're practicing songs we're going to be reading music soon together and so much information that you've just been learning is going to be notated on sheet music they usually have more complex rhythms it's a good idea to have a metronome on when you're practicing keeping the right pace keep in mind you want to avoid using a metronome when you're still just starting out with a new exercise if I taught you how to use a metronome at the very start and I said practice your scale with this metronome play it on on and now go ahead but you've never played scales before you don't even know what you're doing now you have this constant moving beat that's going to pressure you so at the beginning of any exercise that you're doing you want to always get comfortable with the actual technique first and then once that's down you can put a metronome on and start very slowly you can go all the way down if you want and you can practice it like that you usually want to keep on this here where you can stress the first beat because that gives you a sense of where beat one is but you can take it off if you feel like it's necessary that's how you use a metronome if you're using a digital metronome you can set things like volume you can have a lot more complex options more than these things you have here but again don't pay attention to that you want to set it at four stroke 4 which means four time so 1 2 3 4 and if you happen to use a keyboard which has a built-in metronome you can usually just like figure out how to actually turn it on how to turn it off it's usually straight forward sometimes it's really difficult too actually because they don't really give much information but usually it's the same thing of volume up volume down increase the tempo decrease Tempo stuff like that okay that's pretty much all the way to it and I will see you in the next lesson welcome back everyone to this lesson and here I'm going to be showing you some much more advanced chords that you can play to instantly make your playing much more beautiful and have a much richer quality to it so I'm actually going to be teaching you four new Concepts here more full chords stroke chords seventh chords and extended chords now it is likely that you have seen seventh chords already possibly even extended chords even though you might not know what they are because they are very commonly used in cordal based songs that you'd go online to follow stroke chords are also common there as well so this lesson is going to help you play those the reason I did not teach this earlier is because you need to have an understanding of scales to be able to get this concept so that's why you learning scales first so the first thing is more full chords this is not really have a technical name to it it's just a more richer version of an original Triad chord so for example let's say you asked to play A Minor you might play it like this or like that now it sounds good but you want to make it better so here are your options so we have an A C and an e to play with now in our left hand we're playing 2 A's we could have our second finger play this e here that already gives it some more tone we could take our original right hand chord and because we're working with either a C or E I have an e over here that I could work with so I'm going to move my thumb down here and replace the a with my second finger so now instead of playing we canot do something like this now that has improved it there's actually loads of other variations you could do here so instead of this Ive with the E you can actually play the Triad plus the a so you can see you have the Triad chord here and I'm adding the octave a on top and then in my right hand I can do an inversion of the a minor chord so I'm going to do a first inversion which if I take the original a goes up there I swap so that's a first inversion and I'm just moving it down here so Al together again that sounds a lot better than just because that is a very overused method there's nothing wrong with it it's just that if you want more interesting sounds you have options you can repeat this process with any other chord and move around these notes more as you please so very simply it's the normal Triad chord you take those notes and give them to other fingers where you can let's say you're making a chord change here and you're doing a minor to F major you can do a minor first inversion F [Music] major and then for each of those do that Fuller version so you just add the octave note on the end so [Music] there's an example now stroke chords now when you see stroke chords you see the main chord so for example D major and then stroke F sharp so what that means is that you take that first chord name D major play that in your right hand and then in your left hand you play the F sharp now this counts as a D major stroke fshp because I'm literally just playing an F but what's most ideal is that you just play it with the octave that's going to be the most common way of doing it obviously that is not just for just the D major and FP you can see that with many other chords but in terms of the formula for how to actually play it you take the first chord you play on your right hand then you take the second chord and you just do an octave in your left so that would be a D major stroke F sharp now seventh chords seventh chords are a bit more complicated but they sound absolutely amazing so for example we're going to take an F major 7 chord to create an F major 7 chord we need to first know what the scale is for F major so it's a major scale we're going to take TTS ttts so we go to F count that as zero and we have t t s t t t s if you want to play the scale this is one of the very rare ones where instead of 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 you do 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 again this applies to a very small minority of scales Which F major is one of them so basically what you do is that you take the seventh note of that scale and you add that to the Triad or the 1 three and five so we know that this is one that's two 3 4 5 6 7 8 so I'm taking 1 3 and five then I'm going to add the seven so Al together sounds very nice especially when you kind of roll the notes instead of just playing it all at once like that you can actually roll them like that this would be an F major 7 chord now there's actually another type of seventh chord where it's just F7 it doesn't say F major 7 or F minor 7 or anything like that it just says F7 what you do there is that you take that seventh note and you flatten it so you go down by one semitone whatever that note is so that's going to be this E flat and that counts as an F7 chord so here's the exercise I want you to create a D major 7 chord what you're going to do is figure out what notes are in a D major scale so TTS ttts unless you already have the scale memorized play the first third and fifth note of the scale to make the chord then add the seventh note pause the video now play that and then come back and I'll show you what it's supposed to sound like all right to make the D major 7 we have the one three and five of the scale and I'm playing the seventh because D major scale goes so that's the seventh [Music] note now if you find a D7 instead of D major 7 you take the seventh note and you flatten it which means you go down by One semmit Tone that's your D7 chord I'm going to give you one more so you can practice how to do this combination I want to make a G major 7 chord and then make a G7 chord and while you're playing these chords play the octave for G and then it's going to sound real nice so come back when you've done that so hopefully this is what you have for the G major seven chord then the G7 chord and that's [Music] that now finally for extended chords this Builds on the idea of seventh chords of counting numbers from the scale and adding I'm going to take a minor because it's going to be easier to demonstrate this that's our a minor scale now we already know that this is number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 eth 8 degrees of the scale but what if we go beyond this so we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 we're counting this as 9 10 11 12 and 13 so again this is eight and then nine 10 11 12 13 so if you're asked to play an A Minor 9 you take your a minor chord you add the seven okay so a minor 7 then we take the ninth so this is eight and then nine that would be an A Minor 9 chord sounds very complex now what you can actually do here is if you take away the seventh so you're only left with the Triad and then add this nine this is an A Minor add n it's only an A Minor 9 when you have the seventh in it when you take away the seventh it is literally a minor chord and you're adding the ninth so it's well named you're almost never going to see that level of complexity but what you will see for sure is the seventh chords but that's there so that you know how to play these chords if they come up we're going to do an exercise so that we can kind of set it in stone here how to make these nine chords I would like you to make a D major nine chord please so remember your process step by step pause the video and come back when you're ready so to make the D major 9 we're going to take our actual Triad then we're going to take the seventh note which is this I'm going to move my hands around here so I can play a bit easier that's our D major 7 then I'm going to add the nine so this is seven then eight and then nine then this would be a D major [Music] 9 if this was going to be a D major add N I remove the [Music] seven with the seven D major 9 you might have guessed that you can also do for example an A9 chord rather than an a major 9 chord similarly to how you can have an a major 7 chord that's different to an A7 chord so our a major 7 we make our scale which is then we take our Triad with a seven that's our a major 7 now flatten this you have A7 now if I add the nine that's an A9 because there's no major 7th it's a just a normal seven so that would be A9 again that's a very rare quot that you come across so a quick recap of everything that we did so far so just to make more full chords you take the 135 which is your Triad so let's take D major and I'm just going to allocate those three notes in different places to different fingers so I can end up with something [Music] like so you can see it's actually just that [Music] Triad but kind of thrown all over the place here now for stroke chords if it says a minor SL C you take a minor and then throw a c on the bottom end that's a minor SL C now for seventh chords for major 7eventh chords you take the seventh note of the major scale and you add it to the Triad [Music] so obviously right hand or left [Music] hand and if you want a minor 7even chord you do the exact same thing in the minor scale so D Minor I take the seventh note so that is D Minor 7 to make the D7 chord we take our major 7th and we go down a sem tone on the last note that is a D7 chord now Major Seventh chords are actually some of the most beautiful things that you could play on the piano cuz they have this really nice Harmony to it and you can actually mess around with these Major Seventh chords minor seventh chords and you can make something really really nice D major 7 and I said play that within a major 7 so what I'm going to do here is have a baseline so you can see here my left hand is actually going to be substituting my thumb on my right hand cuz that way I have the fingers to mess around with the seventh D major 7 I can go into a major [Music] 7 and then you can mess around with some melodies keeping within the notes of the [Music] scale and I can go on and on my point being is that you can actually mess around with these chords rather than just playing it you know once waiting and then coming to the a major 7 so don't worry about mistakes we're going to go through this process more in the improvisation section but have fun with it all right that's everything for this lesson hope you found this really helpful your task is just very simply to mess around with these uh seventh chords maybe even ninth chords on you know some other St stting notes so instead of a major 7 you can even try an F major 7 so F major F major 7 you can do a lot of things so have it go with just different combinations and see maybe what kind of chords are your favorite that's all for today I'll see you soon all right welcome back everyone to this lesson and here I'm going to be teaching you how to use the pedal and how much of an improvement it makes to your playing and how nice it is to listen to this is a very simple thing but it does take some time to get good with it so when I say pedal I'm referring specifically to a sustained pedal now if you're on an acoustic piano you will either have two or three pedals more commonly three pedals the sustained pedal is the one on the furthest right and that's no matter if you have two or three pedals now if you have a portable keyboard like this one in the back of the keyboard you will find find a large Jack plug that will take in a pedal and the label will be pedal or sustain sometimes you're given the pedal with the keyboard and sometimes you have to buy it separately now if you have a digital piano then you'll likely have a pedal built in which will look similar to an acoustic pedal in all cases you press the sustained pedal down and is going to sustain those notes so that you don't have to keep your fingers on them so for example if I play this without the pedal obviously that does that now with the pedal my fingers don't have to be on the piano for them to be sustained it's as if my fingers are actually still there holding the notes so I don't need to keep my fingers [Music] there so you can see how it adds this sense of presence to your playing because your notes are being held on for longer if I play that exact same thing without the [Music] pedal it doesn't have the same effect now you should not use pedal for every single thing cuz sometimes you should not use pedal because it's intended that you you have that effect of jumpiness which you can't achieve with a pedal now you may have noticed already but on the visualizer keyboard above here you're going to see that the notes are blue when I'm not using the pedal and the notes are red when I am using the pedal and it signifies all the notes that are currently held down so to demonstrate with a pedal you can also see the small red dot that's filled in next to sustain and that tells you if the pedal is on or off so you can see here on off on off on off pay attention to that especially when you're trying to figure out the timings of the pedal now the most common use for you right now is when you're switching between chords so for [Music] example I'm going from an F major 7 which is this and I'm just extending it out and then to a D Minor 7 so you can see the D Minor with a [Music] seven now if I do that with a [Music] pedal when I'm not using the pedal 2 3 four I have less time with the pedal two three [Music] four now your use of the pedal depends largely on what you're playing when you're playing chord progressions you almost always want to take off the pedal and put it back on in between each chord so for example if I'm playing this chord progression 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 then with the pedal watch carefully how I use it and even pay attention to that small red circle that tells you when the pedal is on and when it's [Music] off now what a lot of beginners tend to do is they put the pedal on fine here they take it off then they put it back on as they play the next one and so when you're hearing it [Music] fast the notes seem disconnected so what I'm doing is I'm keeping the pedal on until just after I've played the next chord then I remove it and put it back on and that way it gives the effect of all the notes are connected so here's what I'm doing pedal still on take it off and now back on okay [Music] so and that's instead [Music] of before I give you the exercise so that you can try this on your own I want you to be aware of how you're actually putting your foot on the pedal you want to avoid raising your entire leg up and down like this to put it on you want to actually keep your heel in the same place and use that as like a pivot pivot point so that your front of their foot can go up and down rather than your whole foot coming up and down this way you have a lot more control over that pedal so what I'm going to give you is to play F major with the octave and then G major so just up by one a minor up by one then up by two to C major back down to F so Al together 1 2 3 4 1 2 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 and it's going to repeat those same chords if you're using the pedal correctly this is what it should sound like 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 now just start off with no complex rhythms at all and just do that hold it down for four beats each and then move up try to avoid that disconnection between those notes you're going to avoid those gaps so you're trying to close those gaps together by applying this method of pedal work connect those [Music] gaps okay have a go at doing that and then come back when you feel comfortable with that all right hopefully that was okay for you and now you can start to do some more complex rhythms we're just going to keep it fairly simple for now so I'm going to play it for you without the pedal so you can see exactly what I'm doing 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 and four 1 2 3 and 4 1 2 3 and 4 1 2 3 and four 1 and now with the petal and slightly faster 1 2 3 and 4 1 2 3 and 4 1 2 3 and 4 1 2 3 and 4 1 so again you're aiming to close those gaps in between each chord by using the pedal so before I leave you to practice that I'm going to show you just the pedal work by saying off on off on that obviously just means pedal off pedal on I'm not going to use any complex rhythms here I'm just going to play it normally on off on off on off on so you're doing it off on when you play the next chord not before because then because you haven't played the chord yet you're going to create that Gap and that Gap is what you're avoiding for the context of this particular exercise you can have different pedal methods for different things so have a go at doing that and then come back when you've got the gist of it now don't worry if you feel like you're not comfortable with the pedal yet because obviously this is not an overnight thing this definitely strengthens itself over time the more that you use it even just passively even if you don't give it too much focus it will get better as you play the piano with pedals so we already know what arpeggios are there when you take the Triad of a chord and you play them one by one or just or back down but what if you take that arpeggio and fly it up and down on the piano well here's what that would sound [Music] like that is literally the c major arpeggio going up several octaves and down several octaves so here's the fingering for it so that you can try playing this you're going to take the five 3 and 1 one and your left hand then your right hand is going to go the octave above that and play that with one two and three the reason is you want to keep your pinky free to play the top C when you get over there right over there now how do you do that transition because once you've played change over here so you take your left hand in the 531 and you go over your arm 5 3 1 and right about when you're done playing that your right hand comes underneath 1 2 3 5 so Al together a bit [Music] faster anticipation in this part is very important because otherwise you're going to delay your transition so watch carefully about when I'm moving my wrists across it's as soon as I'm done with that hand I'm not waiting and then doing it as soon as I'm done with this hand I'm already moving it same with the right hand so I want you to have a go practicing that at a steady Pace you can count to yourself 1 2 3 1 2 3 or you can use a metr and set the BPM very slow so here's what you're doing 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 pause the video now have a go with that and come back when you're ready so hopefully you should be comfortable with what notes you're actually playing and getting a bit used to moving your your wrists over in that sense now obviously I'm not expecting Perfection here I'm teaching you how to do it because you'll practice this outside of this lesson and get better at it so don't hold it against yourself if you can't do it in an amazing sense right now now once you get reach the top over here you're keeping your hands in the same place you're not moving them anywhere and you come down right hand is done moving it over 3 2 1 one I'm always keeping the same finger pattern of 53 1 in the left hand and one two three in the right hand and I'm playing it with the five when I get over there so in a more smooth sense 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 and now with the pedal so here is where you get the more graceful sound to it and it sounds nice because all of those notes that are in harmony with each other they work with each other are all suspended sustained in the air all of those frequencies are harmonizing together and it sounds really nice for this particular method you just keep your pedal on the entire time now do not rush the pedal only do this when you're comfortable with the technique until you're quite comfortable actually because the reason I delayed teaching you the pedal for so long is for two main reasons a lot of people jump to it because it instantly makes your music sound better and they start neglecting the technique and practice you have to do for the actual movements of your fingers so they get more notes wrong and they develop bad habits and the second reason is because now their timing and rhythm is probably off when they're doing chords or arpeggios and they're doing they may get used to playing the pedal and you just let go completely and they don't hold it for the valy that it should have so only practice with the pedal this arpeggio when you're comfortable you don't have to go that fast but be at a comfortable Pace that you can consistently get the notes right at that good Pace now you can repeat this in different Keys obviously we are in C major right now if we move down to a minor same finger pattern 5 3 1 1 2 3 5 3 1 1 2 3 and then five on the end so with the [Music] pedal you want to generally keep your finger pressure and how hard you're doing it even so your task is to choose between C major or a minor or you can make another one completely from yourself so let's say you wanted to do D major same thing G minor whatever you want but to pick one of these and get very good at it and then add the pedal and be consistent your extension is to be more wary of the pressure and hardness that you're putting into those notes so if you want this nice um gradual swelling to your notes you can start fairly soft maybe even a little bit slower and then gradually get faster and a bit Lou louder then come down slightly slower and slightly softer so for example I'm going to do a [Music] minor that's your extension task and that is how you use the pedal with cords arpeggios and these techniques will largely replicate themselves in most other styles of playing so good luck great job and I'll see you in the next lesson welcome everyone to this lesson and before we move on to the next module I wanted to show you a realistic way of how I would go and play Coral based songs online so today's example we're doing Someone Like You by Adele so we know how these kind of songs work we know how to actually read them but what about when it comes to an actual playing session do we have some structure are we changing any patterns what are we doing so I'm going to show you in this lesson a nice good General approach to it once you have a song in mind whether you've chosen this yourself or you have a friend who wants to sing with you for example knows a song and you don't and you're just playing up the chords you should check the chords and see if these chords are things that you need to practice playing because you might have for example A B flat major 7 because B flat major 7 is not a very chord so you'd have to practice how you actually play that so make the notes that would be B flat major 7 so we don't actually have any seventh chords here these are actually very basic chords and very commonly seen in most pop songs which is why when you're able to get good at this way of playing you can play 90% of all pop songs so once you check the chords and just practice actually playing them so here we have an a major C minor F minor and a D in the intro I'm going to quickly just kind of scroll through and check if there's any other chords we have an E major so I'm going to practice those chords the a major F Shar minor D major and we'll do an E major as well so now we know we can play all the chords comfortably now you want to actually listen to the song Because if you don't know how the song goes you won't get a sense for how fast it goes because if you happen to have never heard the song Someone Like You you might think it goes I heard that you're settled down that you found a girl and you're married now you have no idea so you should listen to the song so you know how fast it goes what kind of rhythms to play and a general sense of the tone so I'm just going to play an extract here so now we know that the chords are actually going to be arpeggiated and we have a sense of how fast the song will go because we know how quickly we're doing these core changes and we also get a sense of the tone of the song there's not a crazy amount of instruments is actually very very minimal so we want to maintain that minimal tone as much as we can by not you know doing anything too crazy just remember to keep in mind that this method of quote unquote reading music is designed to serve as an accompaniment meaning that you play as a backing track to somebody who plays the main lead Melody you can try and play The Melody Yourself by following by ear since it's not notated for you here but I'm going to explain that later I can hear in the song that these are arpeggio so I'm just going to do an arpeggio of a major since that's our first chord now the next chord is C minor so we're going do arpedio of that but that does not sound the same so let me try maybe an inversion I'm I'm going to play chord move that up here um that still doesn't sound right so I'm going to do another inversion I'm throwing the E up here replacing it that sounds right so I'm going to move that an octave down okay that's right so we have a major then C minor second inversion then F minor let's try the RP pedio chord not too far off I'll try an [Music] inversion that sounds pretty close so I'm going to go with that and then we have D major Let's do an inversion and that sounds right so Al together so I'm going to play my right hand with the left hand so I can get it as close as I can to the actual song [Music] you can either do that method or you can just play the chords outright as they are it's still going to fit because obviously it's still the right Chords it's it just depends how accurately you want to get it and the purpose of what you're doing it for if you're trying to get it as accurate as possible then of course listening out to what kind of Melodies they're using in this case an arpeggio is useful but if you're just trying to play along to something you can just do the chords as they are that's much easier so I'm going to play with the pedal and I'm going to SN so you get an idea of where I am but more importantly I want you to pay attention to the rhythms I'm using you know how loud or quiet I'm doing and my general technique now this is not the correct way to do this is just how I do it everyone's going to have their own style you'll definitely make your own style when you do this but you'll get the idea when I do it I heard settled down that you found a girl and you're married now I heard that your own dreams came true guess she gave me things I didn't give to you so that's an example of how I would do it you can see I'm not incredibly consistent with the rhythms I'm playing where the technique sometimes you may have seen me do or just or even and anytime I'm doing something out of the ordinary you know know 4 beat octave notes I'm always remaining in the same 135 notes of the Triad so when I'm doing this C Shar is in that chord now when you're online looking at this kind of chord sheet like we discussed it doesn't give you an idea of Rhythm Pace speed how hard you're doing it how soft you're doing it tone doesn't give you any information which fine because it's not designed to it which means it's up to you to do that on your own you can really do whatever you want you can stay in this octave you can go up here you can jump around you can do different Melodies you can use different techniques any kind of Rhythm you want it's really up to you and the more that you practice these songs the more your intuition for what would fit will improve I'm just going to play really quickly the precour and chorus so that you know the general structure of how to increase your Rhythm and volume in accordance to the actual structure of the song So pre chorus you're getting a bit louder bit more rhythmic and the chorus should be this kind of peak of a song so you should go much further so here's how I personally do it I hate it turn up out of the blue one but I couldn't stay away I couldn't find it I hope you'd see my face and that you'd be reminded that for me it is an [Music] never mind I'll find someone like you I wish nothing but the best for you to don't forget me I beg I remember you said sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead then after that you can tone it down you generally want to avoid having the exact same feel in the whole song because then there's no variety and you might have noticed that I actually kept the pedal on for two chords and let them merge together rather than having the pedal on for each chord separately now there's actually two conditions you want to keep in mind if you're going to do this the first is that you don't have too many notes together in the left hand because if you're doing and then you do a second chord you can see that they don't fit together and there too much going on there the second instance where you can merge two chords together with a pedal is when the two chords are very related they are very similar so F minor to D major they actually share similar notes D major has an F in it and the F chord is also its own thing they also both share an A in the the chord and they share a C sharp in the scale so in that instance you can see it doesn't Clash together as much as other chords would for most songs you want to close down in a much softer and more simple way so in the very last line of the song it would be sometimes a last in love but sometimes it hurts [Music] instead that would be an ideal way to close the song for most pop songs the last thing I want to touch on is playing the melody by ear so when I say play by ear it means that you listen to something and you try and figure out the notes based on what you just heard if you've heard the song a lot you have an idea for what the melody is going to sound like so we know that the melody goes I heard obviously it's a lot more clear if you listen to the official song rather than my singing But but it's the same principle we have an idea for what it's supposed to sound like I'm going to keep it very simple in my left hand so that I have some time and brain power left to figure out what the melody could be now quick tip the melody is usually mostly in the same notes as the Triad so an a major it's mostly going to you know start or finish on these notes and they might have kind of these passing notes that are not in that Triad so so that's something you could keep in mind to make it easier I heard so that's too low we can go higher in the same chord so I heard okay that's right I heard that you settle down I know that it's going to be probably these notes or this because that's in the chord of the C so settle down that you found a girl and you're married now and if you wanted to you could keep on going you know listen to the song and then trying to find what the right notes are for pop song usually it's not too difficult because they usually keep the Melodies In accordance with the chord if you wanted to actually play this song as a full-blown piano song with you know very beautiful harmonies and more complex left hand amazing right hands and you just generally ajy to play on rather than just using this that's where sheet music would come in and you're going to learn that very very soon so your task is to pick any song that you like usually ones that have lyrics of some kind because they follow a chord structure that you can play because if you try and play film music on Chords it's going to be difficult to find so pick any song listen to your actual song and try and play with it just have fun with it I'm not going to give you a lot to do because we're about to start a new module so enjoy and I'll see you in the next lesson okay welcome everyone to module three and in this lesson I'm going to be introducing you to how to read sheet music this is going to be one of the most pivotal lessons that you're going to have in this entire course because reading sheet music is what's going to allow you to apply your piano techniques read some any kind of song that you would ever want to learn and be actually able to understand and play it it's important that you focus and even take notes during this lesson because doesn't have to be anything Grand just something brief so that you can you know look at it and understand what you're reading it's worth mentioning that there are other techniques out there to be able to re cheat music but what I'm going to be teaching you is the most reliable tried and tested method that exists this is the fastest way to read music there are even people who create their own methods like complete ignoring Street Music and just making their own um variations of being able to read music but the problem is although it might be a clever way of doing it music doesn't actually exist people don't write music that way this is how music is written so here you can see we have five lines here we also have four spaces okay 1 2 3 four spaces and five lines now this shape here is called The Stave and this is where music is notated so that you can read it now we have something that's called a cleff this is going to be the treble cleff the treble cleff tells us which pitch range in the piano that this section here is symbolizing what I mean by that is that first of all this Stave here the higher you go the more to the right and upwards you go on the piano and the lower you go the more down and left you go on the piano so this symbol here is the treble cff I'll write it it's indicating a particular part of a piano but we'll have more on that later the trff in general terms means you play with your right hand now you actually have another kind of cleff for your left hand but again we'll do we'll do that in a second well how do we actually read this so as I mentioned you have five lines in four spaces each of these symbolizes a note and we have a sentence that we use and remember so that we can easily identify what those notes are until over time you're able to just look at it and just for the muscle memory you can identify it but at the beginning stage all that matters is that you remember the sentence themselves so what is the sentence for the lines you have a different sentence than the spaces so for the lines it is Every Good Boy Deserves Football now if you've taken lessons in the past this might ring a bell if this is new to you don't worry so what you're doing here is that you're taking the first letter of every word and you're mapping it out here so this is the first word so every e I'm going to put the E right there every then we have G and this is on the lines remember then we have B then D and then F now there are variations to this some people make their own up this is just my one I use it just happen to remember it you can say Every Good Boy Deserves fun it could be fruit it could be fudge it could be anything so you're more than welcome to change this up just make sure you can actually remember it so how can we actually use this now if you find a note let's say on the second line that is going to be to G if you have a note on the second to last line up here that's going to be a d you have an F up here and so on now what about the spaces what's the sentence for that well the spaces is less of a sentence actually more of a word it is f a c e which spells out face so I'm not going to need to you know do the blue here because it's very self-explanatory you put the F the first letter into the first space okay we count the first you know liner space from down then upwards so you know this is very common in beginners they think that the top one is actually number one but that's number five so this is the fifth line up here so to count it very quickly first line second third fourth fifth and for the spaces the first space second third and fourth now where do these fit in here well you just take the first L into the first space so that's going to be F we have a here so second space second letter C and then e so f a c and now you can get an idea for how these things link Into The Stave if you happen to be writing or drawing this all out into your notebook or anything like that two tips you have to remember the first don't worry too much about drawing the cleff correctly it is a bit of a strange symbol but if you do want to draw it correctly um you take your pen or your pencil you go clockwise and then you go up and then to the left down and do a flick like that again it doesn't really matter if it's good or bad because you as a piano player are not going to find yourself in many positions where you have to actually draw it that's more for a composer who's writing pen and paper the second thing is that you have to make sure very very sure that if you're drawing any of these in these circles these notes they must be very clearly either on the line or in the space you want to avoid having something like this where it's not exactly in the line and it's not exactly in the space thankfully you're never going to see something like this in actual music because everything's printed out you know in very much absolutes but if you're drawing to avoid confusion for yourself make sure it's definitely on the line or on the space so this is all well and good but how can we take this and actually play it on a piano well that's where this cleff comes in when you have this cleff Middle Sea okay so this is trible Cle Middle Sea is actually over here it's kind of got its own line here this own small line this line itself is called a ledger line and it just means a line that's outside of the five line Stave when you're reading music they want to play particular that's outside of this five line Stave um so they would just make a small line here to indicate is it on a line or a space because this is Middle C this would actually be the letter d one known up and that's clearly in a space okay so like I mentioned this here is Middle C on the Trel cleff and that's what I mean by cffs symbolize different places on the keyboard if you IM imagine the full length of the piano this captures a small part and the cliff indicates which section of the keyboard it's indicating so as you're watching this video right now play middle C right now play middle C and that is going to be this note over here which means that if you have a note over here right which is the first space that has to be directly above middle C so if you go to middle C and you count up to F this is where that would be the other thing you'll notice that we have two C's we have middle C here and we have a c up here that is simply one octave Above So if I have a c over there and this distance here that's going to be eight notes because these are both the same C so let's double check right this is going to be C and we're going to have a d over here right the next note and then e which is the same over here right first line and then f g a b c so hopefully that makes more sense now how everything is connected these are not just kind of random notes that fit together somehow these are actually one note apart so actually what you're looking at here is the c major scale right c d e f g a b c now what if you wanted to play a C but an octave even higher well again this is where Ledger lines come in and hopefully this will make a bit more sense now c d e e f g so G is going to be sitting right on the space here right we don't call this a line we call that a space because it's not going through the line in the same way for example this B is okay don't worry if you feel like you can't memorize this right now we're going to have a separate exercise for that just explaining how this works so that's G and then for a I'm going to draw a line and that would be a now two notes above a is C so actually if I have two lines that's going to be C I know that might look like a bit of a jump because I'm just throwing all this at you but this and the next few lessons we're going to take this apart and do exercise together so it's going to make a lot more sense again I'm just showing you how all the mechanics um fit together right now so in a nutshell that is how you identify what notes are in the right hand so I'm going to show you how to remember all of this in a way that makes sense and I'm going to quiz you on it to test your memory and that's going to help with your learning tremendously okay so it's a very common issue to have um a lack of clarity for which sentence to remember um if it's going to be used for the lines or used for the spaces so it's an incredibly simple way of memorizing it um which is just to check does it have five uh letters or does it have four because there are only five lines on The Stave so the sentence of face or I say sentence but you know what I mean so saying face fa a c it can't go on the lines because you only have four letters f a c e and you're trying to fit them onto five lines so that automatically it can't go there now what about for Every Good Boy Deserves Football that again very simply it just goes up this way and it fits onto the lines now you just have to commit every good boys Deserves Football or fun fudge fruit whatever you want commit that to memory okay make sure that you remember it and that you're not making mistakes about it it will take you not even 30 seconds if you just wrote it down in your book any scrap piece of paper and you know wrote it all down rememorize it turn it away check yourself it's a very simple thing it's not like a hundred digit long number so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to give you some time now so pause the video and you know make sure that you're comfortable with what I just taught because now I'm going to give you a quiz where I'm just going to draw in a note you're not only going to identify it right so saying it in your head but you're also going to play the note on the piano and that is going to strongly solidify what we're doing here now if you're not yet generally comfortable with what I just taught then either go back and watch it or take the quiz now and you know it'll make more sense so the first thing I'm going to give you is a nice and easy one the first space okay give you a clue there it is the first space so your methodology here is to identify is the note on a line or a space okay so it's on a space automatically we're not going to use Every Good Boy Deserves Football we're going to use the other one right so if you don't already you know what that is right now it is f because the letters the sentence we remember is f a c e welcome everyone to this lesson and in this video you're going to learn how to read the Bas cleff which in other words how to read the left hand the reason we're learning them in different videos is because you read the bass and treble cleff in different ways than each other this would not be e right in a treble cleff if I drew treble cleff here in right hand this would be e for Every Good Boy Deserves Football but you actually have different sentences for the lines and spaces um that are exclusive to the base cff so before we begin I'm going to show you what this Bas cff looks like and remember this generally means playing your left hand so this would be the base cliff now the most important part about a cliff is where middle C is on the treble we know that middle C Is On The Ledger line here but in the base it's actually over here now what this means is that you have a sense of pitch you know that if middle C is here then treble clap has to be way up there and now Bas cleff is down here hence the name bass so since we already know the basics let's just jump right into it I'm going to give you the sentence that we remember for the lines and spaces so for the lines here is your sentence we have green buses drive fast always now as with the treble we're just going to take the first l of each of these words and we're going to map it out over here so I'm going to put the letters on the lines over here and a space here um just a safe space no pun intended so green is going to be here green buses drive fast always so simple enough so far same concept as a trouble clap exactly now unlike the triple CL we have to actually remember a sentence this time not a word for the spaces now that sentence is all cows eat grass so you can see a pattern here we're going to take the first letter of each word and we're going to put it all cows eat grass now let's double check since we know that this Stave has an actual system to it it's not a random sesis thrown onto it we can check so we have a b c d e f g a and then would continue B and then C which is going to be middle C so for most people understanding how the concept of a Stave Works in terms of where the notes goes um is not a complicated to think it's actually pretty easy to understand so me at the start and including pretty much all my students at the very beginning their main focus is actually making sure the sentence they're using to remember you know what note is what is the correct one because now you have access to four separate sentences and you have to be able to tell which one is treble and which one is base because if you start reading the treble notes in the Bas cleff I guarantee you all of your notes will be wrong immediately because it doesn't work in the same way as a triple cleff right in the triple cleff the third line here every good boy would be B but in the bass it's a d now there are some you know tips and tricks that will let you instantly switch clefts easily when it comes to reading it which I'll teach you later on but for now let's focus on making sure we know the sentences correctly if you haven't already I would very strongly advise that you write the lines and space the sentences down for the bass cff and the treble the reason is not only you're going to be able to just instantly flip to the page and refresh your memory but you're also by the fact that you're writing it you're activating a different part of your brain which processes the information that you're writing nobody writes things down that their brain is not actually processing sometimes you're listening and maybe you Daydream maybe you didn't quite understand what they were saying but when you come to write it down in your own words that's what lets it stick a lot better so what I tend to advise my students on memorizing you know these sentences not only this but in fact anything that they intend to memorize is to actually uh map it based on what your representational system is in short people have a representational system in their mind which is their preferred Way for their brain to store and process information that's why some people are better as visual Learners some people are better as auditory Learners and others are kinesthetic and so on so if you know that you are a visual learner I'm sure that you can take some kind of quiz online but if you know that you're a visual learner you can memorize these sentences as visual cues for example green buses drive fast always the example I like to give my visual students is imagine you're standing on the side of the road and you see you know cars and motorbikes uh red buses whatever and then you see a green bus going so incredibly fast and you never in your life have you ever seen a slow green bus right that's a just a example you can make own uh most men are visual and most women are auditory but it can vary greatly you might feel like you're someone who learns better through sound so you could think of this like standing on a field and you can hear um all the cows in the field like their sounds um e in the grass cuz you cows eat grass it's pretty you know logical sentence so that's a way that you that could help you memorize these sentences if you have trouble with them another quick tip is specifically for Faith which is what we use for the spaces in the treble cluff faces in the spaces would be a good sentence to remember for that faces in the spaces they rhyme and it makes sense but when you think of space it's higher up right it goes up and up and the treble cleft is higher than the Bas cleff I just want you to get a gist of these sentences and you know understand how they work and how they fit into the staves you don't have to feel like you have to be perfect at this right now because we're going to do exercise together on this where being practical with it is going to help you greatly so before I quiz you on this we're going to rec Cap all four sentences then I'm going to quiz you on the treble cleff and the base cleff and see how well you can do okay so here's my chart I've drawn out for you yours can be a lot more neat than mine if you want to draw one out here's all the sentences that you have to remember so that you can identify any note on either treble or Bass cleff the lines for the treble Every Good Boy Deserves footall spaces f a c e you can remember by faces into spaces Bas lines green buses drive fast always and the spaces all cows eat grass another Association that I just came up with that you might find very useful is that you know green buses or you know buses in general and cows for the base cleff they're both on the ground right they're both low to the ground and you know else is low to the ground low is like the base cliff because the base is you know it's base it's low so that's a way that you can connect these and you can make your own as well so take a good look because I'm going to quiz you in a second pause the video now and make the notes if you want to and if not we're going to go straight onto the quiz okay so this is going to be a very new site for you because now we have the treble and base clap together we've got a bunch of notes here all of these flats and you know Ledger lines and all this stuff we got this symbol over here too now so over on the left side here you can see that we've got this symbol over there this signifies that the treble CL C and the base cleff aka the right hand the left hand are connected so that you're playing them both at the same time going across you're taking these two and you're going that way rather than what most people think which is you read the treble cleff then you once you finish that you come to the base cliff but that's not the case because in the piano this is what you're going to actually be seeing when you're sitting down reading music whether the music is incredibly simple like more simple than anything we've done so far course or it's incredibly difficult like some ROV concerto okay The Stave here that you looking at the Grand Stave is something that you're going to get used to as you start learning piano music which is why I'm going to be testing you on all the sentences that we've worked on so far by giving you a bunch of notes and showing you how they connect with each other I'm going to give you one note to start off with and that's going to be this note here which is Middle Sea the middle C here is directly in between the treble cleff and the base cleff and that allows you to get a sense of pitch you know that if the Middle Sea is here and the higher up you go in The Stave the more up you know or to the right of the piano uh you go and the lower down you go on The Stave the lower or to the left you go on the piano then now you can think okay if m is here my right hand would be here and my left hand would be here so what you're going to do is that I'm going to point to your note and you're going to identify and play it on a piano in front of you if you don't have a piano in front of you then obviously don't just you know identify the note but if you do actually play it don't ignore the step because it's important for what we're going to be doing next we're starting off easy with this note over here your thinking should be is it on a line or is it on a space that way you can eliminate What sentences you're going to be using it's on a space therefore we're either using F A CE okay four letters in that word um or all cows eat grass also four letters in the word and that's another tip to remember what sentence goes for what four four letter sentences are spaces five are lines so treble is going to be for f a c e and you can think of it like faces in the spaces space is like really way up in the sky and so is the treble compared to the base as that's going to be a we're going to move a bit faster now what is this note here it is on the third line on the base cliff so we're not using fa a CE or allazi grass we're either using every good Boer football or we going to use green buses Drive Fest always so we're going to be using green buses so that goes here green buses drive fast always so that's going to be a d now it is very important here that you get the pitch correct because I've chosen these notes specifically so that there's a jump that you have to actually consider this if middle C is here and we know that this is D which D are going to be using well in this case you're just going to count down until you find a d and how can I say that with such confidence or how can you say that with such confidence and it's because a d is going to be after a c so you're not going to encounter a d before the C until you get the one that you're going for but in the case of for example an E flat which is up here you have to consider there's actually an e in between middle C and this e which is over here for Every Good Boy Deserves Football every if you ski this note and you just set yourself oh I'm going to go from middle C I'm going to count up until I find an e or E flat this is going to be the first one that you encounter make sure to consider if your you're skipping any notes out this sense of muscle memory with instantly identifying a note when you look at it at the right pitch will come with time and with practice practice that we are going to do together next lesson so what would this note over here be we're on the third space in the treble cleff and we're going to move a bit faster now so in treble cff we're going to be using F A so it's f a c that's going to be C which C well if middle C is here and there's no C in between those two this will be one octave above middle C so you can either count one by one or you can just jump straight an octave with your thumb to pinky whatever you want to do now what about this note over here this is in a space so we're going to be using F or we're going to be using all cowy grass we're going to use all calate grass so all calate grass this is going to be a which a are we going to use well let's count C B A okay immediately we know there's an a directly underneath in fact two notes in underneath middle C here which is obviously what you find on the piano now I'm asking for an a way down here so that's going to be an octave down just double check we're going to count 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and that's definitely an a one octave below so the last question here is I'd like you to play this known over here with with the sharp symbol so it's on a line so we're going to be using either green boss to dry fast always or Every Good Boy deserv football we're going to use Every Good Boy Deserves Football which is Every Good Boy Deserves so that's going to be a dsharp but dsharp is also the same thing as an E flat which is marked over here so even though physically on the piano it is the same note but you just call it different names in your head on the saave that's not the case you have different positions and different symbols to indicate the same note this would be a D sharp remember sharp is plus one semitone and the E flat flattening so going down by semitone these are both pointing at the same note they're both the exact same note it's just different ways of notating it as for which note that is I would like you to go and make sure you're playing it at the correct pitch so actually pause the video now and play that note at the right pitch okay so your final task here is just to play every single E flat that is notated here I've drawn this out so that they're each one octave apart so now you have an even stronger sense of pitch and you start to bind you know the Gap distance here on the stave on the grand Stave actually um compared to the piano itself so you've got an e way up here and then you're going to go down to the E flat just above middle C because it's over here the only thing between middle C and this E flat is a d right A D which would go on the space over here um then we have an E flat one octave below and another E flat an octave below that so actually if you counted every step you'd find that there's eight notes in between each of these so just to make it visual for you I've drawn these blue lines which signify an octave Gap in between each of these so I can just put here 8 ve which is something that you'll find eventually which signifies octave so in terms of notation and identifying what note sits where there is really not that much else to learn more than this now obviously this is not all there is to sheet music in general because you do find key signatures you find Dynamics articulation symbols you find you know um values and rhythms you find time signatures so this simply here is the Baseline foundation so that you know okay it's saying play this note then we can start to building those other attributes of Street Music in order for you to play more complex and beautiful music so the only task I'm going to set you off here is to be very confident in what notes or what sentences sorry are going to fit with what cleff so be very confident F A CE every good body football Trav cleff all cows eat grass and green busted drive fast always base cliff you can use whatever techniques that you want you can even rename the sentences if you like as long as you keep the same first letter you can take your time with it you can write it out use flashcards anything at your disposal that you want to use but you must be confident you don't have to be absolutely perfect just be confident in next lesson and in lessons to come I'm not going to be sparing that much time to explain okay we're using this sentence here because of this with this cliff and for spaces Etc I'm just going to say this is an F because we're using faac and for that reason it's important here that you do this so that you can follow very easily so besides that great job and I'll see you next lesson all right welcome back everybody to this lesson and in this video we're going to start applying and practicing how to identify Notes on The Stave we're going to do the treble C separately the Bas clap separately and then we're going to do the grand Save which is the treble and Bas now these notes that we're going to be playing are not something difficult they're not something that you're not used to already we're taking a step by step here while you start to become comfortable with actually looking and understanding The Stave so if you look over here we have a series of notes that play one after the other and this if you remember is called a Melody there are no harmonies here we are not playing any notes at the same same time this is all one after the other now you may already know what it looks like because this is a recognizable pattern that we've done before this is actually what C major looks like if it was notated on a Stave so you can see that the notes here are actually empty circles now this does have its value meaning it just means that every note you play you hold it for four beats that's all that means we are going to go a lot more in depth into values and symbols in a very soon lesson so you don't have to pay much attention except to focus on what note it's actually signifying you play so we read from left to right always and we can see from the leftmost side we have a middle C okay that is Middle C on the treble cleff which means it's corresponding to this note the first note you see on that stve is Middle C over here then we have D that's going up by by one note on the piano but it's also going up by one note on The Stave another note up same interval and it's going up one note or One Tone actually at a time until you get to see one octave above middle C which is the last note on The Stave now obviously being able to play C major is not something Beyond you we've done this before and you've played much more difficult scales in this so so I want you to just play the c major scale four beats per note but the important thing here is that you look at The Stave or otherwise known as the score score just means the sheet music since you already know C major and you're comfortable with it we're going to go quickly so I'm going to count 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 for each note remembering each note will be four beats very important here that you are looking at The Stave you can obviously check your fingers when you have to tr transition for your thumb and so on but it's important that you start associating The Stave differences to the piano differences so here's the example 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 now because on the save here we're not going back down it's just an upwards you know ascending scale for one octave that's where we're going to stop so pause the video now and try that and again I must emphasize here look at the score your brain will naturally start making these connections subconsciously even if you don't you know consciously tell yourself okay so this is one distance it's the same as the save your brain will do that for you so pause the video now have a go with that and come back when you're done so while we're looking at this Dave we're going to warm you up um just to kind of keep you in the flow of things we're going to recap on identifying these notes so I'd like you to tell me what the fourth note on that scale is um but looking at The Stave okay so don't look at your piano look at The Stave and say what that fourth note is there's multiple ways you can do this you can do the sort of fast version you know you count from C up because it's just the fourth note but I would not recommend that because when you start to actually try and identify notes in more complex music you're not going to have the same root note reference point like you do in a scale so I'd recommend knowing which sentence to use in this case it'll be face it's on the first space so we're going to use f which means that is an F directly above middle C which is right here now I'd like you to tell me what the seventh note going from left to right is on that Stave so I'll give you a couple seconds to think about it again try to avoid counting it on the piano and just taking a shortcut um just look at that Stave itself so if you don't already have it now it's going to be a b because we're using Every Good Boy Deserves Football and that's the third line so it's a b which is [Music] here okay we're going to move swiftly on to the base cluff so here this is the exact same scale but we're playing in the left hand and remember that the notes on the far right the last eighth note is actually middle C that's where middle CA sits on the base cleff and it's the exact same middle CA that you find on the treble cleff right remembering on the grand Stave they both share that note they're both middle C so the last note is going to be up here and the bottom note is going to be over here so it's going to play that through on the left hand and I want you to take it slow while looking at the score so for example I'm looking at the score right now I'm not even looking at my hands and I'm saying 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 and so on pause the video right now and have a go playing the scale slowly looking at the score and then come back when you're done okay now avoid looking at your piano or my piano um and try to just focus on The Stave itself and tell me what the third to last note is or the sixth note and I want you to focus on actually choosing the correct sentence and identifying it rather than just counting out from the root so I'm going to give you a couple seconds to think of that now you know is it on the line is it on a space and is it in treble or Bas and which sentence are we going to use so if you don't already have it that is going to be an a because we're using green buses dry fast always and that a is going to sit directly beneath middle C which is over here and that's because middle C is directly above it's on on the last note so now we're going to move on to the main task of this lesson which is to read and play a very short piece of music that I compos you know fairly quickly it's just something so that you know we can play something nice and enjoyable uh while also practicing how to read these notes so I've made it something that you're quite accustomed to just you know slow harmonies together um nothing that you're not used to what you're not used to though is looking at a grand Stave like this here there are one or two new things that you haven't seen before you can see that we have these vertical lines that are kind of scattered across the place here and we also have um two sets of four four now those both have meanings the first those lines are actually called bar lines we also have what is actually the time signature at the beginning 44 there is a time signature understanding bars and bar lines as well as the time signatures is something we're not going to go into much depth right now but all you have to know is that that 44 tells you count in four meaning count as 1 2 3 4 it is not at a particular speed which means that you can be flexible with how fast or slow you want to do this now let's take a look at the notes we now have the grand Stave and this is something that you're going to see pretty much all the time from now on even if you're only playing the right hand you will still see the grand Stave and the left hand will still be there even even if there's no notes there okay let's get on to it we have harmonies all over the place here in fact this entire short piece is simply made up of harmonies we don't have any Melodies here we only have notes played at the same time which is the complete opposite of the scale that we just played so a good technique in general is to start with the right hand because that's our dominant hand and if most people will find reading the treble cleff slightly easier than reading the Bas cleff so we're going to start with the right hand and we're going to read the notes from the bottom up so our first note there is an e because we're using Every Good Boy Deserves Football and that first note sits on the line the note directly above that is an a because it's f a c so second space will be the a if I play this E and A together at the correct pitch [Music] that will be these two notes now here the fingering is not symbolized meaning we don't have any markers that indicate which fingers we should use do we use 1 and three one and five two and five this means that it's our decision but when you start to read proper music you will have these fingerings most of the time for now we're going to stick with one and [Music] three now the next set is going to be an f and a b because we're in that first space of an F so I'm going to move up my thumb slightly and then we have the [Music] B and then the third Harmony I want you to read these notes so actually pause the video now and play those two notes indicated now um and then come back when you've done that so the next two notes is going to be a g and a c so a g and a C I'm again just sticking with that one and three fingering per Harmony so I'm playing those at the same time and the last one is going to be an A and an e so an A and an e this one I'm going to use one and five if you feel like you have other fingers which be more comfortable you can do that it is your decision so if I go from the beginning here and I play the first four harmonies of the right hand this is what I'm left with so I'm going to play them and then you can pause the video and practice them staying in Time 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 so now looking at the B Bas C most people tend to read notes from the top up because they find the top note is usually within the Stave and it's easier to read and other people prefer like me to read from the bottom up so this is completely your decision but for the sake of this example I'm going to start with the bottom first so we can see that our first note at the very bottom is actually out sitting just outside of The Stave so that means we just go to the lowest note and start counting down so the lowest note is going to be G because of green buses so that g is going to be down here and I'm going to count one note down so it's an F because it's our lowest note I'm going to put my pinky there now if I look at what the note above that is green buses drive fast always now it's going to be an F because it's f for fast meaning that this is going to be an octave chord here now you can see in our next pair that actually both notes go up by one note or One Tone so I could just move my two FS here up by one or just to be on a safe side you can read them so on the bottom note we have a g for green buses and then the top space is going to be all Cy grass so that's also going to be a g so that's confirming they are both G and our next note we're also going up by one note and our next one is interesting because although we're using a c all cows on the bottom end the middle C on the top is actually notated within the treble Cliff but that's okay because although visually it looks like you know we're not playing this on in our left hand and it's actually in the treble Cliff we know that that middle C in trouble is the same middle C over here it's the same note even though it look looks like it's way up there you might be asking yourself well why do they put the middle C directly in between you know straight halfway in between those two Cliffs to make it easier to see well that's because you find other information written in the space and it would kind of get in the way of that so just know that that fourth chord in our left hand is going to be a c octave with our top thumb on middle C so it's a recap one 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 and our right hand to recap is 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 four remembering to change to one five on the A and C because now the Gap distance between the notes is slightly bigger so both of them at the same time this is what it's going to sound like 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 okay so try putting that together yourself pause the video and if you want you can play along to what I just played and try to stay in time or if you want to go slower you can do that on your own as well okay so hopefully you've put those two together and you're confident with that and as always make sure that you go very slow and step by step so that you're setting yourself up for a more easy practice you know don't just try to go all of a sudden CU you might just jump across you might get the note wrong you might feel frustrated and you continuously getting the note wrong it's a very you know Common and Easy Feeling to feel when you're practicing in that way so for that reason if you're not yet comfortable playing those four things that we just did then I would go slower I'll take it more step by step and just take it one you know one Harmony at a time so once you're very comfortable in the right hand you can even me memorize the pattern itself then you put the left hand with [Music] it and even further you can look at the score while you're playing it you don't have to you know glue your eyes to it but you can mostly look at the score and just check your your hands just for positioning so we've done four of these harmonies and we have another four to do and that's actually going to be your task since you now know the formula for identifying these notes I going to have a go at doing it and I've intentionally not played these so far so that you don't have any clue to what it's going to sound like I want you to genuinely actually read this and practice it to test yourself I would not just skip out on this and then wait until I just show you I'll actually have a go of this because we're just going to go further and further to the next level from now so really just try if you don't get it right that's fine as long as you've tried you're still making progress so pause the video now and then come back when you've done those last four harmonies all right so hopefully you've had it go with that and you know you have something ready so I'm going to play it slowly each hand first so the first Harmony the first New Harmony which is the fifth one is the same as is the same as the first one so it's going to be an e and then an a now I'm using one and three here but you can use whatever you feel like is most comfortable um then then it goes to a g and a b so I can use actually a three and five here because it leads kind of nicely from the one and one and three which actually actually I can change to a one and four because then it it fits very nicely with the next chord and then the second to last one is an e and G and the final one is a d and f sharp so pay attention to where that sharp is to signify it's with the D see how it's level with it the sharp there doesn't mean on both it means on the one that's level with so the sharp is clearly on the space and so is that F therefore it's an F sharp so for the left hand this is should be a bit easier we have an F then we have a g and then we go down to D and then D again so Al together and again you can use whatever fingerings you like 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 so that's what that last part should sound like so now let's look at what it all sounds like back to the beginning and this is why I specifically chose to create something from scratch like this where you don't have fingerings because um unfortunately just kind of how the nature of how it is unless you were to buy um an official copy of a um a piano sheet music for a song um some of them don't have any fingerings and this is a skill actually that you develop almost passively just by experimenting with you know what kind of make sense which fingerings to use some times it's because the people who create the she music you know just random people who just do it by ear who are very talented um they don't include the fingerings because they might not play piano as surprising as that sounds and others do include fingerings but I want to give you the tools to be able to to take those harder sheet musics where you don't have fingerings and how to get around them because we actually changed we moved from initially doing one and three and going up like this to then going to one and four because then it makes more sense to enter this for the next chord so now I can go back to the start and say you know what I'm going to do one and four instead for all of these because I don't want to confuse myself with okay one and three this time and then come back to it 1 and four it's a lot easier to just stick with one and four so hopefully you got a taste of that sort of experimentation with the correct fingerings that you might want to use so altogether this is what it sounds like one 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 so your only task for this lesson is is just to practice that little short piece we did but maybe going a bit faster once you're more comfortable and even adding in The Petal and even being a bit more aware of the pressure that you're putting in um in compared to how it would be nice for it to sound so if you're currently playing it like this you know really loud and kind of sharp this kind of tone for the piece it kind of makes you want to play it a bit more softly a bit more you know smoothly and elegantly so you might want to do and so on so this is what you might have if you go with the pedal and a little bit [Music] faster so even at the end there you might want to you know drop it off a little bit go a bit slower and be a bit softer on the fingers great job this lesson and I'll see you soon all right welcome back everyone to this lesson in this video you're going to be learning about values now what are values and why they so important to being able to read music well so far you know how to identify any note on the save and that's the grand save so that's treble notes and it's also bass notes but sure you can say that is a g you know I'm playing this G and this B at the same time you know we know what the notes are but how fast are we playing them are we holding them down are we playing them short or long you know how fast are we doing these do they have a sense of Rhythm and that's why values are so important because when you come to read sheet music you're going to see different symbols that equate to different values it means that for this particular symbol you hold down for much longer than another symbol so in this lesson you're going to learn about these symbols and by the end of this lesson you're going to be able to integrate all this information about values and you're going to be able to put that with identifying notes and then from there you're going to be very very close to being able to read pretty much all of music because there's not that much else to cover in terms of the fundamentals on how sheet music works so I'm going to start off by drawing here one of the most common symbols that you have probably seen even if you have absolutely no musical experience and that is this one here so I'm going to draw I'm going to draw it quite large so you can see it clearly so we have a full circle and a line that goes up so this symbol there are three components that you're going to see in common with not just this symbol but the other symbols that you're going to be seeing too you have the head which is going to be this circle here you're going to see that this one is obviously filled out um then we have the stem and that is this vertical line okay we don't call this you know the line we don't call this like a tail we call it the stem okay then you have the tail which is actually not present on this particular symbol but you're going to see it on the next symbol so this one here actually means a crotchet and that is worth one beat so whenever you see this symbol which is called a crutch it it means you're holding that note down for one beat so I just want to point out here that these names that I'm going to be writing out here are going to be following the English system okay now the American system follows a very different way of naming these they have very different names I'm not going to mention them or bring them up in this lesson but if you do happen to want the American names um I will give you those just in case you happen to be working with American musicians or an American school or whatever now the next one is actually very similar and we have our full circle we have our stem but we have the tail okay so we have the head which is also filled out here we have the stem and the tail the little flick on the end is the tail again not to be confused for the stem now this is called a Quaver and it is worth a half beat okay which means it would take two Quavers to match up to the value of one crotchet because if a Quaver is half obviously you need two halves to make up a hole which is the one so so far we have crotchet and we have Quaver very similar except that we've got this tail which separates them now we next have a quite a different symbol where it's actually an empty circle with a stem so the shape is quite similar to the crotchet but it's an empty circle now this has a very different meaning and it's called a minim and that's worth two beats right so every time you see a minim you're holding that note down for two beats so to quickly integrate this into what we know so far let's say that we're counting in four okay so I'm saying one two 3 4 if every note I'm you know playing is going to be a crotchet I'm going to be playing 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 and so far we've mostly been playing in crotchets you're going to see more about this when we do site reading but let's say that we were in Quavers it takes two Quavers to match up to one beat so if one beat is equivalent to a crotchet then it would take one 2 3 4 I'm snapping my fingers twice so I say I'm playing it I'm playing the note twice per beat right and that's if the beat is you know one crutch it now what about minim well that would be 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 now another symbol that you'll see is actually an empty circle um so very different to any of these so far except maybe the closest to a minim because it does not have the stem now this has a very different meaning a semi breef and that is worth four beats so when you see a semi breath an empty circle that is four beats you're never going to see really like variations of this it's either that symbol or it's not it's another symbol you won't see for example a Quaver with an empty circle you're not going to see a semi Brea that's filled in but can you see a minim that's filled in yes but you wouldn't call that a minim you'd call that a crotchet that's just a difference in the shape now these four values here are the most basic values that there are there are actually a bit more complex ones but to start off with these are the most important now I want you to just Commit This to Memory first okay especially the names the Quaver the minim the semi breath I'm going to test you on it and then I'm going to give you the more advanced ones that you're actually not going to see immediately but knowing these more advanced symbols will absolutely help you because if I don't show you this of course when you go to read music eventually and you have these Advanced symbols you want to know what they mean right so now if you see a minum you know that's two beats so you hold that note for two beats so make sure you come me these to memory there's not really much of a fancy way to actually remember them it's really just you know looking at it and say all right this is a crotchet it's worth one this is a minim it's worth two this is what they look like this is what it's called This is how you say it make sure that you can identify each one of them separately so if I say what symbol has four beats You' say semi brief and what does it look like this one this one this one or this one and you pick the right one so we're going to do something similar to that in the quiz very very shortly so pause the video now and remember these if you haven't already okay so this is the quiz part I'm going to give you a piece of information all right so I'm going to give you one of these three either the symbol the name or the value and you're going to fill out the other two right just say them out in your head you don't have to write it unless you unless you want to but you have to be comfortable with this to start off with I'm going to write in minim so what does a minim look like and how many beats does it have how many beats is a minimum worth so take a second and try to avoid looking at your notes if you can help it and think about what that minimum could be you can pause the video if you want more time but I'll just start filling out now a minim is worth two beats and the symbol is an empty circle with a stem hopefully that was okay the next one I would like you to tell me what is worth four beats what it looks like and what it's called so I'll give you a few seconds now thinking back to our symbols remembering what the difference are is there in their shape filled in circles do they have a stem is there a tail Etc so I'll start filling it now the symbol is an empty circle and it is called a semi breathe the next one is this symbol here where you have a filled in circle a stem and a tail right so how many beats is this worth and what is the name of it I'll give you a few seconds you can even use process of elimination since you know what the minim is you know the semi is you know what this one's worth and that one's worth and we have two other ones that we haven't used yet so hopefully you can remember the first one that we did and this one is called a Quaver and it's worth2 which leaves the last one with being a crotchet and that looks like this it's a filled in circle with a stem and that's going to be worth One Beat hopefully that makes sense it's really not something massively complicated it's just a bunch of symbols some names and what they each represent in value so I'm just going to quickly go through you know the um beat counting for these so if we're if we're in four and we're counting minims so we're going to be doing 1 2 3 4 if we have a semi brief it's just one 2 3 4 if we have Quaver 1 2 3 four okay half is two Quavers per beat then you have the crotchet which is just one 2 3 four the the most basic of them all so like I said these are the simple most basic values that you will see which you will definitely see um and now I'm going to show you the more advanced symbols that you will also definitely see now don't be put off by this name you know Advanced symbols because it's the exact same concept as you've just done over here just with slightly different symbols and slightly different names okay so the first symbol we're doing is actually one that you've seen um very recently it's similar to a Quaver but it's just sort of a variation of it so we're going to have our filled in circle we have our stem we have our tail but I'm going to add a second tail okay so that is going to be called called a semi Quaver and that's going to be worth one quarter which means it would take four semiquavers to add up to be one beat I'm not even sure if I can snap my fingers as quickly but four semiquavers if we're counting in four would be 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 when we start playing this on a piano it's going to be a lot easier to dig Gest that's what a semiquaver is Quaver has one tail a semiquaver has two you might be thinking well if you can have more than one tail have two tails can you have more than two tails the answer is yes you can have three Tails Four Tails it doesn't actually happen that often seeing semiquavers is actually pretty common but seeing what's called Demi semiquavers which has three tails is very very rare like I would be very surprised if you ever encountered a demi semiquaver but that would just be one over eight so if you haven't caught on already each tail you addon would half the value of the previous tail so one Quaver which is a tail would be half semiquaver add a tail quarter next would be eighth next would be 1 over 16 but don't worry about that at all semiquavers is really the fastest that you're going to realistically see the next one is actually interesting because it's not tied to a particular shape so for this example I'm going to draw in our full note our stem so that is our crotchet now I'm actually going to draw a little dot on the side okay this is called a dotted note all right dotted note now explanation here is going to be a bit lengthy but essentially a dotted note means you take the original value of the note it's tied to in this case it's a crotchet withth one beat you half it and then you add to the original okay so dotted note it's a dotted crotchet here right crotch it is worth One Beat half of one beat is a half so this would be one and a half because I'm adding half of the Beats well what if I had a semi brief with with a DOT well you take four you half it so you have two and you add that to the original value so 4 + 2 would be six so that would be worth Six Beats very rare that you'll find this but this is a lot more common you can technically add this dot to any form of note you can even add it to a semiquaver where you half it and you add it to the original so I'm going to add that definition here so a dotted note write down here that for a dotted note you half the original and then you add it on now I have drawn in a dotted crotchet because that's the most common form of a dotted note that you will see you might also actually find um a dotted minim so I want you to think about this and say to yourself how many beats this would be worth if you see a dotted minim how long are you holding that note for half the original value and then you add it on so if this is where two you half two so you have one then you add the one to the original which is two now 2 + 1 is 3 so this would actually be worth three beats again you can find it on any symbol so if you want to draw in a dotted crotchet that's fine but maybe make a notes mentally or on your paper that you can find it anywhere so in terms of values and more advanced symbols you have these two as well so as you can tell it probably wasn't as big of a deal as you thought it was nothing to worry about do is the only one that you might want Clarity on which we are going to do together but semiquaver is pretty straightforward semi so you half it like semi breath you might think well if semi breath and semi is half then can you have a breathe you can but the chances of you finding this in piano music is very very slim you you normally find breathes actually in orchestral music when you have a big Orchestra and due to the nature of how an orchestra plays you know some notes are holding notes for a very long time um to add this thickness I'll write it down just because if you might ever play in an orchestra or a band you may find this so a breath is actually you have a semi brief and then you have a line on both sides like that so you have two lines on both side this is called a breath and this is going to be worth eight notes which is the reason it's so rare to find so hopefully you're okay with at least these two and the basic ones because you're going to find those a lot more commonly than this one so next lesson we're going to be diving into time signatures and bars and how all of these symbols that you just learned for rhythm and values going to fit into the grand Stave so that you're able to identify what note you're playing but also how long you're playing them for and it's and you're going to have some variety which is why you get Rhythm so your homework task is simply to remember all these symbols that we went through be confident in them because I'm not really going to go through all these again very straightforward thing and you're more than capable of just committing them to Memory if you do happen to have problems with memorizing these that's not a problem at all because as we continue through this course through examples and through our own practicing together it'll be easier to look at and understand so besides that great job this lesson and I'll see you the next one welcome back everyone to this lesson in this video you're going to start learning about time signatures in more depth and also why and how values which we just learned in last lesson will fit into this system which there's actually a mathematical way that this is done don't worry it's not complex math or anything like that it's just very basic counting you'll see what I mean here so the very first thing is that we already know you have time signatures of four four which we saw in a previous example I'm going to explain in more depth what that actually means so we have four four written at the beginning of a piece of music obviously we don't have any notes right here right now but this is your time signature you're going to find a time signature no matter what in pretty much every single actual song that you learn so let's take this time signature apart um there are many time signatures but we're going to stick with this one 44 the first important number here is the top one this tells you how many how many beats so time signature is talking about Beats okay so the top number tells us how many times are we counting per bar now we're going to explore what bars are in just a second but the botom number tells you the type that's the type of beat okay so top number is how many beats and the and the bottom number telling you the type of beat okay so let's look at the type of numbers that you can find in the bottom of this sort of fraction shape so the first type is you have two and that's going to be describing a minim okay so if you had um for example 2 two that would be two minim beats I'll explain it in more detail then you have four which is what we see over here and that is corresponding to a crotchet beat all right and the last common one that you'll see is an eight on the bottom number and that corresponds to a Quaver so these are figures that you just have to remember it's very very easy two in the bottom number will refer to a minim you have four which is crotchet eight is a Quaver now let's look at examples of time signatures that you might find let's first start with this 44 this means that you're going to count four of crutched Beats okay four crutch beats and if each crotchet beat is worth one then we're counting 1 2 3 4 well what if we have maybe a 2 over 4 all right that's also something that you can find well that would be one 2 one two each beat I'm counting is a crotchet beat remember this all right well what if we had 2 over two the actual way you name them is 22 or 44 Etc so two Min beats that would be 1 2 3 4 okay so each beat I am counting is worth a minim and I'm counting that twice so 1 2 3 4 they're they're two separate beats now you can also find quite rarily but it is something you might encounter one two and that's one two one two two more examples is pretty common as well you have 34 and that's 1 2 3 1 2 3 and so on and the other common one that you can see is 88 so eight Quaver beats which is actually 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 now let's explore what this is actually referring to because yeah now we can say all right we have four crotchet beats but what does that have anything to do with the music itself besides how to count it this is where bars come in so I'm going to draw what's called a bar line and here we have a space this is called the bar now if I have another bar here this is also a bar so so far we have two bars done say to continue there but we have two bars here when your time signature is 44 it's telling you that you cannot exceed four beats per bar okay now here's where your values information comes in if we had a semi brief okay in a bar and that's on an a it's telling you here play a for four beats this would be musically legal okay there's nothing wrong with this this is perfectly fine let's go into our second bar and let's say we had a minim so for we have two beats now a rule of time signature is not only that you have to not exceed four beats but you also can't be any lower than four beats okay you must stick to this time signature now can you have empty spaces where you're not playing a not of course those are called rests which I'll teach you later on but for now let's say we have two minims each minim is worth two beats this means this is correct okay but what if this minum was actually a crotchet we have 1 2 3 beats in total in this bar that would be transgressing this time signature rule which means there has to be another beat somewhere which is why you cannot ever find this if I added for example another crotchet there that would be fine because it's 1 2 3 4 well what if I added a third crotchet this would be wrong because you're exceeding the four beats we have 1 2 3 4 five so you can't have that well that means this crotch would either have to be removed or um the bar line would have to shift over so if I actually um remove this bar line here and I can draw in here and just continue these on that would be fine because now this is in the following bar and maybe I can have a dotted minim a dotted minim in this case would be fine because we have 1 2 3 4 remember that a dotted minim would be worth three because the dot next to it tells us we half the minimum and then add it on to what the minimum is originally worth which would be 1 + two let's say we did not have that extra section and we only had these two bars and that was the end of the piece well there is actually a way in bar lines to signify end of the piece and I'll just remove that for you now so this is called a double bar line and it's where you have a much thicker bar line followed by a normal bar line and that tells the player this is the end of the song now just keep in mind that I'm keeping all my notes on a right here just for Simplicity sake but obviously does not matter where these notes are but this is generally how the mathematical system of bars work now let's give this a practice for a second and then we'll move on okay so we're in the base CL here just to mix things up it doesn't actually make any difference except by how you read the notes and identifying them um obviously the values don't change then we have a different time singure here of 34 now what I'm going to do is draw in a bunch of notes and you're going to identify where you're going to place the bar line this is a very common example or exercise that you find in a lot of workbooks but it is a very good exercise to change the way that your mind you know looks at sheet music all right so here I have a bunch of notes focusing here on the values of the notes and the time signature I going to pause the video and give a think to where you're going to place the bar lines and remember the only purpose of these bar lines is to act as sort of gates to create a space of a bar and in that bar is where we conform to the time signature so just pause the video and think about what your answers are and then come back when you're ready and I'll show you what they are okay so the first thing we're going to do is count we have in three four so we have three beats to work with per bar 1 2 3 I cannot have any more than that in a bar so I'm going to draw a bar line here one 2 3 because the dotted minim is worth three beats because 1 plus 2 so so we're going to add a bar line there and we have 1 2 3 I can add a bar line there as well so this would be musically correct the reason we're doing this exercise is because once you start looking in actual sheet music you're no longer looking in it in the same frame of mind as okay I can understand kind of what it's asking me to do it goes from that point to I understand why it's notated like this how it's notated exactly what it's asking me to do and I have no problems with that cuz now you're understanding the mechanics of how music sheet music is actually working here so that is how time signatures and bar lines work now when it comes to notation you're going to find some differences um in how things appear there's not actually a difference in how you play it it's simply how they appear and it's a very common misconception that beginners have the first thing bines in no way do they change how you play the music it is simply there for a visual Q so you can follow the music more easily and that there's a mathematical system that follows it doesn't mean that you stop here it doesn't mean that you slow down it doesn't mean you speed up or anything like that it is just to keep things more organized so make sure that when we start to play things together with bar lines that you're not getting confused like that I've intentionally kept my notes beneath this Middle Line because you find a change when you go over it so when you have a note that has a stem if you go over over this Middle Line the stem goes down so I'll show you what that looks like so this crota and this minim both have stems and because we're past this Middle Line we're going to put those stems down the reason is that if we for example put our note over here and we put the stem downwards that's going to go towards the base cliff and our information that we're going to eventually have in this middle section is going to be interrupted by the stem so just for organization we keep the stem on the right side when they are below this middle line so just to clarify you can see that when the stem is going up it's on the right side and when it's going down it is on the left side there in no instance is a stem going straight up through the middle this is also irrespective of the cleff that you're in triple cleff or base cleff it doesn't matter what this line is called the fact that it's the middle line is what separates these two changes now remember that these are affected by things that have clefts which is almost every note except the semi brief because the semi brief does not have a cleff it does not matter where you place it it will always you know stay the same but if this is for example a minim that's going to be down and that would go up okay so number three the reason I did not show you any Quavers is because they're actually grouped differently I taught you so far that One Singular Quaver is worth alpab be which is obviously true but if you have more than one Quaver together they are grouped in this way so if you have two Quavers next to each other they're not individual like this they will always be grouped now if you have four they will also all be grouped or they might even find it that you have two sets of you know pairs importantly if you find something in between these two groups they are not going to be joined across like you're not going to find a line that goes like this this you will see them separate now I'm not saying you will never find a Quaver you know on its own because that is possible and not as rare as you would think it depends really on the time signature and how much beats left you have in the bar but the point is that you will find these groups it does not change in any way how you play them it's just a visual guide we're going to go through some playing techniques when we go through this on the piano but for now I just wanted to show you what you might see again these stems are always up here in this example and this would be if they are below this mid line so in this section here if they are above the mid line they will all be flipped down okay so I'm going to give you a bunch of notes and they're going to be in different places this time and do not affect their value so you will just want to pay attention to the time signature and then we're going to draw in bar lines like we did before so here are some notes you can see we have Quavers minims crotchets and we're going to add our bar Lins does not make any difference between how they're grouped or which way they're facing or any sharps or flats what we're focusing on here is their value so pause the video and think about where those bar lines will be and then come back when you're ready okay so to add our bar lines we have four four so we're going to count four beats per bar we have half and half so that's going to be one beat so one two 3 four I have a bar line here and one half one half half half so one and one so this entire row here is going to add up to two beats and then we have two beats over here so there would be a bar line over there and then the music would continue I'm going to show you just one more example about how semiquavers are actually grouped into the system and it's a little different than what you might expect all right so in a very similar sense to Quavers semiquavers also are joined in the same way we have two semiquavers together they form this shape and you can see that we have this extra line to symbolize the extra tail when it's on its own when we have four group it is also the same and this is not exclusive to you know even numbers of course you can have odd numbers you can have um groups of three you can have groups of five it all depends on the key signature and how many spaces you have left in the bar again in the same of Quavers you'll never see you know um semiquavers or Quavers overextend past where their value is particularly when there's something in between that is not in the you could say Quaver family because like I mentioned you have Quavers semiquavers very rare that you'll see Demi semi Quavers and you can say that these are part of the Quaver family crotchets minims semi bries those notes are not part of the Quaver family and therefore you will not see these lines added okay so let's say we have a Quaver if this was a semiquaver we would have two tails a demi semiquaver three tails Hemi Demi semiquaver Four Tails again you'll pretty much never see this but I'm trying to explain a concept of these lines when you have group notes if for example we had these as a grouped note this would symbolize two Quavers then we have two semiquavers two Demi semiquavers Hemi Demi semiquavers and that's how that works so that's the reason while we have a semiquaver line um similar to the shape of a normal Quaver before we finish up this lesson I want to show you one quick Rhythm that you're probably going to encounter soon is when you have a dotted Quaver and then a semiquaver and so that's what that would look like it's a pretty common Rhythm your homework Tas this lesson is I'm going to give you some notes and you're going to identify where the bot lines will go okay so that's your task looks a bit chaotic but if you count it you'll be fine remember that for this beat here you have one Quaver a semiquaver and this is also a semiquaver since it's half of a Quaver so that would be worth One Beat besides that great job today and I'll see you in the next lesson welcome back everyone to this lesson and in this video we're going to apply the things we've been learning over the last few lessons about notation values time signatures and bar lines and how we can combine that all together to advance us much more forwards towards reading music more confidently so here in front of us we can see some music that I compose for you which is going to sound nice and it's also going to be um at the right level for you right now there's actually a few different things we can see here that we're not used to seeing the first is that we obviously have some Quavers we have some crotchets minims even a dotted note um we have Sharps and flats and even our time signature looks different here we have a a c-shape in a time signature and that means it's in 44 this symbol is called common time it is simply another way of showing 44 that symbol was actually originally used in their Renaissance period and the only other variation of the symbol that you might find is when you have that same c-shape but with a line going straight down through the middle and this means that you're playing in 2 two so when we look at a new piece of music to start learning we want to pay attention to a couple things the first is what the rhythms are looking like in the right hand and in the left hand and any particular black notes that we should watch out for so in this example we have a c in bar one so the third note there it is fa a so that's CP and then the next bar we have an fshp and in the second to last bar we have an A flat so we have a C sharp the F sharp and an A flat we can see in our left hand that we have a lot of very low notes we have several Ledger lines to show that it's really off The Stave there but if we if we count the distance we'll find that they're actually eight notes apart which means there's an octave shape in your left hand so since we're talking about the left hand we may as well start with that so we know the first note in that left hand on the top end is going to be an a because we have all Cy grass so that's going to be an A and since there is a c in the space directly above that we know that the a is going to be down here because the C is directly above it which means that it's an octave below middle C which is in that position which we know so it's going to be this a we're playing it with their thumb and you can even count down from that note all the way down so 1 2 3 4 5 6 78 meaning that we're playing it in our octave shape now if this is too low for your piano then you can just use this an octave higher of course if that was how it was being notated it would show differently on the music but you know of course if your piano doesn't go that low just use an octave higher the next two notes is going to be a c because we have all cows and then we have a sharp symbol next to both of them so that's going to be over here and then our next one we're going up by one note and that's going to be a d and this is going to be our first semi brief now these two so far are minims so we're going to hold them each for two beats remembering that our time signature is 44 we would count it as 1 2 3 4 and our next note is a semi breath on an octave d 2 3 4 so we have the first half of the left hand down if you were doing this yourself you would have the option of doing you know a good chunk of the right hand first or a good chunk of the left hand first um and then learn the other hand and try and put them together we're going to go go through together a lot more specific techniques on how to tackle reading sheet music step by step in a later lesson but for now let's take a look at the right hand we have an A that is above middle C so that's going to be over here and you can see we have a small one directly above it this is called the fingering this tells you which finger on your hand you're going to be playing that note with this is not to be confused with the bar number you can see on the very left hand side above the treble Cliff we have a also number one this is telling us what bar number this is just to make things easier on to how we count it that first bar would be bar one and then two then three and then four so we have a four bar piece over here so I'm going to play that a with a one and I can count that that's going to be a b in our next uh note but I don't have to count it you know every good boys because I know that's simply one note directly above there's nothing else it could be there's nothing in between so it has to be a b now if that sharp was not there we would be playing a C but because there is a sharp it's going to be a C sharp and our next note is the D and we're playing it with a one because of the fingering that's instructing us to do that so we're going to switch our thumb over and then naturally we would continue on the E with our second that's going to be for crotch its worth so 1 B and then back down to a d for one beat so alog together our notes without really looking at our value right now it's going to be an a a b a c sharp and then a one on D an e and then back down to D now let's apply our knowledge on values let's count our time signature first because that's going to make it easier we have four four so four crotchet Beats worth per bar 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 so you can see that in those beamed Quavers each note is going to be half of a beat so two Quavers per beat 1 2 3 4 and then on those crotchets we obviously playing them once per beat so have a go at playing just that right hand section of 1 2 3 4 and you can go much slower if you want for example 1 2 3 4 but just pay attention that you're not cutting any of your notes too short or overextending them for example if I count 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 that would be example of cutting it too short you also don't want to hold it for longer than it's specified if crotch it is worth one beat so you're not going to hold that down for two beats or four beats for example so one more time this is what it's going to sound like one 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 so pause the video now and have a go with that and then come back when you're ready so the next bar in our right hand is actually a little bit tricky than what we used to when it comes to reading music so let's do that together we have an F which at this stage will be played with our third finger because once we finish the first bar it makes sense to play that with the third finger these are decisions that you will get used to making on your own fingerings show you what finger to play the note with if it makes a significant difference to how you play it because we're finishing on that D in our first bar it's very natural to play with the FP and that and that's the reason you're not going to have the fingering for that so we have an f and then up by one note which is a g we have an F again and then an e now the reason I say this is an FP again is because we have a sharp symbol in the same bar and we're playing the same note again so let me repeat that if you have a sharp or flat symbol on a particular note in a bar if that same note repeats it automatically that same sharper flat it does not have to give you the same symbol again so normally people would look at that and think okay FP then we go to a g and then it's an F natural that would be incorrect because we have a sharp symbol in the same bar if that FP was in the bar before and we have an F in the following bar it's going to be an F natural but because we have an F in the same bar and we are repeating an F in the same bar it's an F so hopefully that makes sense let's go through our notes again from bar one we have and then bar [Music] two then let's take a look at that Rhythm more closely we know that a dotted note which is our first note on the bar here is going to be adding half of its value so if a crotch is originally worth one we're adding half of that so this crot is going to be worth one and a half at the beginning stages when you're still getting used to simple and even until you get to more advanced rhythms you should count these rhythms out loud particularly with a time signature now to make it easier for yourself you can subdivide the time signature so for example one and two and three and four and one and two and it'll keep going like that and you're adding the end in between each beat to signify sort of half of that beat so since we're in crotchet beats each end is worth a Quaver because now you've doubled how many beats you're counting each beat is now essentially sort of like a Quaver beat the reason we're going to be dividing our time into these Quaver beats is because our dotted crotchet is adding a Quaver beats length onto that crotchet because half a crotchet is worth of a Quaver you're essentially holding that note down for one crotchet and one Quaver so if we counting in Quaver beats it's easier to be more exact with how long we're holding it down for and when we come back in so that second bar would actually be one and two and three and four and without having practice or experience in more complex rhythms it's hard to just instantly say oh I'm confident in the timing of this Rhythm which is why at the start you should clap it or say it out loud so if we were to clap this bar one and bar two the right hand it would be 1 2 3 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 four remembering our two semiquavers in this bar are going to be much faster than anything else in this piece I'm going to do the same clapping technique but counting in Quaver beads so one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one and and two and three and four and so we come in on that g semiquaver on the end it's obviously going to be on the half beat because we're extending that crotchet by one and a half I'm going to play bar one and bar two one more time for you in the right hand and then I'd like you to practice it on your own while counting alloud one and two and three and four and 1 and 2 and 3 and four and 1 and 2 and three and four and remember to add in the end after the four otherwise counting from four to one is one crotchet Beats worth unless you're counting in you know normal 4 four so once you're comfortable with that especially with the fingering and staying in time then come back and we'll start applying the left hand so we know our left hand is going to have two a's in octave apart we're going to hold that for two beats one 2 then to C sharp 3 4 and then to D for four beats 1 2 3 4 now pay attention here on the grand Stave where these notes are actually lining up you'll find that the left hand and the right hand are lined up quite accurately to where they're going to be playing at the same time so in the right hand our first note the a is going to be played at the same time as those two A's in your left hand so you start like that now we can see that the second pair of notes in our left hand those two c shs are going to be played at the same time as our e in the right hand so the second to last note so playing these two hands together you can see and hear this difference [Music] then in our second bar we can see the same thing our first note is aligned with our left hand notes so I'm going to play that and because that's going to be a semi Reef that's the only thing we play in our left hand because you can only have four beats per bar and a semi re is worth four so now I'm going to count in four four and I'm going to play those first two bars 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 so counting in our caver beats is what it sounds like one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and before you start really focusing on staying in time and Counting with a metronome or out loud it's very important that you are comfortable first with your actual finger technique and what notes you're playing because if this is not down first then everything else will be much harder you have a weak foundation and it's going to take you longer to get comfortable with this section so for that reason make sure that you are very comfortable in what notes you're playing you know especially on the fingerings so that transition into our thumb for the D and for how long you're going to be holding these notes for then when you're confident in that add in the metronome count out loud if you like whatever worked for you so pause the video now and practice those two bars try as best as you can to stay in time and especially hit the right notes does not have to be perfect at all but just so that you get the gist of how you're playing it so obviously go as slow as you need to I'll see you back here soon so hopefully you have now an idea how we are putting these mechanics together we hopefully have our first two bars down and we now have two bars left what you'll be doing is trying to play these two bars on your own and then I'm going to show you how they're actually played now I want you to take your time with this don't rush too fast just to get out the way because being able to independently apply what I'm teaching you is going to really really help you because I'm not going to be with you when you're practicing your own songs I'm trying to give you the tools so that you're self-sufficient in this manner so just attempt these last two bars on your own I would suggest that you take one hand at a time being confident with the notes and fingerings and then you can add them both together paying attention to where these notes start together on the grand save all right so have a go of those two last bars just try it and then come back when you're done so let's explain these last two bars we're going to first look at the left hand and we can see that our first note is sitting just underneath the bottom line on The Stave and that bottom line we knowe is a g for green bus to drive fast always so one note below a g is going to be an F but we have a symbol that it's going to be an FP so I'm going to go to an f and I know that's also going to be an F in the low side but you can count that yourself if you like so that will be held for two beats because we have a minim and then our next pair of notes is going to be an A flat also for two because all Cy grass and then the last semi notes will be on the a [Music] natural now the reason this is an a natural and not a flat is because the flat sign is before the bar where the semi brief is so if you actually had another a natural not take ated on the same bar as the a flat was previously that a would automatically be in a flat but because our a is outside of that bar and it's in a new bar on its own and there's no indication if it's an flat or sharp it is going to be a natural so that will be an a natural so combining those two bars in the left hand we have one 2 3 4 1 2 3 four in our right hand we can take this melody apart one note by note so we have an A we're going to naturally start with our thumb unless we find any need to change if it's more comfortable any other way then we have a b I'm just counting up by one note then we have a C sharp similar to our first bar then a d now I would consider playing this D with a one if the notes were going to continue higher up and it would make sense to switch to that one but because our notes are going back down and we have the room for on our fingers we do not need to swap on that D you'd also likely find a fingering number to indicate an important change in your Technique so so far we have an A B C Shar D with number four then we're going back down to B then a with our number number one and then an A flat with number two so I'm going to put my finger over there and then the last bar will be an a natural because it's outside of that bar with the flat so alt together a bit quickly counting in four four we have 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 now adding in our left hand paying attention to where the left hand comes in in conjunction with our right hand notes we have 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 I could do the exact same thing but counting in our Quaver beats which is actually a variation of 88 because it's technically 1 two 3 4 5 6 78 and each beat is a quiver beat but because the song is and 44 we're counting it sort of as a variation of 44 although it doesn't make that much of a difference so that would be 1 and 2 and three and four and 1 and 2 and three and four and so I'm going to play this for you from beginning to end counting in four four and that's going to be your homework task to get up to near that standard before you move on to next lesson so we have one 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 so you don't have to worry too much about um your finger pressure or your volume as long as you're not being extreme with it that you're not smashing in your keys or you're not so quietly soft that you can't hear it somewhere in the middle ground the important thing here is that everything made sense and you can actually understand what's happening and why even if you don't feel incredibly 110% confident in doing it because that will come with practice again the important thing is that you understand what you're looking at so remember don't move on to the next lesson until you are comfortable with that so your extension task is to play that but with a metronome on now you can set this metronome to 44 or to 88 depending on if you want to count in 1 2 3 4 or in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 which is equivalent of 1 and two and three and four and so you can pick and that's going to be the extension task so don't move on until you've at least done the normal task and besides that great job this lesson and I'll see you in the next one all right welcome back everyone to this lesson and in this video you're going to learn about rests now rests are very important because so far according to what you know you can never stop playing you know that you have note values and each of these symbols mean that you hold the note down for different lengths of time or beats and how that conforms to the time signature and the bar we know that if you have a time signature of let's say 44 you cannot exceed four crotchet beats per bar and you can also not have any less than four cretes per bar when you're not playing a note AR rest will be symbolized to tell you for how long you're resting for to make up the missing beats in the bar to add up to the time signature so in short rests are symbols that tell you for how long you are not playing anything you're resting so rests are actually very well connected to note values which we learned earlier we know that we have crotchet minims you know Quavers Etc so essentially for each of those note values you have a rest symbol version of it and this includes dotted notes so the first one I'm going to draw out here is the crotchet rest and this is going to be you know one of the most common rests that you'll see for those of you who would like to draw this you are essentially having a slanted Zed shape and then a c shape now that would be one beat and this corresponds directly to a crotchet note so every time you see this symbol it's saying you do not play anything for one beat this is definitely one of the most unique shaped symbols so it's very easy to identify as a quet rest because nothing else really look like it for the next two symbols I'm going to draw out for you I need to draw a small Stave and you're going to see why in a second so here we have two very similar looking rests we have for the minim rest on the third line a small black rectangular shape that is sort of facing upwards and then for the semi Bri rest we have the same rectangular shape pointing downwards now obviously when you see the minum rest exactly the same worth as a minimum you're resting for two beats the same goes for the semi breeve you exactly correlate it to the actual note value itself when you see this symbol you're resting for four beats the reason I drew these two together is because I want you to look at them both side by side in beginners these two symbols are very commonly confused because they can't really remember which one is going to be a minim and which one's going to be a semi brief now the most common way for teachers to teach their students on how to remember these is to picture a right side up hat for the minimum rest and an upside down hat for the semi brief rest and you can kind of see it but I personally don't like using this or teaching this to any of my students because there's no really correlational link between that analogy given and the symbol itself how can you know if an upside down hat is going to be worth four or two I'm sure it's very possible to make a link but for me it's kind of over complicating it and I've actually made a much easier way which I'm sure somebody else is also thought of so for this method you have to actually pay attention to the line which the rest is on you can see for the minum rest it is on the third line and this is irrespective of the cleff for any of these rests okay it doesn't matter if you're in trouble or base or any other cleff whereas the semi rest is on the fourth line so it's on the higher line so here that correlational link could be when you're on the lower line when the rest is connected to the lower line it has lower value okay so two beats when the rest is on the higher line it has higher value so four beats for me that's the simplest way that I could think of and will not cause you any confusion very easy to remember now Quaver rests work in a very similar fashion to actual Quaver notes we talked about the Quaver family and how when you have a Quaver if you want to make a semiquaver you add another tail so if I do that here you have a semiquaver so if I wanted to make a semiquaver rest I'm going to add essentially another line which is sort of correlational to the other tail if for some reason you were to ever find a demi semi Quaver rest exact same concept you add another line and another line here and that would be 1 over8 however don't worry because Quaver rests are a lot more common than semiquaver rests so the last thing I want to mention is the appearance of dotted rest these work in the exact same way as dotted notes do if for example you found a dotted crotchet rest which is fairly common that would be 1 and a half beats which equates exactly to the same worth as a dotted crotchet because half of a crotchet is a Quaver we're adding a Quaver's length onto the crotchet if we had a dotted minim rest for example that would actually turn into three beats which would be the the same as a dotted minim because half of a minim is a crotchet that's why it's going to turn into three if these symbols are easy for you to remember then we're going to move straight on to a very quick quiz or if you feel like you'd want to spend a bit more time remembering these I would highly advise you that you draw them out it'll take you about 30 seconds to just flip it over and check yourself so if you're fairly comfortable with these we're going to go straight on to a quiz okay so the first question is what would this rest be symbolizing so we can see that we have our rectangular shape on the fourth line so thinking about that analogy that I gave you earlier that's going to help you distinguish our two main differences here so if you don't already have it this is going to be worth four beats because it's symbolizing a semi brief the reason is we are on the higher line so the fourth line and it's going to be symbolizing a higher value whereas this one is on the lower line and symbol I izing a lower value so this one is going to be worth two beats so this is going to be corresponding to a minim note so for the crotchet beat over here think about what is going to be worth and what the symbol is going to be looking like you don't have to perfectly draw out the symbol but just when you see it you can recognize it so the crotchet is going to be worth one beat and the symbol looks like a slanted Zed with a C shape underneath all in one stroke so that would be a crotchet rest now we have a value of one qu so what note is going to be worth one quarter four of something will add up to one crotchet beat so the answer is a semiquaver so there we have our semiquaver and for the semiquaver rest I can draw a little dot here a little seven shape and so far this is just a Quaver rest but to make it a semiquaver rest I'm going to add another line here in the same way that we add another tail so hopefully that made sense and these are symbols that you can recognize easily we are going to obviously be seeing this and sheet music together so even if you don't have full confidence you'll get better the more we go through this so now I'll draw for you a bar or two so we can see a practical example of what you might find in actual real sheet music okay so here we have a line we don't have any bar lines or a time signature yet and because I wanted to take a second here and explain to you common time which I touched on last lesson if we have a time signature of 44 so four crotch it beats if you see this symbol just a c-shape that is the Renaissance Era symbol to signify 44 so these actually have absolutely no difference except a visual difference I also mentioned there's another symbol which is a c-shape again but with a line straight through the middle this would be signifying 22 so two minim beats per bar no difference here in terms of how you play or count it is just a visual difference these symbols are going to be more common in sort of classical music that you might be learning and these two will be more in modern shap music but it depends on whoever created the score that you're reading from before we get to our main exercise I wanted to show you one thing that is very important that you know our semi Bree rest right which we know as you know we have our five lines and it's going to be on the top line so the fourth line we know that's a semi brief rest which is worth four beats but the special thing about this rest is that it's also known as a essentially a full bar rest meaning although this is actually worth four beats because it's a semi brief rest this can be used to fill out an entire bar if there's nothing playing in the bar so even if you're in 34 which can only have three beats per bar a semi brief rest can be put here to signify nothing is playing in that bar now you might normally think we'd have a dotted minim rest to signify exactly three beats per bar to fill this out mathematically but because of this specific rest can also be used to fill out an entire bar it doesn't actually matter what the time signature is under the condition that there is nothing in that bar if you have even one semiquaver in the bar it would have to be accounted for and the rest would change so just something to alleviate some confusion because when you do start reading sheet music you're probably going to find this and you're not really going to know why so that is why so in our first part we have a g in the left hand so base C all C grass and we have a minim so to help you visualize the time signature in the bar we're going to draw out the time signature essentially so we have three crotchet beats per bar so I can really just draw three crotchets and that would be all the beats that you can use in this bar and that would repeat again for the second bar and every other bar after that because a minim is worth two beats we can cross out these two and we're left with one crotchet beat for that reason we are going to add in a crotchet beat rest because that is just the most logical way of doing this you're not gonna find like four semiquaver rests to count for one beat like that just doesn't happen Okay so in our second bar we have a Quaver and we have two crotchets now in a time signature of 34 three crotchet beats these two are immediately canceling out these two so very simple as for our Quaver here it is worth half of a crotchet so you have to fill out half a beat to make this musically correct for that reason we're going to add a Quaver rest right over here to signify half a beat of rest so half a beat plus half a beat would cancel all that out the goal is to take the time signature and make sure that everything in the bar cancels out the time signature so that everything is even and musically correct now when you're reading sheet music and you want to be more clear in your head how the Rhythm goes we should Clap the line or the bar this means we're going to make a lot less mistakes when we come to play it because the rhythm is now clear if you're getting the Rhythm wrong on even one bar that's probably because of a small error like you're playing a Quaver for too long and every time you see a Quaver off that it's going to be too long and generally the whole Rhythm of the entire piece is not going to be really on point we're going to do these clapping exercise together later but just to give you a little preview for this example we would have one 2 2 3 1 2 3 obviously with clapping it's a bit hard to listen and be clear on exactly how long you're holding a note for but of course you'd be holding a Quaver down for half as much as you'd be holding a full crotchet 4 like I said we'll be doing these kind of things together soon but that's the gist of it if you followed and understood what I explained in this video when you find rests in sheet music that you're going to read you will be able to understand them but what I'm about to to explain to you now is a bit more advanced it's more to do with Theory and exactly why rests are grouped differently for example why would we not use two Quaver rest in other bars you might find a minim rest and then a crotch it but why wouldn't you just use a dotted minim rest I'm going to be answering those questions right now in the following explanation but again just to remind you this is not required for you to be able to read and understand what it's asking you to do this is more for the deeper understanding of why it's happening and that would give you more confidence when it comes to reading it so if you'd like to stop here that's completely fine and if you want to continue of course that's completely fine so time signatures like 24 34 and 44 are called Simple time signatures you have a lot more advanced and complex ones which you definitely don't need to know now but focusing on the simple ones we're going to take a look at specifically the top number so if you're counting in two or three or four there's a sense of pulse this underlying beat that some beats are stronger than others when you're counting into two you have one two one two so it would be strong weak okay so s stands for strong and W stands for weak one two one two for counting in three you have strong weak weak strong weak weak for four time it's a bit different you have strong weak medium weak strong strong week medium week this plays a big role in how rests are going to be grouped together but when it comes to actually playing music this is a more advanced technique which we're going to go through but you essentially adapt your playing a bit to accommodate for these strong and weak beats so there's two things you have to understand here sometimes you will join rests together and sometimes you will separate them in the instances where you will join rest together is when the beat goes from strong to weak or medium to weak essentially the more powerful beat will join with the weaker beat you don't see strong plus medium here and all the instances is just strong weak or strong weak weak or strong weak medium weak now the instances where you are separating these rests from each other is when you have a weak beat followed by a medium beat you do not join them you separate them also a weak beat followed by a weak beat are also separated now let me draw this out for you so it can make more sense so I've not drawn a stfe to simplify what you're looking at and we're working with rests so where notes are doesn't matter as much but let's say that this is one bar of three four so three crotchet beats per bar if you have let's say a crotchet beat as the first beat which is where strong is and remember we're choosing strong weak weak because we're counting in three like I showed in the previous diagram you now immediately cancel out this first beat because now I mean it's separate like there's nothing you can do with it so now you're left with two crotchet beats and these are both going to be weak now the reason you're not going to find a minim rest which is worth two is because you do not join together two weak beats you separate them that's this rule over here so for that reason you're going to have two separate crotchet rest beats let's say that instead our crotchet note is going to be on the last beat so one two three that's going to very easily cancel out the last beat and it would work the same way if this was too Quivers it doesn't matter as long as that beat is now canceled out so now you're left with strong and weak let's look over here do we separate them or do we join them we're going to join them because strong followed by a weak will be joined so you have two crotchet beats merg together we we need a TW beat rest so for that reason you're going to have a minim rest to join them together now what if you didn't have any notes in this bar at all and you only had to fill it up with rests you would not have a minim rest and then a crotchet beat rest this entire bar would be filled out by one semi brief rest you're going to see this happen about 97% of the time there are one or two instances where this will not be the case but it doesn't really matter that much because you're still going to understand what you're looking at okay so last example let's say you in 44 now you're counting strong weak medium weak you're going to have four crotchet beats so four four and we have one beat already filled out on the second beat so on the two now two Quavers together is still one crotchet beat so I'm going to cancel this out because there's nothing else we can do with it now on the left side we are stuck with a strong beat because on its own there's no rules of joining or separating there's no choice but to separated so it's going to be a crotchet rest Beat As for medium to weak we're going to join them according to this Ru of here where we join so for that reason you're going to have a minum rest over there okay so hopefully that made sense now when you read sheet music and you're seeing why rests are grouped in this way you will understand why and that's going to increase your confidence in a great all round sense so great job this lesson and I'll see you in the next one all right welcome back everyone to this new lesson and in this video you're going to learn about how to quickly read sheet music now what I'm about to teach you is a technique that will allow you to instantly get an idea for what note you're reading without having to count each and every single line in every space sometimes there are instances where you can just very quickly identify what note is asking you to play you're also going to begin to see some real life examples of rests and where they come in so that you can get used to seeing them especially when you go on to read your own music so this concept I'm going to go through with you today is called intervals and intervals are the gap or the space in between two notes okay so let's say that I was on C okay and I play C on its own this would be a a second from c a third from C fourth from C fifth 6th 7th eth now this looks very similar to the degrees of the scale which I described in a previous lesson now the difference is that degrees of the scale are very basic and exactly as we showed them last time whereas intervals can be a lot more advanced and currently I'm going to show you the simple version for the case of this example we're only going to be using this to judge the distance between notes when we read them in sheet music they're also not tied specifically to a scale in such a rigid sense as degrees of the scale do but obviously if your Melody is going to be essentially a scale then of course it's going to look very similar right so on the screen now you're going to see a bunch of notes so we have a middle C in our right hand I'm going to naturally play that with number one then we have a d back to C then e because that is the first line of the trouble so it's going to be Every Good Boy then we back to C then the first base that's going to be F because faces in spaces back to C and then it's going to be every good boy so it's going to be a g back down and so on so we we can continue reading this now for the stage that you're probably at right now you are probably not going to be able to instantly look at a note and instantly identify the note you're probably still going to be counting them you know based on their sentence like every good boy servs football face all cazic grass Etc Now by no means am I telling you not to use that but when you have particular cases when the notes are fairly close together you can use intervals now let's look at our first two notes that first pair of notes is going to be a c then a d now that c is going to be on a line that little Ledger line and the D is going to be on a space because it's in between two lines that would be an interval of a second so no matter what you're playing one note up from wherever you just were you're going to start to see a pattern here about how to identify these with much more ease our third interval is going to be from a c to an E now these are both lines our C sits on a line and then our e is sitting on the next possible Line This is automatically a third okay so Line to Line will be a third now since we know our starting note is c a third from C is going to be e we have any sharps or flat symbols in this piece so it's definitely going to be the right note so the interesting thing is that these interval jumps are mapped the same way on the piano as they are on the sheet music a c2e is the third now on the sheet music you have c space e on the piano c space e that's a third now let's move on a bit faster so the C to the f is going to be a fourth apart now the C is on a line and the f is on a space but it's not the next immediate space from C it's a space after that now there's some patterns in your mind that you can remember and picture that will allow you to play these notes with a lot more confidence and ease without having to count out every single note so it's going to save you a lot of time the first is that when you have a line to the next line it's always a third apart no matter what it is going to be a third apart whether that is the next line above or the next line below Line to Line will be a third so here we have a c and e they're both on lines is the next possible line whether you're reading from the c or from the e it's a third apart what about these two third apart third apart third apart what about spaces well it's the same principle if you have a space And Then followed by the next possible space whether above or below it is also a third so for example if you look at the screen these are all the next possible matching type if you will so say that you have these two types of notes either aligned notes or space notes if you have two matching types it will be a three or five so we have two lined notes they're matching okay it's not like we're mismatching we have it's not like we have a line in a space there're two lines so that's going to be a third apart because this would be a fifth AP part or even if I do it here this is going to be a fifth AP part third apart fifth apart it's very easy to tell the difference you can't really mistake that for a third apart because you can see obviously you have several notes in between these two whereas the G and B only have one note missing in between them same thing with spaces when you have two matching spaces it's either going to be a third or a fifth let's take FNA a we have two spaces there definitely not going to be a fifth that has to be a third apart that would be a fifth apart now of course you have two spaces like this that would not be a third or a fifth AP part but in this case there is no point in trying to count the interval Gap in between them because the time that would take you to do that you could have probably already very quickly identified it using a sentence so I know the first space is f and the last space is an e according to faces and the spaces this method I'm teaching you will allow you to play chords and Melodies much faster but if the gap between two notes are really large there's no point in trying to you know count the interval Gap you may as well just count the note itself now for mismatched types where you have a line and a space it's either going to be a second apart or a fourth apart so if I go from D we have a second apart because that's going to be from a space to line and it's very close like there's no way you could call this a four that is definitely two now a fourth part you have a space in a line with some gaps in between them what about line to space same concept the important thing here that you need to do to be able to read music fast is identify these shapes and patterns that you will come across and be able to respond quickly this is especially the case with gaps of seconds and thirds fourths and fifths you can get used to doing but seconds and thirds are the most important now here we can see pretty much the same thing but just to show you that this works in any note value of course it is not restricted to just you know crotchets this can happen with Quavers semiquavers semi Brees minims any kinds of values now you can see at the very end there we have a chord that starts on C it's easier to read Things From The Bottom because you're usually playing with number one and now you have fingers to fill out whatever you're reading next but in this case you can see we have three notes and they are each a third apart what does that tell you this is going to be a Triad and what's our root note it's a c so our bottom note there is a c third apart third apart that's it hold it down for 1 bat now here is the task of this lesson I've composed a very short piece for you so that you can practice these Concepts while also having a realistic taste of what sheet music might ask you to do now instead of going through this together very step by step and then asking you to play and then we come back and you check how you did I'm going to site read this as though I was actually reading this for the first time obviously I'm going to go a bit slower than I normally would but I'm going to explain to you my process so that you can see the order in which I do things and importantly why I'm doing this in that way so the very first thing I look at is that we are in 44 we have a normal double cleff in the right and a base cliff in the left so everything's completely normal so far I can see that we have a sort of repeating pattern in our left hand where we have a low note then two higher notes and it repeats this process but Shifting the note it starts on and then in the very end we have some Quavers and a Quaver rest at the start I'm going to start with my left hand because we have a lot of repeating notes so once I get that down I'm already halfway done with this piece so the first note is going to be an A in the low end because all Cy grass then our top note is going to be an a as well because on the top line green bu dry fast always then we have a middle C above that so it's going to be this note as well and I'm playing those two at the same time after I play the bottom a that middle C is normally supposed to be attached to my a since I'm playing them both in the same time in the left hand but sometimes you do find them in the right hand as for my fingering that I'm going to choose I could do 5 2 1 but an easier way since I'm playing my thumb here anyways I can do that and this way I don't have to stare at my left hand and hope that I land on the right note when I shift in this way I'm using my thumb as a pivot point as a reference point I'm going to move on a bit faster now so in our second bar we have the exact same pattern but shifted down by third so I'm going to go down a third I'm going to repeat that twice going up by one now to clarify I'm able to play these notes with confidence because I'm seeing that this shift down a third between bar one and two is mirrored not only in the bass note but in the top two notes so while our base note goes down from the a to an F so we're third down so does our two notes in the top and I can see that just visually by the pattern of them then from bar two to three we see the same thing happening our base note is going up by one note so by a second and that shift is exactly the same in the top two notes in our left hand so for the last bar I'm just focused on getting the correct notes I'm not going to worry too much about Rhythm for now and exact timing of when I come in because I'll do that later and just need to know what those notes are so I can get used to playing them I can see that these first three notes are going up in thirds each so if I just get the bottom note down I'll be able to easily play the next two so counting from the bottom line is is G for green buses a third down to that ledger line will be e and a third down even further to the next Ledger line will be a c so that means the next note is a third apart next note is a third apart and the last note is going to be e for all cow's eat so we have I'm making a mental note here that it's going to be difficult to reach that note if I keep my fingers Frozen here so for that reason I'm going to add some wrist movement you can see how my fingers are not stuck here that way I can reach that top e Now quickly looking at your right hand I can see our top note is a C I'm playing it with number five because I don't see any notes higher than that c in this piece in the right hand I'm ignoring that middle C because I know this going be played with our left hand so C going down by second don't even need to know what that's called I just know it's going to be a second and then first line can play that with one it's worked so far then second line is a holding that for three beats then I'm going to play a B down by second then to a D since that's obviously one note below the E and then up by second to that e so now I'm going to play that but count ing it and especially accounting for those rests so I'm not going to play for one crotchet beat whenever I see that rest so one 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 now very important for me to mention but if I had the sheet music on paper in front of me as you would when you start to read actual sheet music for songs I'll just make a little note that I'm playing a certain note with a certain finger just so I never get confused and I can keep consistent with my fingerings that way my muscle memory will improve since I'm not changing what fingering I'm using so for example I'll put a little number five on top of that top C to remind me I'm playing it with a five now before I join hands together my focus is largely going to be on my right hand therefore I'm going to try and get my left hand to be sort of automatic I don't have to pay that much attention to it thankfully our left hand are mostly repeating notes that just shift position so I don't have that much to think about so I'm going to be counting 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 One and 2 and 3 4 I'm going to come in on the one end because we have a qu rest at the start so for half a beat I'm not playing anything in my left hand so if I subdivide my four crotchet beats per bar time signature I can do one and two and three and four and one and two and that will let me come in on time so now that I'm comfortable with playing my left hand I'm going to try and play these two together especially noticing how these notes are joined together vertically we can see our crotchet left hand is going to be vertical with our crotchet rest in the right hand so when that so when I'm resting in the right I'm playing it in the left you can see specifically why I'm timing things the way I am because a Tempo or speed is not notated here I can pick my own speed that I think would be comfortable 1 2 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 and 2 and 3 four so guess what your task is going to be you're going to play this exactly like I did at your own pace before you move on to the next lesson make sure again I am reiterating at your own Pace do not think that you have to go as fast as I did if you went twice as slow but M maintained consistency that is completely fine and completely acceptable make sure you're first getting comfortable with what notes you're playing and what fingering you're going to use so that you can stick to it then you can be more precise with your Rhythm then once you're especially comfortable with your left hand you know not taking up a lot of your focus you can try adding these two together if you want an extra Challenge and to make this sound really beautiful you can try adding in the pedal that's going to be your extension task and it's nothing complicated you just put your pedal on at the beginning of a bar remove it at the end of the bar put it back on beginning of a new bar remove it at the end so for [Music] example now because your pedal is on especially for that doted minim where it's supposed to be held for three beats you're going to end up making it sound like it's held for four beats so even if you just tapped the note for like a Quaver's worth it's going to still prolong for that time only use the pedal once you're very comfortable we're doing the actual task first so I'll see you next lesson and great job today all right welcome everybody to this lesson and in this video you're going to be learning about key signatures and how they relate to sheet music you're going to learn how to identify this key signature and be able to see the effect it has on the upcoming notes the reason this is so important for you to understand is because if you have a key signature which I'll show you in a second notated and you're not following it when you're actually reading the music a lot of your notes are going to be wrong and you're not going to know why now first of all to recap we know that a key signature is the rule that tells us what flats or Sharps we're going to have in a scale but what does scales have anything to do with sheet music well the first thing you need to understand is pretty much every single song that you will ever learn is based on a scale otherwise known as a key and key is really just Shand for key signature since that's the main part that we're going to be focusing on now beforehand we have done some scales together such as D major a minor C Major G major F major and I've given you the formula on how to create any scale that you would want to be up to play remember scales can either be sharp scales or flat scales you will not have some Sharps and some Flats in one scale they'll either be all sharps or all Flats now here's the important part as we know a scale you know with a key signature describes to us What notes we have available to us and what notes we do not at this stage you're not going to be able to calculate the key signature from just any scale because I'm going to give you that formula later but for now you need to know that for example D major has a key signature of F and C sharp so let's say the piece you're studying is in D Major you would actually find an f and a c sh symbolized in your Cliff this would then be followed by your time signature which let's say is 24 and then you would start to have your music then you have your bar line and then you would SE on all right so now we have some notes on The Stave we have an f and we have a g followed by another G if you just took these notes and play them as they are you just be playing an F natural a g and another G natural but in our key signature we have an F SHP and C sharp so what this does is that every single time that you find an F or a c they're automatically going to be Sharps okay so in theory you're never ever going to play an F natural or a c natural we know that this song is going to be based on D major which it means if you played the D major scale using the formula given to create any scale you're going to become very familiar very quickly What notes you're playing and what not you're not playing you know for example you're not going to play a G sharp or an E flat you're going to play only F and C Shar as your black notes so you can now see why we started with our scales initially then we move on to this point because an F sh is in the key signature you will never find an F with a sharp next to it right you'll never actually find the symbol next to the note because that note's already in a key signature let's say that instead of D major we were actually an F major which has a key signature of a B flat so you would simply just find a B flat symbol on you know the correct place and then any single B that you find ever notated will be a B flat automatically now here's a common misconception that a lot of beginners find themselves in they think that because they're looking at this particular F sharp it means that if you had an F down here for f a c if you had this F is going to be an F natural that's not the case this F and this C applies to every single fnc in any pitch the entire piano does not matter it only needs positions for the sake of organization and it's just easier and more identifiable because if it wasn't organized like this you would have a lot of symbols that you know it would be just hard to look at so we know that the key signature comes from the scale and the scale is a series of eight notes that say you know which notes that you are allowed to play however there are some exceptions you know you are going to find sometimes where your notes indicated are actually outside of the scale of this sort of rule if you think about it from the composer's perspective it's going to make a lot more sense if you're the composer creating a piece of music right and you're doing it by ear you're just playing around on some notes and you're thinking yeah I really want to play this note but wait it's not in my key signature I can't play it's not in D Major you know I want to play this GARP right which is not indicated in the key what can you do you're stuck right well this is where accidentals come in accidentals are essentially symbols that you find next to specific notes that tell the player this note is outside of the key signature these symbols can be Flats sharps or Naturals now let me give you an example we have a g over here right it's not a g flat it's not a G sharp it's just a g natural because it's not part of the key signature well let's say the composer wanted this to be a G sharp well you would basically find the sharp symbol right next to that note however this comes with a huge caveat that you must be aware of so please pay attention to this the accidentals that you find are specific to the bar that they are in okay so this is going to be a G sharp but this is still a g natural okay it is specific to the B that it was set in if the composer wanted this to be also a gsh you would find another sharp next to it but because this bar line is separating these two bars from each other that would actually be a g natural so that's an example with a sharp you can also find this with flats and Naturals so a natural symbol is basically that shape and it says this note that I'm connected to is a natural note it is not a sharp it's not a flat it's a natural it's going to be a white note so natural signs essentially cancel out any sort of of um sharpening or flattening of a note so it's definitely going to be a natural version if you found this next to the F over here which is normally going to be an FP considering the key signature if this note appeared over there that should be more in the line but if that note appeared there it's going to be an F natural it's going to be the white note and again this applies only to the bar if in the following bar you had an F on any pitch it's going to B and F because it reverts back to the default which is the key okay so let's move on the only difference between cleft changes when it comes to key signatures is where the actual symbols will be notated and that's because of the different note names of the lines so in treble our bottom line is e for every good and for base CLE is going to be G for green buses so if we put a base cff over here and we want to think of our time our um key signature so let's say we're an F major with a B flat green buses you would find the flat symbol over there then you would find your time signature and then you'd have your notes this key signature obviously meaning anytime you see a B notated on any pitch it's going to be a B flat the only exception to this is when you have a natural sign next to that b so that's going to be obviously the white note okay so here are some notes we have green bus's drive so DD a third down so that's if you have your keyboard is going to be a b and considering our key signature it's going to be a B flat then a second down that's going to be an A so hopefully you're beginning to see how these mechanics of sheet music um works and fits together particularly in coordination with the things that we learned earlier such as scales now we're going to go a bit more in depth into scales and key signatures and how you can more practically use these Concepts in another video but for now it's just important that you know how a key signature works and how it affects the rest of the noes you're going to be playing and the role that accidentals have also on the notes that you're playing remember when you're reading sheet music you are always in a key or in a scale even if you don't see any key signature it's going to either be C major or a minor this might lead you to think how can two scales have the same key signature this is a topic called relative majors and minors which we're also going to be covering so don't worry if these questions come up and you feel like you're not sure how they fit into this again no worries there as long as you're consuming and understanding the information that I'm intending you to learn in this video that's completely fine so your homework task is going to be a little bit different than you might think it would be although we are going to be practicing together a lot of music that contains key signatures I'm actually going to introduce you to something slightly different you may have noticed that the order in which we name um sharps are FL flat is actually not alphabetical we say you know F and then C why don't we say C then F since that's alphabetical that would make more sense right well there is a system to this and this system is actually a small Cog in the wheel of something called the circle of fifths for now all I want you to do is memorize the following so what you're actually looking at here is a sentence that will help you remember the order of Sharps here we have a bunch of letters which are the order of flats so let's stick to the shars for now as we have done in the past we're going to take simply the first letter of each word so f for father C for Christmas g d a e and B so that we can remember this order so Father Christmas goes down and escalator backwards and again you can change a sentence if you want as long as you keep the first letters of each word and for the flats we have b e a d g GCF so I personally remember this as bead like beads on a bracelet or on a necklace beads GCF I just remember the letters but you might want to think of it as um green cars fly for example but as long as the order is correct that's completely fine you're going to find out what the system is going to be used for in the circle of fifths but again all I want you to do is to just remember these two write it down if you want but as long as you can recite it from memory that's going to help you so so much all right besides that great job and I'll see you in the next lesson all right welcome everybody to this new lesson in this video you're going to learn about relative minors and Majors this is going to be a great tool and concept to have and understand because you're going to find this come up time and time again whether it be the relationship between chords or improvisation or helping you practice the right things for your song that you're learning it's actually quite a simple concept that can be very easily misunderstood so I'm going to try and explain it in the easiest way possible so we know that every scale has a key signature if we take C major there is no sharps or flats so that would actually be its key signature if we take G major which you'll see in the screen here you have an [Music] fshp so that's a concept that we can understand but for each key signature so if we take just the f as a key signature to work with right now there are two scales that can share that key signature one is a major scale and one is a minor scale and we call these scales relative majors and relative minors because they are related using that key signature now there's a very easy formula that you can use to calculate what the relative minor or major of a scale is and it depends on where you're starting if you already have the major you're going to be looking for the minor scale if you're starting on the minor you're going to look for the major scale right you're not going to find yourself in a position where you're starting on major and you're looking for a related major scale that shares the key signature cuz that doesn't exist so this formula is counting three semmit tones now if you're on major counting to a minor scale you're going to count downwards three semitones we have G major so I'm going to just put my finger on G I'm going to count three semitones not including the note I'm just landed on so one 2 3 so e I'm going to call this E minor I'm going to call that E minor because we went from a major looking to a minor so that's going to automatically be E minor so now we know E minor is going to share the key signature of G major which is FP so if I just play e to e with an F [Music] sharp that's going to be the correct way of playing it if you really want to double check that this is the right way of playing it if you feel any doubt or you're just not confident yet in playing your scales you can use the constructing formula to make the E minor scale and just double check that your notes are right so we're going to use t St t t St T so I'm going to go to e t s t t s t t that's definitely E minor scale and clearly there is only an FP in that so let's take a minor now you might not instinctively know what the key signature of a minor is because I'm still going to give you that formula very very soon and that's the same formula that I use and all the other high Lev people use to quickly know the key signature of any scale or the scale of any key signature so I can tell you that a [Music] minor dis played like so it does not have any sharps or flats now we also know that c major does not have any sharps or flats does this mean that these two scales are related well let's double check if if I'm starting on a minor scale I'm going to count up three semitones to go up to the major you know major imagining as being bigger and you're going upwards and minor being it smaller going downwards so a I'm going to count three semitones 1 2 3 so I can confirm that c major and a minor are 100% related and again if you want it to be extra double sure you can construct the scale individually to check that the know are correct using the formula previously given now I'm going to give you a very quick exercise here to do that'll help solidify this information in front of you here you have a key signature of FSH csharp and gshp as a quick side point you can see that this order of Sharps f c then G follows the same order of sentences that I gave you last lesson as a homework task Father Christmas goes then it would be down escalator backwards but here here you how Father Christmas goes so just wanted to point that out so you see how that also works now I'm going to tell you that the major scale for this key signature is going to be a major okay so if I start on a and you know you could either construct it um to hit the right notes or you can just play a to a and include all of those Sharps indicated so F C and G sharp [Music] your task is going to be to find the relative minor scale and play it try to use the correct fingering if you can you can do it either in your right hand or your left hand doesn't really matter so pause the video now and once you've tried and played it and you have an answer resume the video and I you know we'll compare answers all right so we're going to start on a because we know that we originally had a major we're going to find a relative minor so I'm going to count down three semitones 1 2 3 now we're on F so I'm going to count this as FP minor now again you have two ways of doing this you can either construct the minor scale itself using the TCT formula or you could go from F to F and include the key signature as shown so make sure you're adding the obviously f c and and gshp and that you're not playing the natural versions of those so hopefully what you have look something like [Music] this an interesting way to look at these relative majors and minors together is that they're actually the same exact notes but they're starting from a different place let's take a simple version let's take D major okay so just remember these notes so I'll actually play them all for you so you can sort of see them on the screen now these are all the notes of the D major scale now if I go to the relative minor which is B minor you can see that they are the exact same notes but just shifted down so it starts and ends on this different place and obviously if you started on the minor scale you can take those order of notes those exact notes and just sort of shift them up so you start over here now this is sort of delving into a territory called modes which I'm definitely not going to be covering in this lesson but that perspective is something that you can be aware of trust me although it might not seem like it right now there are many times you are going to find yourself in a position that knowing the relative minor or relative major of a scale is going to save you so much time and it's going to give you that sense of knowledge that sense of you know I understand how and why this is working and I can find I Can you know and I can take the right action for whatever problem I'm facing here you'll see some examples of this in future lessons so your task for this lesson is to take the following key signature I'm going to give you the major scale for it which is B flat major scale and you're going to play the B flat major scale you know with either hand then you're going to find the relative minor and then play that scale one quick tip for the B flat major scale is because you're going to be playing a bunch of black notes remember to put your fingers slightly forwards and into the keys rather than hovering them back because that's going to sort of contort your wrist so you want to put them in and [Music] then play them like that so if you can do that task correctly then you are completely prepared to move on so great this lesson and I'll see you in the next one all right welcome everybody to this lesson and in this video you're going to learn about the circle of fifths so what is a circle of fifths and how can you use it as a piano player well the circle of fifths is actually a diagram that is one of the most Central core most useful things in all of music theory that actually can be used for three main different things you can use it to see the positions of notes and sort of how they relate to each other you you can use it to see different chords and how they compare to each other and you can use them to see different keys or scales and see how they compare to each other now this third use where they contain the scales is what we're going to be focusing on because it has the most practical use out of it and it's a diagram which will show you what scale has what key signature and it's going to be a system for you to just have in your head and you're going to be able to instantly know the key signature of any scale major or minor and we also allow you to look at a key signature and identify the scale now the circle of fifths is actually quite an advanced Topic in fact if you took um graded examinations in music theory alone not even in just instrumental exams in just music theory it would take you about five or six years depending on the board before you can become confident with this concept but once you do understand this not only will it have so many uses for you and save you so much time you don't even know yet but you're also going to be in a completely different bracket of music musician because most other people don't actually know and understand how to use this I'm going to explain this in the most simple way possible so please make sure you're paying attention all right so let's get into it we have a circle right from the name circle of fifths okay so it is going to be a diagram of a circle now what about this concept of fifths right so what's going to happen is that we're going to just go to C okay since that's our sort of neutral note that we usually start a lot of things from and I'm going to put C just at the top over here with a little sort of kick now C is going to rest always at this position make sure that you know if you ever draw this you're not putting it on the side or here it's going to be in the top in the middle over here now if we count an interval of a fifth from C up you're going to get to G okay so C to D will be a second CTE will be a third and fourth and fifth until you get to G which will be a fifth so I'm just going to put put a g over there now a fifth up from G is going to be a d a fifth up from D is going to be an A A fifth up from a is going to be an E and A fifth up from E is going to be a b now you could continue on here but you're going to see why I'm actually going to go backwards from C so instead of counting upwards a fifth I'm going to count downwards a fifth from C A fifth down from C is going to be an F A ifif down from there will be a b then you have an e and then a and then D then G so I've just redrawn it so we have a bit more space now you can see we have a bunch of repetitions okay we've got a B of here and a b there an e here an e there an a here there there there and you can see these repetitions now what we have right now is actually an incorrect correct circle of fifth is not actually correct this would actually supposed to be and going to be a B flat this would be an E flat and a flat and d flat but why if you actually count a fifth down from F to B it's a it's a b it's not a B flat and that's where we start to get a bit more technical here if you want to count it more accurately you're actually counting seven semmit tones and you're because you're counting in semitones you're not including the note that you start on so if you're counting from C to F you don't start on C and call out one you go to B that'll be one then B flat two semmit tones then a three semmit tones and so on until you get F but if you count seven semitones from F you're going to get to B flat but I'm going to take the long way about doing this so that you can understand why it is notated in this way especially when we get the key signatures so these are all representing major scales that's a C major G Major D A E B major and so on now I mentioned that you have sharp scales and you have flat scales you'll never have them mixed together a scales key signature will either contain all sharps or contain all Flats now when you go from C which is neutral okay we know that c major has no flats or Sharps it'll always be natural make sure you get that perfectly clear in your mind now the more to the right you go you're going to actually add a sharp to the key signature I previously gave you the task of memorizing two sentences Father Christmas goes down and escalator backwards for the sharps and for the flats it's b e a d or beat G CF now let me just write that down here so you can see it okay so here you go father Christmas goes down and escalator backwards and b e a d or bead G CF unless you actually memorize it by green cars fly it's your choice so um the way that this is going to be integrated into the circle here is that like I said The more to the right you go the more Sharps you add so since C is always going to be um natural right no sharps or flats this is going to contain one sharp but which sharp well we're going to add the first one because this is the order of Sharps okay so we're going to add the first one so I'm just going to put here FP okay so this tells us that the key signature of G major is fshp okay so if I play the G Major scale the key signature will have an FP now what about D major okay this is two ticks away from neutral so we're going to add two sharps so f c Father Christmas so you can see over here father Christmas the key signature of D major is going to be F and C Shar now we're going to continue this up until the B over here so three ticks from uh neutral so three ticks will be three Sharps okay like three degrees away to the right we're going to do Father Christmas goes so the next one E major what's going to be the key s of e major think about it for a second should only take you a few seconds to think of an answer so if you don't already have it by now it's going to be FP csharp G sharp and D Shar this is why it's key to remember that sentence father Christmas goes down an escalator backwards so this is going to be four sharps and now what about B major that's going to have five Sharps so Father Christmas goes down n f c g d a f sh CP gsh D Shar a Shar I'm just going to put a symbol for five Sharps because I'm not going to have space to write every single one but you know exactly what I mean okay so now we're going to move on to the flat scales and you might be thinking well why aren't we going to finish the sharp scales why don't we just continue because surely you can continue to add more Shar right we still have so we've used five Sharps so 1 2 3 4 5 we can still add an e sharp and a BP to the key signature right there there should be a scale that contains seven Sharps but that's going to be a bit of a gray area which a lot of people get um confused by so I'm going to leave that to later so for now we're going to get the basics down for the flats so this is the tricky part because this is where the naming of the scale comes from so again very important that you pay attention to this our first major scale in the flat section okay so we're going to left now um we have F major right now F major is one tick to the left so it's going to be one flat now what's our first flat it's going to be B flat okay b e a d g CF that's our order of flats so the first one there is going to be a B flat okay now what about this here well is it going to be two ticks away from neutral so it's going to have two Flats so I'm going to put B flat and E flat now the reason that this is not called B major and instead actually called B flat major is because you have a B flat in the key signature if you actually called this A B major there are two things wrong with it the first is that there's already another scale called B major which has five Sharps and the second is you have a B flat in the key signature so it's saying anytime you come across a b you're going to modified instead of being a b you're going to flatten it to a B flat okay but if your colon is B major so you're starting on B natural B major it's contradicting itself are you going to play a B natural or is it going to be a B flat it can't be both okay so for that reason it is called B flat major I'm going to do the same thing for the rest of the scales and I'll give you a great example to help clear this up so the next scale our key signature is be EA because it's three ticks away from neutral so it's going to be B flat E flat and a flat so that's going to have three now we have an E flat in the key signature therefore this is not going to be called E major it's going to be E flat major right because you can't have a flat and a natural version of the same note in the scale now the next one again we have an A flat in the key signature so that's going to be called a flat major now this one's going to be called d flat major and I'm just going to put five flats the same I did here so that I can save some space so put five flats now this is where we start to get to this sort of gray area but first let me clarify why the system works in this way I think I've mentioned this before but to clarify when you play notes on a piano by ear it's the same note whether it's going to be for example A D sharp or an E flat they're both pointing to the same note it's got two different names but to your ear it's just the same note it doesn't matter but when it comes to notation and to music theory and when you're actually looking at notes they're different notes it's sort of like you take a d and now you're modding it you're sort of changing the quality of D to be a D sharp right it's not called an E flat it's a dsharp so that's sort of the difference between playing a note by ear and being it represented in music Theory even something pretty complex like B major scale right that has five Sharps it's got F CP gshp dsharp and a sharp but BP is not part of that key signature so are you playing a natural b or is it going to be a BP it's going to be a natural B Because 1 2 3 4 5 there's no B shop there so that's simply a perfectly normal B natural now when you're playing for example of a B major scale your starts going to be natural and ending going to be natural now one of the most common questions I get by my students when I explain this concept to them is in B flat major for example we have a key of A B flat and E flat now what if that B flat was actually an a sharp What If instead of it being called a B flat it was called a sharp would this scale be technically called A B major instead of B flat major now that's a very hypothetical question with a hypothetical answer hypothetically if that was was an a sharp yes that would be called B major but that does not exist like you will never find it for the main reason that Sharps don't mix in with flats and flats don't mix in with Sharps so I hope this is making sense and I'm about to explain this area here which gets a bit more complex I'm just going to remove these sentences here so hopefully you have in your mind because you're no longer going to see on the screen okay so exactly the same thing you know just sort of with a bit more space so we we still have other skills to discover that have more sharps or more Flats now I'm going to stick with the flats for now um B flat major has two Flats E flat major has three a flat has four d flat major has five flats and this would actually be called g flat major and it's going to have six Flats so this is going to be g flat major this will have six Flats now what are those six Flats I'm just going to write them all down here so there are all the six Flats b e a d g c flat you can see that g flat there which is why this is called g flat major and I've done the same for d flat and for B major with those five Sharps so it's very very clear now if you remember back to that order of flats we actually have seven total that we can use okay b e a d g c and we have F so what scale is going to have seven Flats well it doesn't seem like we have space for it but what actually happens is that we call this C flat major and I'm just going to add a little stroke there to separate them and C flat major is going to have seven Flats okay and we know what those seven flats are going to be so I'm just going to write them down all here and you can see that's actually going to go all the way down to F flat so this is going to be the most complex major flat scale and your limit is seven because you can't have eight you know sharps or flats in a scale so that's as far it goes but what about the sharps well what happens is the same concept I'm just going to draw a slash here and this is going to be called fshp major and that's going to have also six Sharps now what you can notice is that you're actually calling this by its opposite name right so a b is also technically the same thing as a C flat an fshp is the same as a g flat now a d flat is going to be the same as a C sharp major so that's going to have seven Sharps and then you would have it all written out here so I've just done it a bit more clearly here so that you can make a bit more sense now although this part looks incredibly complex and you know chaotic and it's hard to understand if you can understand this part you know up to like four sharps then this becomes very easy because it follows the same principle now it's going to be incredibly rare for you to actually come across music that is going to contain you know five sharps or five flats or more then that's completely fine if you at least have you know everything above my hand here solid and you can understand how it works you're good especially with you know how the more ticks you add the more sharp of flats you add and there's actually one more very simple thing I want to add that's going to make this even more useful and that's going to be relative minors so we know that for every key signature you have a major scale and a minor scale so how does that fit in here well we know that c major which has zero Sharps and zero Flats has the relative minor of a now I'm going to do this in lowercase so that you can very clearly tell it's the minor scale if you want to Quick Refresh on how to calculate the relative minor you're going to take you know the starting note of your major scale and not including that note you're going to count down three semitones and that note you land on will be the relative minor so three semitones down from G is going to be E minor because we're going to to land on E now three semitones down from D you're going to find yourself at B so B minor would have F and CP three semitones down from a major you're going to find yourself at F sharp minor okay so if you go to a then one semitone down a flat another one down G natural and another one down F sharp now the reason you're going to call this fshp minor and not g flat minor is because you're on the sharp side remember so you can't call the sharp scale by its flat you know other variation because G flat minor is a completely different thing now the relative minor of e major is going to be C sharp minor again it's not going to be d flat minor because d flat would suggest it has a d flat in it but but you're on the sharp side so it's going to be C now hopefully you get the idea of how this works so I'm just going to fill this in quickly so there you go relative minor of F major is going to be D Minor so D Minor will play B flat and we'll just cut to maybe F minor F minor will actually have four flats which you can see how different that is from F major um which is here which has one B flat so obviously make sure when you're referring to a scale you're calling it by the right name now it would be the same principle over here um you would just draw the relative minor for the one that you're intending to do it for so B major the relative minor will be G sharp minor and again obviously because it's on the sharp side you're going to use the sharp version so that's going to have five Sharps so now that hopefully you are understanding the concept of how this circle of FS work how can we actually use this how can we put such a pivotal you know great diagram how can we actually use it practically well there are actually many many different ways and having this in your toolbox to understand will come in so useful that you don't even know how much frustration you're going to skip but one of the most common ways that you're going to be using this is when you're taking a look at a new piece of music and you see let's say four sharps you can immediately look at that piece and say okay so I'm going to be playing an E major now there are ways to tell if a piece is in the major or the minor version which we're going to touch on later but let's say you know it's definitely actually an E major song that means that you as your warm-up could practice the e e major scale because your hands are going to be magnetizing to the correct notes right in the E major scale you have f c GARP and dsh so if in your mind you completely get rid of all other notes that you could play unless again specifically asked to by maybe an accidental then you have less things that you're focusing on you're probably going to make a lot less mistakes your practice is going to go a lot more smoothly and you feel like you can understand the piece it's not just you know a robotic recitation of what you're being told now this will apply for literally every song since every song will be in a key although I am going to give you a way to remember this circle of fifths in your mind so that you don't have to you know quickly go on Google and look at it you can actually remember and that's the reason I could tell you easily that d flat major has five flats and F major has one flat and I could tell you which Flats they are and if you ask me what's the key signature of a major f c gsh I can play the a major scale and obviously I could only do that if I understood it remembered it and applied it which we're going to do together before I give you a way to remember it let me just give you one great analogy on why this diagram is so useful so let's say that you're given um these special glasses and what these glasses do is that they remove all color from your vision okay so pretty much the entire world is just black and white there's no color right now then you're given a pack of let's say 50 colored pencils and then you're asked put this in order of lightest to darkest how are you going to do it right you're probably going to mix them up and put them in some sort of order but they won't be in a system that's the key you're not putting them in a system and for that example a system of lightest to darkest so the same concept goes here imagine that each of these scales represent his sort of a colored pencil if you learn the piano through traditional means and you took let's say your piano exams without studying Theory 99% of the time you're going to be trying so hard to remember each and every one of these scales and you're not putting it in a system it's like blindly putting color pencils in it in an order but there's no system it doesn't follow any sort of rule now imagine trying to memorize a key signature of every single scale here without the circle of fifths the only way you could do it is put them each into memory like practice it enough times that it becomes unquestionable in your mind if that D major has FN sharp and C now now although there are many benefits to doing that and to going through each and every scale and practicing them until you have the key signature in your mind it takes a long time to get to that level and this would take you not even an hour to understand you know it's funny sometimes I I talk with piano players and you know I can see them that they're reading um she music and you see the key signature at the beginning and and you know they're playing and I see that they're playing a lot of wrong notes and I'm saying hey what key are you in and they're like I don't know I don't know what key I'm in and they're just like missing out on so much understanding that would make literally every other part of music playing so much easier so let's get to how to remember this now the way I'm going to teach it to you is sort of a high-risk High reward way it's the way that I personally remember it the higher risk is if you misunderstand it or do it wrong the rest of it is going to probably be completely wrong but the high reward is that you'll remember it so so so quickly and be able to just drw in your head or on a piece of paper at any given moment until you've done it enough times in your head that you could just recite the key signature of Def flat major so this method you may have noticed that the order of Sharps and flats is actually very similar to the order of these scales so for example for the order of Sharps we have Father Christmas goes down and escalator backwards and you can see here that it also goes Father Christmas goes down and escalator backwards and for the flats you have b e a d bad so I would actually advise you to stop at G because in the sharps you probably already went up to B okay um because the C part of GCF in bead this is the C that they're referring to so it's the same one so that will um so make sure that you're not doing two separate Strokes for that they're referring to the same thing so when you're doing this just remember as b g so you can use this as a reference to build Out Your Circle of Fifths without having to count a fifth in your mind or on a piano so the problem occurs when you think of Father Christmas goes and asor backwards and you think of Father F as your neutral as your starting position not only is it in the wrong position but it has a flat in it so the rest of it will just be calculated completely wrong so what I'm going to do here is just do a quick brain dump and I'm going to show you exactly what I picture in my head step by step really quick so you can see how I think about this I'm going to do this quite quickly so obviously first thing I do is I picture a circle now the first thing I do and it's very important that you do this first okay C must be at the center C must absolutely be neutral it does not have flats or Sharps now from that then I can do the Father Christmas goes in always because I know father is going to be on the left of it okay make sure that f is not your neutral scale because that has to be C major then Father Christmas goes down and escalator backwards then I do b e a d and obviously we have our G bit tight on Space there but it's fine now obviously this will be B flat this is going to be E flat a flat d flat and G flat you know this is how you do it normally but I took the long way around so that you can see why they are called B flat E flat a flat and then since I know know that this is neutral and this is the sharp side I'm going to start with my order of Sharps which is the same order which I just did here so one sharp father father Christmas uh Father Christmas goes Father Christmas goes down Father Christmas goes down always and then we have the flat side so C is neutral F has one flat of b b e b e a b e a d b e a d g and I actually normally stick up to five because it's rare that you find things with more than five flats or Sharps but if you wanted to um this G flat so let me just do it here that g flat would also be um an fshp and so the F would have six Sharps and the g flat would have six Flats so that's literally all I do now if I wanted to find the minor relative of any of these I don't usually remember them as part of a pneumonic I just literally count down three semones in my head I just picture the piano so for example if somebody said hey what minor scale has four flats so four flats I I literally picked like this is what you're looking at my head okay so I'll just do it real time so I go C that's going to be neutral then I go f because it has one flat then B then e then a that has four flats so a flat major I know has four flats so what is the minor three sem tones down from a flat major that's going to be F so F minor has four flats now the more you do this you're going to be able to just recite it just like that is just going to be integrated as part of your knowledge now that's literally everything there is to this use of the circle of fifths now in this example we did it to look at scales and represent the key signatures and that's the most useful practical way you can use it like I mentioned you can use it to look at notes or chords which we're going to look at in the future lesson but they're built out in the same way it's still like it looks exactly like this you just don't see key signatures because you're no longer using it as scales but they still you know they they still have the same notes in the same places now your task here is going to be to memorize um essentially the circle of fifths very confidently up until five sharps or flats the best way to do this is just take a scrap piece of paper draw a circle and do it and then once you're done look back you look at this or look at some online version on Google Images and check it if you wrong do it again and obviously check what you did wrong and improve on it the extension task is to remember the entire thing so if you really want a challenge and you really want an in-depth understanding of how this works so that you're best equipped to take on any single challenge that would require this you're going to be well prepared so again that's going to be the extension task to memorize everything including you know all the seven flats and seven Sharps so I hope that made sense great job today and I'll see you in the next lesson all right welcome back to another lesson and in this video you're going to learn about Dynamics this is going to be knowledge that is going to allow you to play with more dynamic range which means which is the full spectrum of volume from very quiet to very loud now when you come to read sheet music you're going to find this information now these symbols are not going to be in English they're going to be in Italian and sometimes these words aren't actually fullon words sometimes they are symbols some are quite self-explanatory and others you're going to need guidance to know what they are now if you did not know Dynamics and you had no idea what they were even asking you to do when you come to play a song even if you're very comfortable with what notes you're playing and how to play them and your Technique is great when you come to play the song as even a performance your volume is probably not going to change it's going to stay sort of stagnant and monotone maybe you will find some variation in this dynamic range but as probably not going to be intentional it's probably you're coming up to a more difficult bit and trying to focus and maybe have some tension and you're naturally going to play a bit louder so so of course we want to avoid that but the general concept is applying Dynamics to a piece makes it sound like a 100 times more beautiful more flowy more dramatic maybe depending on the song it just gives it so much more depth so uh let's just go right into it there are two symbols that you need to know the first is a p the second is an F so p is essentially going to be quiet or soft and F is going to be loud or strong but let's just simplify and say this is quiet and this is loud so these are actually abbreviations of piano and 40 you might have thought it was English ISO Forte so yeah these are Italian words and so that's going to be soft just to be a bit more accurate and that's going to be loud and interestingly this is where the name of piano came from that's the instrument you're playing before the piano there were other instruments such as the harpsicord and a harpsicord was very limited in its dynamic range you could really only play at one volume until somebody invented the piano but at that time they called it the piano Forte and that's because it was a first variation of a keyboard instrument that could play both piano and Forte which gave the player a lot more control so then it you know just got simplified down to piano so moving on from that quick history lesson let's look at two other symbols which actually come directly from these two so we know that P is piano which is soft but sometimes you will find two P's and this would be called pianissimo so pianissimo and that would be very soft so obviously if you saw a p you're going to play soft but if you saw a what some people call Double P but panimo these two PS you're playing even quieter almost to a whisper now then you have the other side of the spectrum where you can find two FS so that would be foro and that would mean very loud so now we have even further ends of the spectrum now you might be thinking is it possible to have three PS or 3 fs and that is possible but very rare fortisimo and P Simo is fairly rare on its own but but having three FS or three PS is very rare but if you did that would be forc Simo and Pio now each sort of is sound is Italian for very so that would be very very soft and very very loud there's no actual rule that says you can only have this many FS or this many PS but you're not really going to find much past 2 FS or 2ps so now that we know what's on the extreme sides of the spectrum let's explore what's in the middle and this is is where you're going to find a lot of information that you're probably going to see quite commonly okay so we have piano and Forte and directly in between them you have an M now this m is going to be called Meto metso in itself means fairly or medium but seeing Meto on its own is actually not that common we only put Meto here because of what's more common which is metop piano or Meto Forte now these two are probably the most common Dynamic symbols that you're going to see so that would be metop piano and metop Forte you would not see them actually written out as words when you seeing music you would see the symbols so metop piano would be fairly soft Meto for would be fairly loud and this is the part where some people get confusion especially beginners who are still getting used to Dynamics now I've drawn it out in this order for a reason because metop piano is louder than piano okay some people think that Meto piano is actually quieter than piano it's like somewhere between piano and pimo but it's actually louder than piano it's fairly soft okay same thing with metaforte it's actually quieter than 40 it's fairly loud so so they're both sort of pointing between metso which is the middle point now I would strongly recommend that you actually pay attention to the Italian terms here and how to actually say it now I'm not saying that you need to be able to spell it or that you need to know Italian to be able to understand it but just look for the patterns because some people they would memorizes as P mp uh MF F double F triple F right but it's so much better and so much easier to remember especially when you have the meanings in your head again you don't have to speak or tell or spell out but if you know that metso means fairly or medium and piano means soft then you can put two and two together and you you'll have your meaning now when you come to see a bit more advanced Dynamics you're going to come across instructions and these are no longer going to be symbols but they're actually going to be written out in Italian and it'll instruct something for example [ __ ] dando which is to slow down so trying to get used to the Italian will actually help you in a long run to understand the more complex stuff now an important thing to note about these symbols and a lot of the things I'm going to be showing you with Dynamics they are not absolute which means that you know you can't tie them to a particular level of loudness DB and say that is absolutely you know 10 DB so it has to be this these are actually your own interpretation but it's just giving you a sense of the loudness or quietness now let me show you two more very interesting symbols you have this one and you have this one so the top one is what's called Crescendo okay I'll write out for you but it means to gradually get louder then you have this one which is diminuendo that is to gradually get quieter or softer okay so simple enough now the interesting thing about these two symbols is that they are variable okay so you can see that sort of the angle which it opens at the I guess you could say intensity will actually represent the intensity of this gradual loudness or gradual quietness so let me give you an example if you saw Crescendo which actually shows you this okay you're going to get gradually louder very quickly right you're not going to take your sweet time and gradually get louder you know to sort of make things very very slow and smooth this is going to be a very fast gradual loudness very steep now what if we changed it and instead you have this sort of shape so it's a much softer effect than if you saw this one which is sort of the average size the same effect goes for diminuendo now the interesting thing is that depending on the composer or the time which the piece was written there are different versions that you can have of this so the only other notable one is that you will find cres for Crescendo with a DOT next to it to symbolize an abbreviation of Crescendo and you're not going to find any symbols next to it you would just Find Crescendo with that abbreviation and that's it so that would mean apply a crescendo gradually get louder but it's complet you know it's to your interpretation you can make your own judgment and you can decide how much you want to do Crescendo bu but if you have um direction right so for example if you found fortisimo on one side and you found uh Meto Forte on one side so met Forte and you found this symbol then for Simo of course you're going to have to match to what it's asking you to do and this not only applies for you know the crescendo here but if you had the symbol so maybe again metaforte Crescendo maybe 40 right or fortisimo doesn't matter when you have specific Direction like symbols that tell you to what loudness you're going to you normally have the symbol um but when you find just the abbreviation there uh just with Crescendo it's actually less common to have these symbols now this works exactly in the same way for a diminuendo you would just find Dim with a DOT to say diminuendo that's the abbreviation of it and that would mean gradually get quieter let me just brush over a few things that are the most common mistakes that beginners use when they are learning Dynamics the first is their level their volume how loud they are at a particular Point especially when it's followed by more Dynamics so you know for example let's say that you have to start at panimo and by the way I will show you what these look like um in the sheet music soon just explain the concept here let's say you start pimo and then it says go to piano then it says go to Meto Forte and then fortisimo okay that pretty much doesn't happen by the way but let me explain the principle let's say that this is the range of your volume okay so the top line here is as loud as it's humanly possible for you to play and this part is as low as possible for you to play now I'm going to draw one in the middle to say that's the middle point for metso so say that you need to start a panimo which is just a whisper you should barely hear the piano okay that's how quiet this is but you start too high you start sort of near the metso area and then you have to go to piano right now you're already playing at Forte levels then you have to go to Meto Forte and you're already at fortisimo levels then you have to go to fortisimo and you have nowhere to go like you you're already at your m Ma so what you need to do is make sure that you're aware of the level that you're playing at now this sensitivity for sure comes with time and just practice um experience but you have to make sure that you're actually playing at pimo okay maybe leave a bit of room for pimo which again you're pretty much never going to see but there you go panimo then you can come up to piano slight increase then Meto Forte you want to come up here then fortisimo and you go up there so that be a pretty good way of adjusting your levels now we saw how you might be starting too loudly but you can also be too quiet this is also a common mistake so it's asking you to play at metso Forte which is directly between metso which I've symbolized here and Forte which will be around there so you're going to be in the middle right so Meto Forte this is where you should be right but instead you're actually playing over here which is the metop piano area are then when you come to do your Crescendo and you're supposed to be at Forte you end up actually being covering around Meto Forte so what you should do is start at Meto Forte go through your Crescendo so you can end at 4te I'm going to show you on the piano what each volume or dynamic level would sound like so you can get an idea for where your benchmarks are hopefully you're beginning to understand and get the gist of the symbols and of how Dynamics work and if you do I'm going to go straight to a quiz and I'm just going to test your memory and help things stick in better so just before we start the quiz if you're not ready and you feel like you're just completely lost with you know what each symbol means and how the Dynamics work especially with Crescendo symbols the menu Endo symbols I would urge you to rewatch that part and just make a note of it again when you write things in your own words it's going to help you remember it so we're going to take things step by step here we're going to start with um this symbol right so you can either pause the video or I'll just give you a few seconds now to think of your answer if you know it if you don't know it then I'll show it to you right now so this m is going to be short from metso and the f is going to be short for 40 so Meto 40 which is medium loud or you could say fairly loud now the next one I'm going to do is this here so we have two P symbols and that is going to mean you're playing at a certain dynamic range so if you don't have it already one p is short for piano and piano means soft okay so you have two P's it should be called panimo right and that means very quiet or very soft remember that the ISS the E part of the word means veryy so I'm actually going to write the Italian words also for this one here okay so the next symbol I'm going to give you is this one over here so hopefully you can save the Italian name of it and then say the English meaning so you can pay attention to the symbol remember that music was always readed from left to right it's pretty self-explanatory here you're going to be decreasing your volume right because sort of going in this direction always so this is going to be called diminuendo so that means that the inverse way of this direction so if you started with the small side and it got louder that would be Crescendo which is gradually louder now the next one I'm going to give you is should be very simple just an F symbol and that's going to be short for Forte so Forte which means loud so that's pretty much the basics down there's not actually a lot else to it than that for Dynamics now that you hopefully understand what it's going to be asking you to do from now on it's going to be actually doing it properly right working on your Technique and control and giving you exercises that will help you develop your sense of dynamic and what benchmarks are where so that you know Forte you know how loud you're playing that so a great quick tip is to remember that Meto 4 is about the same volume as when you're just speaking to a small room right um or when you're playing on the piano and you just sort of play it a normal volume it's probably going to be M 4 you're not trying to be loud and you're not trying to be quiet that's where most people sit but we're going to go it together anyways so your homework task for this lesson is very simple you're just going to put this in order of loudest on the top and quietest on the bottom super easy and if you can do this correctly then you can be confident in your knowledge of what it's asking you to do so then we just work out on your Technique so great job this lesson and I'll see you in the next one all right welcome back everyone to this lesson and in this video you're going to be applying what you learned on Dynamics in the previous lesson so now that you know the theory and you know what the symbols are what they mean what they're asking you to do how do we go about actually playing it on the piano what techniques can we use to make it easier how can we help develop our sensitivity to the volume um spectrum and maybe what what exercises can we do to help um develop this so those are the things we're going to be covering in this lesson so let's just get right into it the first thing we need to understand is what the benchmarks are for piano and for Forte those are the two sort of extreme sides of the um volume spectrum of course not including the really extreme sides like foro and piano but let's just stick with um piano and Forte if you can get a pretty good technique in actually playing in these two um opposite volumes then everything between and everything outside of that actually becomes a lot easier to digest okay so now let me demonstrate for you what piano might sound like on the piano so I'm just going to play some random [Music] Melody so that's just a sequence of five notes played softly right that's what piano means now if I do the exact same Melody but in Forte which is loud so just to reiterate here although you know of course those two are very different volumes and you can obviously tell them apart there aren't actual absolutes I'm just going to reiterate this from last lesson there are no absolutes you must understand this because you know students at the beginning especially try way too hard to you know try and get their volume exactly where they're trying to match it to so it is actually more about your Technique and your sense of volume and judgment than it is that you you know you play something and measure it and see the exact you know um decibels like that's that's not what it is so in fact have a go up playing that Melody just G A B flat c d as if we're almost going to play the G minor [Music] scale but we're going to obviously just stick to these five notes and have a go playing it at piano and then at 40 now if you want to get a bit more clarity on what counts as piano and you're not sure if you're playing you know pianis Simo or something so what you can actually do here is play that Melody and do it as soft as possible do it so quiet but remain consistent right try to keep at the same volume and make sure that you're not slowing your notes down because a lot of people they find it sort of natural to slow down when they're going quietly and speed up when they're playing loudly but that's not the case but that's something that will come with time now when you're playing this as softly as possible consider that pianissimo okay not panimo because that actually takes you know um development of control to get to but you know let's say call that piano so let's go with that would be my panimo now if I did the same thing in piano I just raise it slightly you know I'm playing soft but it's not you know to the extreme quietness which I did earlier so in fact pause the video now and just have a go of playing that Melody a couple times through until you can play it softly and consistently okay make sure you're not you know decreasing your speed or you know you're suddenly jumping in volume at some point they're all at the same pace and you can choose your pace one quick thing to mention is try not to you know try and be so exact with volume um to what I'm playing because obviously that's going to depend on you know what volume your phone is at or your computer is at and what volume my keyboard is at so just you know take it as a general guideline and if anything you can look at my technique and how I'm using my fingers right my wrist so use that in correlation with the earlier technique of you know Finding piano then go up to piano so I'll see you back in a sec okay so hopefully you got an ad gist for how to play softly and I want you to actually do that with the left hand as well so you can just do that you know in any octave range that you want and make sure to do the exercises with both hands from now on now what about Forte if we want to play at Forte how do we know that we're actually playing Forte and not you know meta Forte or metop piano or Forte CC Mo well again relying on just the volume of you know your speakers or you know whatever is not really going to be that accurate so what I like to teach is just like we did before play as loud as you can and consider that fortisimo all right and then you're going to dial it back a bit and that will be Forte make sure that you're not playing quicker or suddenly decreasing in volume on particular notes like none of this you know just keep it consistent so if you're going to try and play as loud as you can on that note you might do [Music] something like that then you're going to dot it back so that you're trying to play loudly but not that extreme so it probably going to sound something like this and that would be Forte so have a go at doing that in your right hand and in your left hand and remember to go slowly okay just because I'm going this fast to sort of move the lesson on a bit quicker doesn't mean that you have to play at exact speed as me so obviously take it at your own pace whatever is most comfortable for you to start with because we're going to take things faster um anyways so you might even go this low completely fine just as long as you're consistent with your actual um technique and your sound so I'll see you back in a second so hopefully that went okay and you're starting to get the idea and the concept of how to play at different volumes and that you know sort of where Forte rests and where piano rests now previously I did mention that metop piano and Meto Forte are the most common Dynamic ranges you're going to be playing in and that's completely true so how do we play mop piano and how to play M Forte now this one's going to be a bit easier than the previous ones because you're not really starting from scratch you're sort of you have your piano um and you have your Forte well Meto Forte is actually um usually the volume that we normally play at so when we're not trying to be loud or not trying to be quiet and you know probably up until this point you probably have been playing mostly at met 40 so if I play the c major scale really quick that is played at meno 4 now if you want obviously more guidance on that um just go to Forte and decrease it you know slightly until it sounds a bit more natural you're not really um you know trying to be loud or trying to be quiet so if Forte was then Meto Forte might be it is quite a subtle difference and it might not even come across that clearly over the speakers but I promise you that the the more that you practice and um play in different Dynamics especially when you learn songs you're definitely going to sort of develop your own sense of you know what I think this should be a bit quieter because um when I get to fortisimo I I don't have enough room so you know this process of uh refinement will come naturally now for metop piano you're going to take your piano volume and you're going to increase it slightly right it's not a big change um but it is audible Okay so if this is piano and you might barely hear that this could be metop [Music] piano again nothing Grand it is a slight difference but just like with men Forte don't worry about too much because it will sort of come naturally you don't have to actually think about it as much as you think you would be so what I'm going to do here is play the c major scale at pianissimo then at piano metop piano Meto Forte Forte fortisimo so you can kind of tell um the general gist of where each Dynamic fits in so let's start [Music] now a slight change in my technique that you might have noticed is that I'm changing which part of the finger I'm using when I'm playing at different ranges so you might notice that on your fingers um the part just beneath your nail is you know when you're playing on a piano is much harder and it's you know it's easier to play uh loudly with um but if you're playing very very quietly you actually want to move to sort of this um pudgy area on the fingertips because that is more sensitive now you know doesn't really work that well with the thumbs but for the rest of the fingers it does and it becomes easier to control your dynamic range one more quick tip here is to use your arms and not just your uh fingers right so your arms you know it carries weight and because you're using this weight to sort of set what range you want to be playing in your fingers has less uh work if you will hope that makes sense so you know for example if I wanted to play a forte and just use my fingers this is what it sound like now it is a lot of work my fingers but if I actually use my wrist and my arm and I'm sort of leaning into it if you will it s it sounds like [Music] this again that is definitely something that will come with practice and even naturally like you'll be very surprised how many things we develop naturally as we're playing the piano now crescendos and diminuendos this is a gradual increase in volume and the gradual decrease in volume now before I actually get onto that let me address something that occurs a lot of the time when I teach people on to one and they're completely fresh you know no musical experience beforehand no uh you know they not play a piano or instrument before they start learning and what tends to happen is that they realize that they've really only been using their hands in this fashion right with their thumb like this and fingers like that so of course they don't have independent finger control but what that has to do with Dynamics is people tend to be a bit more heavy handed with their playing or they tend to be a little bit Li handed let's say that somebody is trying to play uh you know the a minor scale and I asked them to play at uh Meto Forte okay so the heavy-handed person would naturally lean towards playing more loudly right so they might actually be playing at at Forte and and they're not doing that intentionally and this might even be before they know what Forte is right um and then the other person who's trying to play Meo Forte um who's sort of more light-handed is going to probably naturally be playing at metop piano so and the reason I'm bringing this up is because if you know that you tend to be more um heavy-handed you're bit more more weighted with your fingers and your wrists and this could be for a number of reasons it might just be a natural um thing or because of your lifestyle like if you are somebody who does uh you know a martial art boxing um manual labor you know these heavy handed uh even tense things and then you know on the other side of spectrum like you know artists or painters who try to be very um light stroked with their brush so that could be the difference but you know all in if you know that you tend to play louder than you want to you should be toning it down a bit right but that advice of course will not apply to the person who's naturally more um light-handed so that's just something I came across um the more people I taught so it's good to be aware of that because you will understand your own Tendencies and account for them so moving on Crescendo I'm going to play a C major scale um one octave and back down I'm going to do a crescendo going up and a dimin minu window going down so you can see how this works so I'm going to start at piano go up to Forte and back down to piano so my checkpoints is you know when I'm at the C I must be playing a piano when I get to this C I'll be at Forte and then back to piano so here's what that sounds [Music] like now you want to try and keep your um volume gradually going up and down in a sort straight line now what I mean by that is let's say that you know you're trying to play the c major scale and you you know you start piano but you go for piano for too long right so then you have the sudden jump in volume up here so right so so it sort of looks like you know piano piano piano jump up to Forte and then you know probably the same shape down rather than ideally a fairly straight um line your line now when you go and play this on your own uh you can tell right like you can tell if you're suddenly jumping um in 40 you just have to you know uh intentionally listen out for it right like you're not your focus is not just on the notes because you should know see major scale by now your focus should be more in the ear training which is actually what we're doing here um to develop your sense of volume right and if you try and listen out for this gradual sense and avoid avoid you know any spikes then you would account for that and you change what you're doing so just keep that in mind when you practice something with uh crescendos or diminuendos so here are your tasks make sure that you are taking your time practicing this and do not rush okay please do not rush with this you're going to play the c major scale um right and left hand separate and hopefully you're confident in the cator scale so that you don't have too many things to focus on um and you're going to just go up and down the octave and make sure that you are playing it at piano right so just your right [Music] hand then play a forte same with the left hand then when you're comfortable with that and you can play each hand separately at either piano or Forte then put both hands together and keep them at the same volume so piano and Forte and then finally your third task is going to be playing you know again separately doing Crescendo and diminuendo so Crescendo going up diin going back two hands separate once you're comfortable put them together so then two hands together and it should sound something like that for those who are craving for an extension task and a challenge here um this is definitely going to be a challenge because it's quite a step up from what you've been doing you're going to play the c major scale in one hand in Forte and the other will be in piano and this is definitely going to take some time for you to you know actually do properly but if you take your time doing it then you're definitely going to get there like there's nothing you can't do if you take it in L of steps so um piano one hand for the other and then [Music] together something like that and if you want you can swap them over so hopefully that contents of the lesson made sense and you know once you're done with this lesson and you're done with those tasks you're going to be a lot more prepared to tackle the these Dynamic ranges because when you play music that contains Dynamics it is so you know is there for a reason like it adds so much depth adds so much um emotion and you know the piano music that people will go on YouTube and find you know beautiful caling piano music it's because there's dynamic range right and of course there's technique involved and the actual music involved but Dynamics plays a huge huge part in adding drama in adding action um you know sadness whatever it is so the better you are at dynamic range the better you will be at expressing that emotion so great job this lesson and I'll see you next one all right welcome back everyone to another lesson and in this video we're going to actually take a look at a piece of music that I've composed for you it's very simple it's got Dynamics it's got key signatures time signatures it's got everything that you've learned so far and it sounds really nice and it's enjoyable to play and this is going to show you how much you've learned and it's going to be a little uh it's a good task to help apply everything you've done and sort of practice solidifying it all and this is really going to serve as a fantastic um introduction or you could say um warm-up to looking at a bit more complex and advanced sheet music all right so this is what the piece of music is going to look like now you can see there's a lot of things going on here and let me just point out a few things because there's so much information on the sheet music um a lot of people tend to Miss very obvious things like the key signature right um or Dynamics or the time signature and you usually focus on you know just the notes how complex they are um you know maybe even the uh fingering that's you use and just try immediately play but there is a process that you should be using whenever you come to look at a piece of music there's always a step-by-step process that you need to follow that if you get used to doing you're going to you know it's going to be a lot easier for you to read music music more accurately so the first thing you should look at is your clifts okay so you have the treble cleft in its normal position and you have the base cleft in its normal position now the reason I'm pointing this out is because sometimes you can have um different Cliffs than you would normally think you should have so in the top obviously we have treble cleff but that could be a base cliff right you can actually have a base cliff in that top Stave um the top Stave is not really um exclusive to the treble although like 98% of piano music treble would be there and 98% of piano music Bas will be there but even throughout a piece like you might find a Clift change and that means that you're going to have to read the music differently so you can find two base clifts you can find two um treble cfts and it depends on where the notes are right so if you're if you're reading a piece that has a lot of high notes and you're playing two hands in the high end of the uh piano then you're probably going to have two trouble class rather than a trouble than a base so in this example we have trouble and base so of course just making none of that you're going to be reading it normally the second thing you're going to pay attention to is the key signature this is very very very important that you look at this first before you even touch the piano okay you must look at the key signature so we have three sharps in our key signature FP csharp and gshp now what information can G this well we can find out the scale right so what scale has three Sharps let's stick with the major scale for now so um if I just picture the circle fifths in my head and and I have that sentence of Father Christmas goes down and escalate her backwards um and C has to be neutral so it's got to be in the middle which means F which comes before c will be on the left so it's going to contain a flat so flat um one you could say um natural so that's c c for Christmas then G has one sharp then D for down has two sharps f and c and then a for n has three Sharps which is f c Shar and G Shar so the key of this piece um is actually going to be an a major and you might be thinking well how do we know it's not in uh F minor right because if you count three sem tones down from a this the you know the relative minor will be F and the most obvious thing is to see what note it starts on right so this piece is starting on a and even when you start playing it you can sort of quite easily tell if it's in a major or minor so if you happen to get it wrong you can just you know um switch it right so uh we're going to be in a major now the next thing I look at is the time signature so we are in 4 four so we're going to be counting one 2 3 4 so if you're going to use a metronome at some point which I'll talk about in another another Point uh make sure it's at 44 okay you're not make sure you're not at 3 four or anything because that's going to confuse right out of your mind so keep it at 44 now the next thing you're going to be looking at is the Dynamics so you want to take a skim across actually most of the piece in fact all of the piece and just take a look at what dynamic ranges you're going to be playing at so we can see at the beginning here we're playing at metop piano then if I scroll down a bit we have a diminuendo down to piano then Crescendo up to Meto Forte um then Crescendo up to Forte and then you have a RIT which is not really to do with dynamics that just says slow down um but yeah so the lowest we're going to be um playing at is piano softly okay um and then the loudest we're playing at is forte so what that means is you know um you're going to be playing your ranges um at normal levels you're not really going to be making any changes so if for example you took a look at a piece of music and you had Forte then up to fortisimo then up to foro right so there you might thinking you might be thinking to yourself you know what um I need to probably lower my forte just a tad and slightly lower my fortisimo so that each time I go up in this volume it's distinguishable right because sometimes you know play for you know might be too loud and fortisimo is too loud so that you know you can't really tell that you're actually increasing loudness so that's a change that you might make if you find something um in a rare occasion like that but in this particular case it's normal right this is a very very standard set of dynamics that you would find in a piece so now that we have our foundations out the way we can take a look very quickly at our notes we've got a lot of Quavers in our right hand repeating notes um they're not really changing notes that much except maybe at the end of the second line um we have some minims and semi Brees in our left hand we got a dotted minim on second line so I'm just paying attention here to what things I'm going to be looking out for you know everything here is quite simple so now that we have an understanding of what we're about to be playing we can start to actually practice it now like I said I did compose this to sound nice and for it to be um quite easy at the level that you're at because we're going to have more complex stuff in future so um I'm only going to go through you know maybe about 70 80% of this piece because I want to leave some for you to just you know read completely on your own um now let's start at the beginning okay now our first note is going to be a and because we have nothing in our left hand I'm going to start with my right hand and I personally tend to always read with my right hand first considering that's usually where the melody is so we have an A and I'm playing that with number one okay so you can see the fingering above the A and it says it's got a small one there so that's remind you the fingering the next note is going to be an e and that's going to be obviously above the a directly now it says a four on it so I'm not going to play it with five because that's sort of where it naturally wants to go and if in fact I'm to play with a four instead now if I wasn't the composer of this piece and if I was just learning the piece for the first time never seen it before I might be confused why like you know sort of it's more natural to play at5 but there is a reason there's always there always a reason okay um which you're going to see later so 1 14 and then we do that again 1 14 14 and it keeps on going like that now you can tell here that I'm not p paying too much attention on you know doing it exactly in time I'm just being familiar with what notes I'm playing so now that since these notes are repeating I can play a bit faster and in time so 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 now I could continue here but I want to point something out now for a long time when I was teaching I would always tell my students get used to the notes first okay um then do the Rhythm and then add the Dynamics but uh a common problem that they faced was that once they become perfect with the uh the actual notes themselves and The rhythms and how to play it with technique then they come to add the Dynamics on their muscle memory so ingrained at playing at that certain volume that it takes them a while so what actually we're going to do here is I'm not going to really pay too much attention at playing it exactly metop piano and trying to adust adjust it so that it sounds like metop piano I'm just going to play softly and sort of have that on my mind right something like that right I'm I'm just not going to be no Forte nothing like that you just want to keep it loose at this point because once you practice it like this then later on um you know once you're finished with pretty much most of the actual notes and you come to work on your D Dynamics you're already going to be at a point where you know what this is very natural to play this um volume now if you look at the first two bars before our left hand comes in yeah we're just playing a and e one and four um for those two bars so 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 now our left hand's going to come in on the three on the a so green mustage right fast always that's going to be three 4 2 beats and then the next note is also another minim a second above it's going to be a b and then the next bar in a new line is going to be a g and I'm playing that as a G sharp because our key signature says F sharp C Shar and G sharp okay so although on the sheet music it says go down by Third you might be tempted to just go down by Third like that right but if you know the scale is an a major these are the notes that you're EX exclusively going to be using okay you're never playing a C natural never an F sharp uh sorry never an F natural and never a g natural right so those three notes will always be sharp unless you have an accidental uh natural note so I'm going to play that with the four because that's sort of the natural position it leads to and then we're going to go down by note and if I actually read that it's going to be green buses drive fast so f now we're playing F sharp remember because of the key signature so if I go from the first bar which the left hand joins in on and play for those two bars we get one two 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 three four now that last not it's just a semi breathe on a and you know it's very easy it's first note that we started on now just a quick Point here to clarify something at the beginning we says it says uh play metop piano right and that means until further instruction and that's not just exclusive to the metop piano that's for anything if it was Forte if it was you know uh fortisimo or panimo that lasts until further instruction now you know try not to focus too much on it you just want to Loosely play at that um just you can you know build a good set of habits now uh we're going to start actually putting these two together because what I like to do and what I like to teach is you're going to be playing um you're going to be learning the piece sort of two hands incrementally and what I mean by that is some people they tend to um you know they would prefer to learn the entire song one hand at a time so they would go through you know how many lines is this one two three four five six there are six lines in this piece okay so it's a page long and six lines they would learn all six lines in the right hand and then all six lines in left hand and then put them together now although that's not going to lead you to failure you know of course you are going to eventually learn a song but the problem is it's not like fresh in your head right um you know the first time you learn something you want to keep it sort of in that uh Zone in your mind right you don't want to give your brain too much to focus on split your focus you want to keep it in one area and then get pretty good at that and then you can move on right so if I play from bar three until bar five and you can see now why bar numbers are so useful um bar three to Bar five I'm going to play the right hand okay so 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 now I'm pretty confident with that okay I don't need to really practice that it's it's you know it's a pretty easy thing to do I'm keeping in time I'm keeping my dynamic range you know lose most ly the same not focusing too much on Dynamics yet U and now for our left hand I need to be confident in that before I start to put them together so making sure that I'm going to be on the three on the a so 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 now that is a slightly more challenging than the right hand because the right hand is it's almost mindless right like it's the same notes okay although the notes are going to change in future for now they're the same so it's sort of like you can have it as Clockwork robotic right and that's what makes it easier to add the left hand in once you're confident in something enough that you can just play it almost like muscle memory like clockwork like you don't even really need to look at your hands that much now you have the space in your brain to integrate the left hand to it or or if you're done with the left hand and you want to add the right hand to it of course same thing if you have this piece of music printed out I would highly highly highly recommend you get a pencil not a pen okay never by the way never ever write a pen on your music okay because you can never rub it out if you know if something is if you wrote it too big or if you know it's too small you can't see something or you miswrote it or whatever like you don't need to make a note of something anymore you can't erase it so make sure you're always writing in pencil um and you want to sort of draw a circle around the things that you know you want to point out or you can actually write on top of the music and uh make a note of something so for example you might write a little sharp symbol next to um the G sharp right because you don't want to confuse going from G sharp to okay because you won't even know that you're getting it wrong and and you're sort of solidifying that in your brain as an option to play which is not right so make sure that's playing in G Shar and you can just make a little pencil sharp symbol next that g to remind you and you can make all sorts of notes that you would like um in fact I might make a different video on how to do that exactly in a way that's most useful but just to remind you you can absolutely write notes on your music as long as it's not some you know vintage antique super valuable piece of music that you just got access to exclusively for you at some Museum of music of course don't Rite on that right but if you just printed out some music of course so my right hand now up to Bar five is like clockwork and my left hand let's say I wasn't that confident with right so what I would do is take it slower right and just really really focus on the movements you're making and you know you want to avoid staring at your fingers when you're reading music because you know when you look at the score four and your fingers and you sort of you know interchange between them you're binding those two things together and it's a lot easier um to learn and read over time so don't just you know look at it and say G okay uh and then never look at the score again for G right you sort of want to follow it as you go now if I wasn't confident in that left hand I'll take it even slower one 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 now I did stress those notes so that you can tell when I come in because that is a dotted minimum which is worth three beats so it's important to get the timing right on that point now if you're Comfort on both hands there up until bar five you can start to put them together and again pay very close attention to where those notes are vertically lined up so you know bar one it goes bar two [Music] now bar three it comes in with the a okay so these are two A's that come in at the same time and then the next note and then the next one then on the a halfway into that second uh grouping it's going to go then back up to a the key here is to take it slow enough that it's very difficult to make a mistake and the second key here is to you know never divert away from what it's asking you to do like once you're very confident with the piece you might want to add your own little flare to it you might want to add your own little rhythms your own little um ornaments and your own style to it which I'll teach you how to do but at this stage when you're learning a song get very good at the song first exactly like it's asking you to play it because when you start to add your flares and your own rhythms and Sy ofation like some people will be tempted to go and they want to make it like off the beat right because they think it sounds better and I'm not saying it doesn't sound better I'm saying that unless you're 110% confident with a piece perfectly you should not be adding your own stuff because you know it's probably going to be inconsistent right you know you you're probably not going to play that syncopated Rhythm exactly the same way as you do every single time right and that sort of uh suppresses you from um getting consistency in a piece of music which is by far definitely the most important thing so what I'm going to play here is sort of the level that you should be at before you start moving on and learning uh the new parts and on that point you should really only take it you know one to three bars at a time I wouldn't go more than that obviously would depend on the complexity of the music so this kind of thing you know you can go uh three four bars at a time both something really complex I wouldn't go more than two bars so 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 now if you can do that move on to next section so in this case so that would be a G sharp a a G sharp down by third or I can read it up and I know that's an e and that's not a key signature so that's going to be an e natural um then I'm going to go up by second which would go to F but all FS are F sharp so it would be that note now if I play that bar for you maybe a bit faster so you can see sort of the level which you're going to be going [Music] at and we're not using any left and in that bar now the next bar we have something similar to what we did before so we're doing 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 and again for the third bar so the right hand is going to be all AE for the entire line here but the left hand is a bit different we have our a 1 2 we have our b 1 2 we're go down to our G sharp for three beats 1 2 3 but here we have um an e that goes up to an F but that e is going to be a Quaver so you have actually a Quaver rest just before the Quaver note and it's asking you there to play it with the five timing here is important now I put this here for a reason um this sort of you could say technique um in composing is something that's fairly common right it's not that common but it you do see it where you have a certain Rhythm that you play and it's sort of um memorable in a way and then they change it just enough so that there is a noticeable change but it adds something right it adds it adds some sort of uh difference that sounds nice so in this case um when we're going up to that um semi brief we have a Quaver just before it rather than a crotchet just before it and we saw that in the line before now let me play that for you from Bar Seven which is the beginning of this new line here 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 so there you can see I'm delaying it um by just another half Fe because that is going to be a Quaver rest now if you look at the bar itself if you look at that left hand where that dotted minim is you you know that's going to be counting for three out of four so one 1 two three that's three beats gone now you have one beat left to work with so where that Quaver rest is and the Quaver notes are of course if you join them both together you get one beat so the first half is you know where the crotch it normally would be um but you're going to delay it by half a beat in other words exactly where that Quaver rest is um is where four would be if you're counting right so if you're counting one two three four the four would be exactly where that qu rest is which means um if you counted it as one and two and three and four and to sort of help you with um the timing of these Quivers the end after the four so for end that's when you're playing it okay so let me demonstrate I'll play from the previous bar so 1 and two and three and four and 1 and two and three and four and one and two so you can see how that works so my right hand is like clockwork my left hand let's say it's like clockwork now if it's not practice it and you know make sure that you're comfortable with what you're actually playing and with the timing because if your timing is completely messed up and it's it's not even close to what you're supposed to be doing then when you try and put them both together you're going to get even more confused so let me play for you um both hands so we have one and two and three and four and 1 and 2 and 3 and four and 1 1 and 2 and 3 and four and so that is what good timing would be like and you can see how I applied counting in those subdivided four four so one and two and three and four and if it's too much to think about while you're playing uh you can either count it 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 or you could put a metronome on so actually let me play it for you with the metronome so you can see how I'd use it all right so 1 2 3 4 I might even want to go much much slower right I might want to put a tempo right down like if I'm really struggling with getting the timing down I'd put that down so so here's what I would [Music] do now the anticipation there with the five you might have seen that you know after my pinky was not resting on this F natural cuz I'm not going to play an F natural I move it already to the E because I know that's my next note okay so I'm not going to waste any time my anticipating and that's what helps me stay on time so we do have a diminuendo here that goes down to piano you want to generally do it quite Loosely again don't focus on it too much but you know do apply a diminuendo okay so if you're playing it so if I go from the part um so that's going to be bar 9ine going into Bar [Music] Nine and you you can you have it Inu window now even Dynamics are similar to the way that notes are vertically grouped right so Dynamics start pretty much on the note that it's underneath it starts just beneath that e okay so on the last e on the four and from that point I'm going to start adding that diminuendo so if I continue reading we've got a did minuendo so next part we have some different notes we got a FP a f sharp then a d it's going to be D natural because there's no key signature for D um then e right [Music] so and that we have a slight Crescendo um that starts you know just about halfway into the um second group of Quavers there and we're going to start the next bar on meno Forte so that Crescendo has to be noticeable but again don't re like seriously don't focus on the Dynamics too much at this point just Loosely play at them and then we have a new uh section so you have completely different left hand completely different right hand they almost swapped rolls now you would not Advance onto this until um you're pretty comfortable playing up until this point right and your ATT task is pretty much just to learn the song it's it's uh not as difficult as you might think there are so many um fundamental uh things in this piece that I uh you know I compose it very very specifically um to get your foundations absolutely down right you know you've have Ledger lines you have U beamed uh Quavers you have different stem directions you have pretty much every single um note value you have different rest values you have Dynamics crescendos key signatures um a common time signature fingerings you have all of the basics of reading sheet music and from here you literally have only like one or two things left and you're going to have pretty much most of the knowledge there is um for reading music so um I think I'll hopefully will have a um PDF for you to download the sheet music so that you can print off make your own notes and everything um and then there should be hopefully an MP3 file or a video of some sort so that you can see how I play it when it's completely done and please only use that for reference when you're actually finished with your song okay um I'd really prefer if you did not you know you know listen to that and just try and copy it by ear um it's more of a guidance so that you know what it's supposed to sound like um but please don't only do that once you're actually U done with most of the reading so great job this lesson and I'll see you in the next one all right everyone welcome back to another lesson and in this video you're going to be learning about articulations so you may have heard this phrase before or you may have not but articulations is essentially the way that you play um the notes right it's the how you play it because you know it might tell you exactly what note you're playing and for how long you're holding it for but then you have sort of the other sort of information which is how you play and articulations are a slightly different to Dynamics because although they share a similar effect like when you you know when you add Dynamics to a piece it makes it sound so rich and so you know whatever the intention is so sorrowful so happy so dramatic whatever it is it gives it that richness so um Dynamics are actually based on a section right so Dynamics you have Forte right and it would apply to this entire section until there's a change in Dynamic um like a diminuendo or whatever but with articulations it is usually note specific right so it'll be specifically this note um you're going to play in this particular way and so this combination of articulation and Dynamics is what gives your music that sense of depth to it right if you got a robot to play exactly perfectly to the nanc what is being asked and compared to um a human desit who adds the sense of depth to it not only is the articulation Dynamics um a big part of that but also your general um human sense so let's just get into it um the first symbol and by the way yeah these are symbols right you don't um normally have them as written words right so um the first thing is if you have a note let's say a crotchet right um you can have what's called Stato right and this is essentially a DOT directly beneath the note now this dot could also be found directly above the note so this depends on uh the direction that the stem is facing all right now what does this mean so staccato Dot mean that you're going to play that note short and sort of jumpy right so if for example I'm not on my piano right now but if you had uh you had one two three four five notes um together and there's no articulation symbols on them at all you just have you know five crotchets with the sakat it would sound more like du du du du du so you can see that jumpiness um effect now the thing with stakato is that some people get confused with s doos and dotted notes now just to be very absolutely clear here a dotted note and that's to do with the value like how long you're holding it for um you're going to always find that on the side whereas the sakato dots will always be either directly above or directly beneath depending on the stem Direction so that is stakato for you so the next articulation symbol is the accent so this is going to be on a particular note or several notes and it says that you're going to play that note stronger than the other notes around it okay so you can see the symbol itself is quite different from the stath dot because it's sort of this horizontal vshape that appears on the note so just to write out for you you're going to get um louder on that particular note compared to the rest now we are going to go through these in an example um you know on the piano but if I was to just sort of vocally do it for you if you had um just normally without any articulation du d da du if you added um an accent you can hear the difference so so you have that stronger um note and a stronger attack on the note and specific for that note if you have two accents then it's for two notes five accents five notes same concept and you might be thinking well you know why couldn't you just have Forte for that particular note right and it's a valid question so if for example you know you have your music and let's say that you're playing and the entire piece is in let's say uh metop piano okay now if you didn't have these accents and you just put a forte suddenly well that Forte is now for the rest of the piece until further instruction and again you might think well why don't you just put it back to metop piano so Forte and then metop piano that doesn't happen right because what you're doing here is specific to the note right so if he wanted or she whoever the composer is wanted a particular note to come out stronger than the other they would certainly not use um Dynamics in this way Dynamics like I said is more for sections of Music rather than individual notes so although in terms of how you play it yeah maybe that note itself will play at Forte volumes but you don't call it yeah I'm playing in 40 now right it's just an accented note or notes so that is a difference now the next one is going to be a bit of a variation from the accent right so it's a sort of a different shape and you'll see what I mean so here you have marato so this is when you have an accent that is either uh it's more vertical than this than this horizontal shape but it is an accent shape that is either going upwards or downwards depending on the direction of the stem so this is very similar to the accent because the accent you add a bit more um force or stress on a particular note and this is the exact same thing but more right it's the exact same thing but you're doing it more forcefully more you're stressing that particular note with more force or with more attack and it has to be distinguishable from the accent okay so for example um if I do an if I do normal without any articulation then I do an accent then I do a marato you'll definitely hear the difference so just completely normal now with the accent marato it's easier on a piano but Marcato yeah it's literally the exact same thing as an accent but with more um stress and more attack and it's a lot easier iier to do on the piano because of the nature of a piano with the Hammers and you know you directly apply Force it's much easier to do than a vocal I hope you're writing this down or at the very least you know paying attention and trying to understand it because I'm going to quiz you and these are very common things maybe not Marcato as much but the following ones are definitely going to be very common so these are the three main um articulation symbols that you'll find that affect the note in a more Sharp Way right I don't mean sharper flat I mean it gives it that edge to it like it makes it uh jumpier and makes it a bit more uh yeah sharper so you know there are other articulation symbols for sure I'm going to go through them but I'm not going to give you the really you know rare ones like because you'd usually find that for completely different instruments other than the piano um you know you'd find that in more orchestral music but I'm going to give you the most common ones in the piano um because I don't want to overwhelm me with too much information before we move on I just want to point something out here articulation may seem sort of like a afterthought right or an afterthought um and although it is not part of the you know fundamental like lesson one stuff of reading music like you know in the same way that reading the actual notes and identifying them is but it is important because like I said it gives it a lot of depth and when you listen to like a proper great piano player Maybe on YouTube or uh you just hear in a song or whatever and you hear them with such control and precision right and articulation plays a very very big part of that Dynamics is also a big part as well but because articulation is more note specific it takes more precision and when you're practicing this you're increasing your range of control if you will because if your notes are only limited to just you know completely normal with no articulation like no sakato no marato nothing like that and plus the ones I'll show you you don't have the sense of phrasing then you're going to feel stuck you're going to feel like how can he play with such precision and with such emotion how can he um you know amplify and express such a powerful thing um through his fingers like that right I just you know I can't do it like how how how's it even possible and it comes largely through articul like not all of it but articulation plays a big role so I just wanted to point that out so the next two articulations I'm going to be showing you are so common that I had to try I had to really try and not include them in the last thing I compose for you right these two things are so so so common like you I would be incredibly surprised if you did not come across a piece but that does not have these two things they are very similar right like they look almost the same there's only one minor difference to tell them apart so let me show you these two things all right this is the first thing so please pay attention we have two different notes okay you can kind see where I'm leading here we have two different notes right I've not dra it this stage just to make it easy to look at but there are different notes like you could say that's oh that's a b uh and that's a g for example it doesn't really matter but they're different right then you find this line okay if you've seen music in general you've probably seen this line and this doesn't just occur between crotches by it URS with everything this is called a slur and a slur um is another way of saying Legato Legato is obviously the Italian um and this means to connect notes together so instead of playing it um you know and it's obviously easier on piano when I show you but instead of playing it like du du du du du when you add Legato or when you add slurring to it it sounds more like they're more connected there's no no sense of uh distinct you know clear-cut separation between the notes okay so there you go it means Legato otherwise known as a slur and means to attach notes together you can say connect it doesn't really matter but um but Legato literally means attached or so you could say like that now the funny thing is that Legato is literally the opposite of stakato you can kind of hear it in the word so Stato literally means detached right so you can call it short jumpy attach is carries the same meaning generally but that's a good thing to know so now for the second major articulation here um it's going to be similar to the first one but also contains a difference that will make a big difference to how you play it now assuming that you have two identical notes with a line together this is called a tie so um the tie is when you're you're you're tying together the value of two notes right so that you're only actually playing it once all right now let me explain this we have two crotchets they are the same note let's say this is an A and this is an A okay if this was an a that's a b it would be a slur but because it's an A and another a it's it's 100% going to be a tie okay now um a crotch is worth one beat this crotch is worth one beat as well if you were to tie the values of those two together you have two beats now I'm going to do this in red to really make this stand out you're not going to play the second note right so you're actually holding this down for the length of a minute now you might be thinking well if that basically means a minum why why does this exist right well here's the key Point let me draw a save out for you so here's the key okay here you can connect the value of two notes together that are actually separated by a bar line you cannot do that with a minim for example because if you had a minim here instead of a crotchet you you know it has to end at the bar length cuz it's it's in the bar right um and this is where ties are commonly used of course they can also for sure be used within the bar it doesn't have to connect two bars together um but this is you know a common use of it so yeah you're going to be just playing for two beats so for example if you're in 44 you have you rest for two beats and then you rest for another beat so you have three beats of rest then you play a crotchet and it's going to link directly to um the second crotchet and because they're on the same note it's going to be a tie if that was even a semitone lower or a semitone higher there would not be ties okay that would instead be a slur and this is not limited to one note like you might have a chord or maybe not not related notes at all but you have a Harmony you can connect that to another Harmony whether it's individual or actually the entire group so let me show you so here you're seeing two notes both being tied across because they're tying with identical notes okay um now you could actually find um something it's not that common but you know you you definitely do see it you have another two but they're not tied but these two are so you're playing this at the same time you're playing the a the C and the E so an A minor chord and you're going to be tying the A and the C together but not the E the E will be separate that's because there's no tie for the E but if there was a tie you would see it symbolized so there's another common use of the tie for in this example we're in 44 in the treble cleff and we have a c which is a minim and we're going to hold that down for two beats so every time I snap my finger I'm playing down a new note and you know the longer I hold and count obviously that's how long I'm holding it for so for example just this minute will be 1 2 now if I continue here 3 4 1 2 3 4 now these two I am playing individually usually because this is a slur they have Legato it's not a tie because they have different notes you see what I mean because if you got these two confused and maybe you just thought okay yeah every time I see a slur and like a tie doesn't exist in your mind then you're going to be playing these two together and in some music it's a big difference right now um this is actually it's pretty common but the most common way of using it is having a semi breeve um in a four four bar for example and then tied to another semi brief in the 44 bar and that's usually when uh you know for example you know the composer wanted you to play Boom in the left hand like two really strong deep notes and you want to hold you hold that down for a long time because you know without this there it's not possible it's not possible to do that because if you're in a 44 bar you have no choice but to repeat that but a tie ties do exist for that purpose right so you can hold up boom 2 3 4 1 and you can just continue it I'm so I'm just going to put here merging values but you don't play the tide note right so the second note you don't actually play that it's just a reference for how long extra you're going to be holding the original down for okay so I hope that makes sense and I hope you have a note of this somewhere unless you're very confident in your auditory learning and visual learning and you really don't feel the need to write anything down that's completely fine but I would recommend it because this especially I I really would not want you to get confused so so far we have the Stato we have the accent and the marato now these three articulations they um they affect the note in a more uh jumpy and short uh way okay detached but with these two it is when you're connecting notes together quite literally when you're doing it with slurs and then also with ties so those are two the um more connective articulations those are actually all the articulations that I want you to learn there are others but they're they're quite Advanced like too for example um it looks like this uh I wasn't even going to plan to show you this but I may as well now you have a line that's above the note or below the note that means you're playing the note with more depth you're holding it for the full length of that note so rather than doing uh rather than playing it like du du you're doing du you're you're holding it down for the the full possible length you're just giving it that extra bit of um depth I'm not going to explain more other ones than that cuz I wasn't even going to show you this but you know it's pretty rare to find anyways the the thing I do want to show you um which is not as rare as tono as you as you might be surprised to hear U it's called a fata and this is a very interesting symbol and I was actually almost not going to put in this video I was going to put it in the ornaments video and ornaments are just like beautiful little things that exist that like sort of accessorize the music any I'll get into that in that video now the formont sign you can have pretty much on top of anything um let's say that you had it on top of a semi brief like you or several s bries and you ended on like a nice great cord this is usually where this is used now this means basically um stop and pause now the reason I love this symbol so much you stop and pause for as long as you want right it's sort of like a performance little um uh well I wouldn't say trick but it's like it's a really cool performance feature that you that you can do so you can do something like if you're playing a complex song and it goes bam and you you know you hold it and then you stop and you pause like this doesn't tell you how long you pause for you can pause for as long as you want you can give them just a tiny pause just to like you know if you want to move on the piece quicker but you can also depending on the piece and depending on the context you can give them a long you know suspenseful pause right um so this one's completely up to you and that's why I love it so much but it's called a fata okay um so it's a great cool symbol so before we end the lesson I'm going to give you a quick quiz and then we are going to move on to next lesson and hopefully you know you do your tasks before you move on so we're going to go quite quickly um please don't use your notes unless you absolutely have to I'm going to give you like a second or two in between when I say the question and before I give the answer just to move the video a bit quicker but you would pause okay so pause um after I say think about your answer pause right that's your cue to pause um and then you can think take as long as you want one second 5 seconds so the first one is going to be I want you to identify what that symbol means in Italian and give the meaning think of your answer so the meaning oh sorry the the name is Stato and it means short we'll also call that detached and you if you said jumpy of course that's fine as well so the next one we're going to move fairly quick here three notes here and they're all Quavers and you have that symbol and there are different notes so I would like you to identify the name of that symbol and then give the meaning so think about your answer so it is called a slur or Legato and it means basically connect or attach okay uh next one we're going to do this symbol now I would like you to identify the name of this symbol and give meaning so think about your answer okay um this is going to be called a marato and it's um basically more forcefully remember this is individual for the note as it's you know very clearly shown and it's not like for section in the way that Dynamic is so that is pretty much it um that's obviously not all of them because I also gave you um accented notes I gave you ties I give you formata so these are the main ones I'd like you to become familiar with because they're fairly common especially slurs and especially ties and staccato are also pretty common depending on you know what type of music you're playing if it's classical if it's more modern maybe how complex it is these are definitely factors that you know influence what artic culations you're going to see but for sure pretty much all the music that you'll find will have slurs and legoes in them so if that makes sense and you know what these symbols mean and what they're asking you to do and next lesson we are going to be actually playing them and showing you different exercises on how to get good at playing them so your task is very simple get comfortable with every articulation symbol that I showed you know the name especially the Italian name um you know slur obviously is fine if you know slur andata but know the names of all of them know they mean and try not to you know um get too confused about them so I'd recommend that you just write them down cover it think ask yourself pretty much what I did here and then you know flip it over and check yourself so besides that great job this lesson and I'll see you in the next one all right everybody welcome to another lesson and in this video we're going to be going over how to actually play with articulation and how it might sound like on the piano so we're just going to go right into it and the first thing I'm going to explain is the Stato so we know that stakato is this shorter and more jumpy note so if I for example play you the c major scale normally you might already be playing it like this obviously doesn't matter what scale we do we could do a major does not matter but let's stick with C major to keep it simple so if I were to add Stato it would sound like [Music] this now now you can hear in the sound it's obviously shorter it's obviously more jumpy but the key here is to be able to distinguish it by sound um from the normal way of playing it because that's not really um there's not particularly a name that you would call um not using any articulation because most people would just play it like that and it's fine because now we're adding articulation so sakato that's obviously in right hand if left hand and you can do that in different Dynamic ranges you can do it at Forte or [Music] piano you can do either obviously so the most important thing about playing inato is to keep in mind a few things first you don't want to be using your entire arm to play or just the tip of your fingers you want to actually use your wrist to help you place theato you probably won't even see on the camera but instead of using your entire arm up and down although you could get a staccato sound out of it if you really you know tried but you want to keep it simple and keep it easy and more natural so you're going to be using your wrist in sort of this motion does not have to be like specifically like that it's just more of something to keep in mind you don't want to just use your fingers because that tends to keep your wrist in a locked uh position you can sort of feel it even so uh the key here is to just bear in mind that you want to try and use your wrist but don't make it just the sole you know the only driving force behind Stato you just want to keep it a light movement okay so don't take it overboard that's something obviously that will come with practice that is how you actually play staccato now if I play something completely random uh like this that has no articulation and now I add the sakato [Music] in you can hear it obviously makes a difference to the sound so to actually get good at playing staccato I would recommend three types of exercises a scale a cord and an arpeggio so we already did what the scale would look like and again you should be able to do that in any scale that's C minor G minor G major so you want to be able to do that consistently and you should also practice doing it with your left hand so if I did C major again so one of the other exercises I would recommend is doing it with arpeggios so if you took a C minor arpeggio fit it a bit fast that's with no articulation we add Stato you should be able to have that uh control obviously not now but by the end of um you know sometime practicing you know doing Stato on a arpeggio should be easier you can pick your own arpeggio to do you can do C minor like I did you can do I mean you know how to make arpegios at this point so you can just pick whatever sounds nice to you I like C Miner but you can pick anything want and just practice the arpeggio with that the third exercise I would recommend is to do chords now what I mean by this is a particular type of chord because yeah you could play uh let's stick with C minor you could do it like that and although of course you should practice that I would actually want you to play like [Music] this it's slightly more difficult because you have to control this staccato touch in your fingers separately then when you do then you do for all of your fingers so what you should be doing to practice theato is again to recap you're going to pick any scale that you want C minor C major uh even a more complex one maybe you want to do a flat major uh maybe you want to do F minor you can pick uh you know one of these scales one of these keys and I would recommend um you know switching up every now and then and you're going to going to go through this process you're first going to practice the scale in Stato then you're going to practice the arpeggio then you're going to practice the chord so now it's just about technique and like I said just be light on your fingers okay don't don't try and be so heavy um although you know if you're doing it at 40 or fortisimo that's different but um you generally want to keep it fairly light on the fingers and hence the description I gave jumpy um and you want to add some wrist support right don't don't let your you know hand and fingers all come crashing up and down like that you want to just you know control you know obviously mainly from the fingers but let the wrist be the supporting uh Force now for accents and Marcato we're just going to stick to the accent because Marcato is just a stronger accent so if we just focus on the weaker accent and focus on making that um audible a difference and your Technique becomes good then marato will just be so much easier than if you stop Marcato so we're going to for this one just take the major scale or minor scale whatever so for this example I'll go with C minor again feel free to pick your own scales and I'm going to play an an accent on the five okay so 1 2 3 4 five on that g I'm going to play an accent so the rest of it I'm going to you know keep it at piano or metop piano range so that the accent can be easier to distinguish so here's what it would sound [Music] like you can obviously hear the difference and if you want to take that a bit further this is what I'd recommend doing and you're more than welcome to add your own sort of markers or checkpoints to where you want to add the accent so I might want to count in a different way so I might want to count it as 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 so I'm going to repeat the first and last note so that the one is going to be on both sides rather than 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 that's what we are sort of used to but I'm going to repeat the first and last note so that the ones are always going to be there and I'm going to actually put the accent on that second um repeat so for example [Music] and again to remind you you can experiment it's not you know 110% rigid and you have no freedom to make your own exercises because you can experiment and refine your own exercises yes of course doesn't mean you should skip out on things that you don't like and only stick to things you do like because things that you don't like are probably good for you so for example you might want to add the fifth to those two or the seventh or the fourth like whatever you want so you are free to experiment and one of my favorite exercises to do um that you can adapt you know for this need is this one and you can continue so what we can do here is okay so I want to practice my accents I want to practice my Stato or my Dynamics or whatever it is but let's stick with the accent I might say okay on the first and fifth or so the first and last note I'm going to put an accent so you can continue or you might say hey I want to do it on the third note and you can continue like that you can also experiment and add your own variations however the Legato or the slur is because it's the most common um articulation symbol that you're going to find like it's very common then you should practice Legato and it's not difficult you just get to you know connect the notes together so um C major with no articulation in Legato and notice that I'm keeping the same Dynamic if I did that and I said I'm going to try and do it in uh Forte right it's still aato we naturally have this uh tendency to associate fast with loud you know quiet with slow you know these kind of uh associations which is not bad but when you're trying to isolate you know Dynamics on its own articulation on its own um speed on its own and they sort of connect to each other you know unconsciously that's why we want to separate them out so remember whether it's legato stakato um fast loud quiet whatever try and isolate those things from each other so lato at piano stata [Music] piano because the piano is a piano and you have hammers that hit the string um in acoustic piano which is which is what the keyboard is trying to imitate you can't have a perfect Legato in the sense of you can't have no re attack on the Note because the piano is not a it's not a voice and it's not you know a violin for example or a recorder or a flute so um you want to just be careful that you're not putting too much attack than necessary although you could do for C major and although that's technically Legato because they are connected you're putting more you know attack you're putting more Force than you need to and it sort of defeats the point of the this uh smoothness now of course if it's said you know you need to play in fortisimo or something and it's very fast and maybe you have accents on the notes in the Legato sure but if it's just a normal lato try and make it smoother okay try and let it uh flow you know like a wave right you don't want to just have like abrupt Cuts more than necessary so to play leg go a bit more effectively um I would recommend that you just practice making it smoother and you can obviously tell even when I'm playing that my wrist has a different movement it's it's more flowy it's more like water rather than you know when I'm doing stac it's more you know vertical it's more has a bit more rigidity than a Legato so I'm just letting my wrist sort of move with it right I'm I'm not keeping my wrist Frozen in one place unable to move because although it is possible to get the Legato out it's just not going to sound as nice like people listening they can tell that you're tensed and when you're tensed you're not playing as you might like to that you might intend to and the music just simply comes out differently and for the Legato practice I'd recommend the scale the arpeggio and even that exercise we did earlier try to keep it connected rather than so you can see the difference there things like the formata or the um the tide note are not really things you practice in the same way because formata is not something that you have to technically practice with your motor fingers and every it's just you know it's just a pause you know you get a sense over time for how long the pause what you want to express so that's in a separate uh field you know unless you're reading shim mus like the tie isn't something that you sit down and and try and practice because that's part of actual note values when you're reading but let's say that you were reading and it said you know tie this crotchet into this minim right and you know it's over the bar whatever you're playing that for three beats total so 1 2 3 you're not playing that second note tied it's more for a reference of how much more value you're merging or tying to that first original note I would absolutely advise you not to use the pedal when practicing articulation because it's more about using your fingers and your wrist um correctly right you want to practice getting the technique right The Petal is not something that you attach to articulation articulation is separate it's the actual notes you're playing how you're playing it the pedal obviously sustain those notes so if your Technique is really bad and you try and add the pedal yes you will get those notes sustained and yes it might sound a bit better let's say that I was trying to play something if I just you know make something here [Music] um and you're coming back down like that if that's asking me to play that on the sheet music and it says play it with a nice Legato like you would usually just see a gigantic slur from beginning to end and it looks kind of intimidating because you don't really see that often previously but that's just what it means beginning to end that's going to be Legato so if you technique in Legato and just generally playing softly and smoothly is terrible like it's really bad you've never touched Legato before and then you just slap on the pedal to make it sound nice it's it it has a distinguishably different uh quality so if I play that for you um without [Music] articulation now with articulation again without the pill for now now with the pedal without articulation it does sound nice but if I added the [Music] articulation it sounds more smooth it sounds more flowy and because I'm practicing that actual uh Legato and I'm trying to connect the notes together I'm working on my wrist movement and my general fingering and it's going to sound better so don't skip out on the articulation practice if you able to play with articulation it does not mean that you're Pro level articulate Master at the piano but you generally can play with articulation it's going to naturally get better over time whether you practice it or not um obviously if you do it's going to get faster but your control over the piano is going to increase rapidly like let's say that you're playing something you know really emotive right something that has some expression because when you combine articulation with um Dynamics control and even with the pedal you get a lot better result so let me play let me just play something here that um I'm not going to add any articulation not going to add any Dynamics uh not going to add the pedal even and see the [Music] difference okay now let me add some Dynamic control articulation control and I'm going to add in the pedal [Music] I did get carried away a bit cuz it was very nice sounding but that sort of expression through articulation control and dynamic control even pedal control just that like that's all I did that's the only thing I added to the exact same uh piece like if I notated that on a she music for you two people read it the exact same way one added those three things you're going to tell who is who is a better player like who's going to be able to give more to The Listener right and you know even for them as the player who's going to feel more so to practice your articulation let me just summarize your tasks uh we're going to divide it based on the exercise rather than the articulation so first you're going to pick a scale a scale that you have played that you haven't played maybe you're going to construct one um maybe maybe you'll even discover like your new favorite scale everybody seems to love C minor it is a great scale um but you're going to pick any scale that you want and then you're going to practice it in Stato right right hand left hand separate then you're going to practice it in Legato again separately um then you're going to try adding accents so for this you can pick What notes you want to try an accent on um remember to try and keep it uh light don't um you know try and go overboard and try to add six out of eight possible notes as accents because that's just it's too much for your first couple tries so just add in one accent maybe two and that will be fine for now again you're going to do that separately you're then going to make a chord it could be out of the same scale or the uh a new scale and you're going to play the actual arpeggio that's of that chord in Stato and then in Legato two and separate again just to clarify there you're going to play them arpegios right you're not going to play the chords because you can't play chords as Legato you're playing the arpeggio as Legato and eventually you're going to be aiming to put those two together so you're going to try and take each of those exercises that you did hopefully you're confident in each hand separately and you're going to try and add them in together because they're playing the same sort of quality should not be too difficult and your extension is going to be be to take that exercise and add in everything that you learned right you can take it as Legato first and maybe you can do staccato you can add in accents you can even add in Dynamic control which we did earlier so uh piano Forte crescendos the mini Windows you can put it all into that obviously take it step please take it step by step if you're going to do that but that's for the people who really want to accelerate their uh control over the piano and their fingers so that is how you play articulation on the piano so great job this lesson and I'll see you in the next one all right welcome everybody to another lesson and in this video you're going to be learning about improvisation and composition so before I actually go into this and start explaining and teaching this um concept I want to First just you know get out of way some misconceptions because a lot of people have an image or an idea of what improvisation is and what composition is that sometimes is wrong and that's obviously completely fine because you're not you know you're you're taking this course because you want to learn a piano so you're not really expected to know these things beforehand the only problem is if you have an idea of what composition is or what improvisation is and in your mind you don't like it um but that idea is actually wrong then you're sort of limiting yourself to an entire new field so for that reason I'm going to just quickly explain what improvisation is and how it differs to composition because it really only is one very small difference improvisation is when you are just freestyling on a piano when you're just making things up as you go along and you're just kind of letting it flow this can obviously be in any style in any key um any speed like it doesn't matter the whole point is that you're just making things up as you go right um for example you know if I did [Music] that will be improvisation right now the only difference between improvising and composing is that when you compose you're just editing your improvisations when you improvise something and you say you know what I want to change that right I want it to sound instead like this now you're composing now you're actually editing and you're sort of fine-tuning your improvisation into essentially a piece of work now you don't have to write out a notate this you don't have to you know go and make an entire sheet music and publish it and you know go and charge like money for it and go and put on websites to be a composer you just have to edit improvisations and it has you know preferably you want to remember it right but we'll go into that in another video so let me give you an example let's say that I was improvising and I did you know something like [Music] and I wanted I I wanted to edit that I wanted to say you know what I think a different Melody would have work better again you're going to be learning this stuff but just the principle is when you improvise and you say I want to go back and change something that's composing okay so here's the first thing that you need to understand when it comes to improvising and even composing it's one of these Foundation principles the concept of questions and answers when you are listening to something when you're listening to a song any any kind of song there's always some sort of question and there's always some sort of answer so let me give you an example and even you know like even if you don't um know exactly why specific intervals and uh you know very particular music theory techniques you don't need to know why to be able to hear the question like sound of it so for example question answer doesn't have to be that simple um it could be very very grand um you know for example um question answer and it doesn't matter the style doesn't matter the grandios of the piece or of the music and doesn't the speed nothing like that it's pretty much just a matter of sound like that that this is sort of where this satisfying element of music comes in because when you listen to somebody playing a piano if you ever heard somebody improvise on the piano and everything just seems to fit in and it just works and it just sounds pleasing to hear um it's largely or you know a big factor of that is because of this question and answer balance if you have just constant you know question like especially Melodies it doesn't feel like it's going anywhere it just question question question question and the entire thing and there's no there's no balance for [Music] example you could there's many ways of doing it unless of course that's your intention if your intention is to give this sense of you know leading them on like this breadcrumb Trail like let them hang on to that of course that's different but just talking about the general rule of thumb question and answers are important the second thing you need to understand um as one of these foundational things is that the structure of improvisation can be very very different to the structure of composition and this is because when you're improvising it can vary greatly depending on the situation you're in if you're just passing the time maybe you're you know at a event and you want to pass the time just as background music you'd probably a different structure you're not going to be playing like B like super um intense stuff structurally and complexity wise um you might just want to play something very simple and very you know nice to listen to so let me give you an example let's say that you're just doing right and [Music] [Music] you can continue like that and of course the depend on situation you could just stay like that you don't have to switch key you don't have to um you know completely change the um sort of energy of it simple stuff but nice stuff right the third point I want to talk about is the key right the scale um I mentioned this very briefly but in that example that's D [Music] major so I'm in D Major there and whether I'm improvising or composing just like in songs you're going to be in a key you know this that's not a coincidence why when you read Street Music there's a key signature um because that's probably based on somebody improvising then he composed it or she composed it and then it became a proper song so the point I wanted to get across here is be aware of your key okay just like when you read a piece of music and you say D major never going to play notes outside of this scale unless I'm told to when you're improvising it's the same thing but you obviously have more flexibility since you're the person who's making up the music for example let's say I was [Music] doing these are all notes in a G minor scale okay here's the last point I want to make and I say the the best for last because although when you hear it you might think you know what this doesn't seem like that important and trust me this is very important okay compared to the previous stuff I talked about that seemed pretty major this is very major okay you ready record yourself always record yourself take your phone and record yourself play I can't tell you how many times I've improvised I just played some something completely random I don't know what I was doing my fingers were sort of I was just doing random stuff and I heard this melody I was like I need to replay that and guess what I try as soon as I try and play it again I forget it take your phone trust me just take your phone put it next to you on the piano when you're recording you don't even have to go on camera just press record and record your entire improvisational session and this actually Ser serves two purposes obviously referring back to it if if you want to just see how something sounded like and you can figure out the notes and the second is you can measure your progress because after maybe a month two months 3 months um even a few weeks you will be able to look at your progress like you can hear it you know it's hard to sometimes measure progress when you're just sort of focusing on what you're doing now and you're probably making more mistakes and more things you're unhappy with than you are happy with at the very start but trust me having those recordings will be a huge confidence booster although I do recommend you know actually video recording um your fingers right you can either ask someone to do it for you just put it in an angle but so you can see what notes you're playing um especially if it's something that you you know is like really great so that's pretty much the introduction to the improvisational uh World um I'm going to obviously teach you how to compose and improvise your stuff things that you feel like is you and you know the thing I love about improvising and especially composing is like it's an extension of yourself musically right it's an it's an entirely different you could say language um and however you are in that moment maybe you feel a certain way maybe you um you accidentally came up with something and it's like sounds really good maybe you're trying to actually compose for something for a person even um as you're going through the upcoming lessons I can give you you a lot of really simple really quick like Secrets almost like keys that will massively increase you the quality of your improvisations like hugely um and the stuff that you don't really come across at least I didn't come across them anywhere when I was searching about it um until I actually did it myself so I'm looking forward to hearing your results and I'm looking forward to you hearing your own results so other than that I'll see you in the next lesson all right welcome everybody to this lesson and in this video we're going to be practicing how to actually improvise things how to make some Melodies how to make them work with those harmonies so we're just going to go right into it and we're going to just touch very quickly on chords now we already know all about chords we know simple chords Advanced chords major chords minor chords um let's take for example C major just to keep things very simple that is the c major chord obviously we're playing it one sorry we're playing with five three and one now here's the thing about a good sounding Melody which is keeping the notes The Melodies on the notes of the chord so you have the 1 3 and five degrees of the scale being played here but if you actually played the [Music] melody like counts as a Melody right it still sounds like a melody but it sounds pretty boring so what do you do with the other notes you just not play them no you do play them but you actually they're going to be acting as passing notes so passing notes are pretty much just as they intend to say passing notes you're going to sort of move from anchor to Anchor as I like to call them um these sort of strong points in your Melody so you know for example if I was doing this [Music] now if you saw that I'm hovering around this and this and this note because those are the notes of this chord and they work obviously very well with this now if we take this actually a step further and we're going to do this example with any other chord if I went for let's say a major same principle I am using a bit Advanced Rhythm there but and I could go up [Music] here now the passing notes are going to be the notes that are not in these three now the a obviously you have an octave so it's actually going to be these notes are going to be your anchor notes but you can do it just like this for [Music] Simplicity but pretty much anything that is outside of these key anchors as I say um you can use them as passing notes because if you played let's say the a major um chord I'm going to do a bit more stretched out chord and then you you know played with the f it sort of wants to go somewhere right it's not like that Pleasant harmonizing um sort of full note that you just kind of land on it's more like a it's it's kind of here is like it's supposed to be going somewhere so you can actually you know instead stick on the main notes so you can use the rest as passive notes for example I'll just sort of improvise here [Music] you can see how those primary notes when you every time you come back to them it fits with that base like it fits with a cord it makes it seem like okay so that's where you're going okay so that's sort of why it fits because you're giving a contrast between very harmonically you could say perfect sounding things which is [Music] just those notes and you're comp and you're contrasting them with those passing notes [Music] right like you can hear it like just there like there that that's that's what I mean so when you're generally going to be playing which I'll show you how to do um you want to stick to like I said I'm going to keep repeating this because it's very important stick to the anchoring notes of those that the basically the chord notes now I I say chord notes because in your left hand you're not always going to be playing a chord you're probably going to be doing more advanced stuff which you know later for [Music] example and you're not going to be relying on your actual left hand chord pattern because you should at that point be comfortable with where your anchors are going to be and it's going to be exactly like playing the chord of that scale now speaking of scales and before we move on to the bulkier part of this lesson let's talk very quickly about scales like I mentioned in lesson one you're going to be sticking largely to a scale now you can have different chords but are still in the same scale which that is going to be in in CHT progressions which I'll talk about in another time but you're going to largely stick into that scale so if you choose okay I'm going to stick in a minor but pretty much your harmonies and your Melodies will both be in that same key so when I talk about anchoring notes obviously it's going to be based on the chord right if you're an A Minor and then you say hm okay where's my anchoring notes oh yeah maybe it's this well there's no C Shar in a minor so that could not be an anchoring note unless your key was the a major scale because that is one of those anchors it's got that 135 pattern but it's not that a major is the only scale that can to have the C as an anchoring note because in a major the C sharp is the third right that's the anchoring note but if you're swep to for example uh F sharp minor one two 3 4 five that's going to be your fifth note and that is going to be an anchoring note so that's another example your first exercise here is going to basically be getting more comfortable and getting used to what notes work with what harmonies so basically sort of getting an idea of how these synergies work we're going to start super simple in C major okay that's your scale obviously that's your chord now you're just going to be repeating this 1 2 3 4 1 two you're going to hold that down for a semi breath so four beats you're going to keep on repeating it so you're just going to play around with some notes on the right hand you're going to just play around with some notes that you're going to just hear like does it work does it not work now obviously in theory you know that the anchoring notes the 135 of the scale are going to work best but I want you to just experiment just play around with it and see so that your brain can actually get used to it your fingers your muscle memory will start to develop because it's one thing for me to tell you this works this doesn't and it's another for you to actually play it and sort of discover that yourself so for example you might just want to do [Music] the reason you're going to be doing this although it seems very very simple and although it seems maybe to you who's playing it pretty much improvising for the first time here my students always get the feeling that you know this just really isn't that great and it's probably because they're comparing what they're doing now to what they're expecting or what you know really good improvisation sounds like no good improviser has not comeone through the stage of very basic sounding improv and your ear training is also going to improve because when you're playing you're going to get the idea of like okay so now I'm on this passing note do I go do I want to go up do I want to go down to that anchor note do I want to keep on doing more passing notes um am I going to be repeating any notes do I uh change pitch so for example um you [Music] know now here you can go up you can go down if you go up [Music] now it really doesn't matter what you do there's no really mistakes at this point because your only objective here is not to make things sound good it's to figure out what sounds good and what doesn't work play around with some black Notes too even though it's not in a key signature play around with them too so either now or later or both pause the video and have a go of that just for a couple minutes even again don't worry about right or wrong just get used to it okay so hopefully you had a bit of a go at that um just wanted to explain quickly here why I did not want you to use the pedal I don't want you to divide your focus subconsciously your focus is going to be divided it takes a certain amount of focus to actually control the pedal so focus on just you know getting good at what you're trying to get good at right don't add in the more complex stuff at this stage all right so we're going to take this a step further and and we're actually going to be putting the chord progressions in now I'm not going to do a whole lot of explaining on why these particular chords work in this particular pattern because I'll say that for another video but just for now very common very basic chords that you're going to be doing but C major a minor F major and G major now you're going to notice that they all are going to be white notes you're not playing any black notes right um so what you're going to be doing is repeating that chord progression in your left hand and you're going to be playing um the melody in your right hand and this is particularly important to understand because your anchr notes are going to be different right you're going to be playing um you know your root is going to be a different uh set of anchor notes a different chord cuz in C major your anchor notes are c e and G right just the normal C major chord chord a minor the a minor chord [Music] right you're going to be trying to hover around different anchor notes cuz if you're in let's say F major here and you're sticking only in the c major [Music] ones it does kind of work because it's in the same key the same scale which I'll touch on later um but it doesn't work as well as when you're sticking with the right and the corresponding anchor [Music] notes don't feel like at all you have to improvise at the same level that I did take it 10 times slower does not matter truly again to reiterate your only only objective here is to get a bit more understanding on what notes work and what notes don't work with you know when you're playing different chords because then eventually you're going to be at a point where you're playing any chord whether you're improvising on your own whether you're improvising with a friend with a band alongside a new song that you haven't played before whatever it is the situation a singer even um they say hey okay give me some D major improvisation you're going to be instantly [Music] you're going to know sort of what notes work like I don't have to think about really what notes are going to work and why because I I'm already used to that like I'm used to knowing these are the anchor points I'm just going to hover around them that's it that's all your objective is so again either now or later have a go at you know playing in these different chord progressions in these different chords don't worry if it sounds like something you've heard before because that's actually what songs do now I did change the chord progression a bit there which you can do if you want but to keep it simple do the same progression the same sequence don't worry about mistakes at this point but have a go with that and then come back when you're ready okay so level three here we're going to add in actually two new elements now before I move on here I just want to keep something uh I want to explain something very quickly something like improvisation is not as black and white as for example learning a song when you're learning a piece of music and you have notes in front of you the note is either right or wrong if it says play an E flat and you play an E that's incorrect when you're improvising it doesn't work in the same way it's as it says you're improvising right it's not a matter of what is correct and not correct it's more of a matter of um what works and doesn't work okay because what's correct um you know it it really differs from one person to another because you sort of create your own style and for me like I think that one way of making Melodies and harmonies and rhythms speed pitch like I have my own way of doing it so when I say don't worry about mistakes I really mean it like it's it's not it's really nothing to worry about you just keep on moving that's one of the first things we learned just keep the B on moving you don't you know if you go you you know you don't have to just stop and restart because it's not a matter of it being Incorrect and therefore you just stop repr practice it it's more of that doesn't work so well just keep going right it's just not it's not a big deal I just wanted to point that out because sometimes um my students get really hung up on that bit so these two new elements we're going to be adding is a the pedal and B um we're going to change the way we play their chords so instead of playing them like this we're going to do it Bare Bones and do it like that okay now there is a reason for this because um we're going to keep on doing this pattern this right we're going to still do that um chord progression okay now if your piano doesn't go that low you can either do it instead of you know octave to octave you can do it like that right um or you can just move the entire thing up and then you come up here there there's different ways of getting around it um but but let's stick with maybe let's say that you do have an 88 key um you're going to still do the chord [Music] progression and then in your right hand you're still going to be doing um the same thing but but now you no longer are relying on your left hand for okay so so I'm playing the chord here that means that I'm going from E so then we have a g like you're not going to be referencing it in that way anymore if that's what you were doing before which is completely fine we're just going to be taking this bit of a step forwards so at this point in your mind you should have an idea of what the c major chord is already you should not you know be sitting here constructing it like 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 you should know what the c major chord is so if you have that in your mind you know [Music] okay the other thing is that when you're adding in the pedal obviously the notes are going to be sustained in the air so um this is s of sort of like a general um tip um and it's the reason that you don't find as much in actual music that you learn but when you have a lot of notes in the left hand in this range especially they're are too close together and playing at the same time with the pedal it sounds too muddy like you can't really make it out as clearly as if you doing up here remember to also lift your pedal and put it back down in each cord change so now your improvisations might sound something like [Music] this again when I'm saying your improvisations should sound a bit like this I don't mean in terms of complexity and in terms of how good it sounds right because I'm not at all expecting you to make it sound like you know that good right um because that's again not what we're going for we're going for developing your ear and developing your understanding of what works and what doesn't work so if your sound really basic really Bare Bones completely fine as long as you're experimenting right don't just keep on Hover not even hover but don't just like stick to constantly the an notes [Music] right you don't want to like obsessively stick to that note and not use any other passing notes right so like always either now or after the lesson or both have a go at doing that just experimenting just playing around with it and exploring let me give you two quick tips that will increase the quality of your improvisations the first is don't be afraid to change up your rhythm second don't be afraid to change up your pitch if you're playing this for example and you're doing the same and you're you're doing the same uh rhythm in the same area maybe you're doing [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] um you can move around right [Music] you know that's again a bit more advanced but the principle is the same you can change up your Rhythm and change up your pitch and that will give it a bit more um you know variation and it sounds you know more like an improvisation that is a bit more complex and it's nicer so that is the bulk of this lesson um I hope you understood the things that I explained and trust me these things will for sure this is one of those things that definitely does come with the practice right um something like learning how to read music is pretty logical you just remember the system and you read it of course that takes practice and it does help that you play what what you read but to actually understand the system you don't have to to do that it's pretty logical but with improvisation it's a lot more creative right not you know you'd be surprised how many or I should say how little um of the population of piano players improvise and even fewer compose so for that reason if you feel like this is sort of like going into an unfamiliar world that's natural because you're using a different part of your brain so don't worry about that hopefully you can implement this into your practices and you know just generally um do things that sound nice that you're happy with and just generally increase your improvisational skills I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to be going deeper into how to improvise see you soon okay welcome back everybody to another lesson in this video we're going to be taking a deep dive into chord progressions and how to make them now you're going to be able to apply this not only to your actual improvisations or any compositions you do but you're going to have a deeper understanding um so when you come to even learn uh actual songs and you're going to be able to see these chord progressions you're going to realize how common some of these chart progressions are now let's quickly recap what we know about chart progressions they are usually uh a loop of chords that are either uh three or four chords okay so for example we know this [Music] one and that would simply repeat we have four chords on a Loop but sometimes they can just be three chords that repeat a very large percentage of songs that you play or even listen to are going to be following a chord progression and they're usually not incredibly unique the unique thing about it is usually the sound uh maybe the instrumental Choice the way that the music is created um but as far as a framework is concerned this is something that is very common in a lot of songs now sure of course the complexity and the structure of these core progressions will obviously vary you know they're not always going to be just the entire song for repeating chords although it is possible with songs such as noola bian by an AI you're going to find that sometimes they switch core progressions maybe in a introduction it'll be different compared to the CH or the verse or the bridge especially the first thing you're going to do is you're going to choose a scale okay so just for the sake of this uh example and for Simplicity we're going to stick with C major okay just so you can understand the framework and then we're going to go into more complex scales keep in mind that you're going to always be in a scale whether you are learning music through sheet music or when you're in Google looking at core progressions and this is no exception when you're improvising or composing you are in a scale so that's why we have to actually choose one so in a C major scale we're going to take each of these notes and give it a number this will be 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 we're not going to call this eight because we're going to take this as they are seven different notes this eighth will be the same as the first so again we have 1 to seven different notes of the scale so you may already recognize this as degrees of the scale except what we're going to do here is take each of these numbers and give it a Roman numeral number okay so this would actually be I then I I then i i i i v v so on before we move on let me quickly mention that when the Roman numeral character is actually in a capital form it means it's a major chord when it's in lower case it is a minor chord now for the diminished it has a bit of an odd symbol because it's obviously going to firstly be in lower case because you can only diminish minor chords you can't diminish major chords you're going to see a lowercase um Roman numeral and then you're going to see like a little zero or a little circle next to it and that's a symbol for a diminished chord now although this is a principle of Music Theory don't worry because it's not something super complex or anything just because there Roman numerals this is simply how we you know look at the notes individually now the difference here is that we are going to take each of these notes and give it a chord rather than play as a note itself for example when we play C it's going to be the c major chord when we play for example an F we're gonna play the F major chord we're going to play the G G major chord so again although we are in the c major scale each note is no longer an individual note each note is going to be representing a chord okay now here's the key Point some of these chords will be major and some of them will be minor this might seem counterintuitive considering in the past we've known that when you're trying to construct a chord from the scale it has to match the tonality of the scale so you cannot make a C minor chord from a C major scale except that's exactly the difference we're not using this to construct chords we're using this to see what chords fit into this scale you have three cordal positions which are going to be the most important the number one the number four and the number five okay so chord one chord four and chord five are always going to be major when you're in the major [Music] scale everything else is going to be minor okay so we have major minor because this would be major so we're in minor here minor again major major minor and for the seventh chord is not going to be minor or major it's going to be a diminished chord and to do this this you're just going to take the minor chord and you're going to flatten that last note by One semmit Tone okay so in other words you could also just count three semmit tones and then three semitones again so from the b 1 2 3 1 2 3 but I personally to make it quicker I play the minor and then I flatten it last one now you're going to notice here that each of these chords actually fits into the key signature of C major and which is why we're not playing any black notes here so again to recap we have major minor minor major major minor diminished it is important to remember which of these chords are major and which are minor and which chord is diminished so I'm going to give you a very simple very easy way to remember it always keep in mind the three main positions these are never going to change whether you're in major or minor scales the one the four and the five you must always remember these positions 1 four and five if you are in a major scale those 145 chords will be major everything else will be minor except the diminished sth okay now how does this tie into chord progressions well we know now that you can basically say okay in the c major scale you play the four chord that's going to be this F major maybe the one chord the two chord so what chord progressions do is that they take a combination of these chords right you have seven available chords to you and you can sort of mix them around to make a chord progression for [Music] example so we did chord one then chord six okay 1 2 3 4 5 six chord 1 chord 6 chord 4 Chord 5 so that was 1 645 now if I just Shuffle the octave um of these chords around so that I don't have to jump so high from the c major to the a minor I'm just going to put that a minor down here and everything else in this area so that still actually is 1 6 4 5 and there are so many songs that follow that progression in fact that's one of the most popular progressions of all time right up there next to the 145 progression I'm sure that you'll hear many songs in your head when I play this although I slightly changed the Rhythm the actual framework and the chord progression is very basic the significance of this method for creating core progressions is that it applies to to any key now if we are again in a major scale we can do what's called modulation now modulation is a term that we use when we say that we're going to take a piece of music or a section of music or some harmonies some Melodies whatever but we're going to take music and just shift it up or down into a different key but maintaining the actual structure of it so if I take 1 4 5 from C major and I say okay we're going to switch to the key of G major okay G major has one sharp it's the F sharp so now when I play the 145 chords with the key signature in mind we're going to play the following 1 4 5 doesn't matter the pitch either now to make sure that our D major chord here is correct and we should actually be playing a D major with this FP we're going to take another look at the framework of the chords the order so again because we are on a major scale our three key chords that are going to be major are the 1 four five okay those chords will be major everything else is minor except the diminished seventh so chord one major chord 2 minor minor major because is Chord four chord 5 is Major so you see how I switch that D major has an FP in it and again that corresponds to the key signature of the scale that we're in then we have minor now for our diminished seventh chord what's the seventh note in the G Major scale it's an FP okay 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 this would be one again so seven I'm going to play the minor then I'm going to diminish it just by flattening that last note down or you can just count three semitones and then three semitones so again one more time then back to one let's take another look at a popular core progression 1425 let's go with the a major [Music] scale so this is Chord one 2 3 4 5 6 7 and back to one let's take each of those notes and play them as their chords so chord one is going to be major chord two is minor chord three is minor now I'm going to go to the C Shar because that's an a key signature so C it's going to be a minor chord then we're going to go to a major that's chord four chord five is major chord six is minor again key signature so I'm going to go to FP chord six is Major and chord seven is diminished so I can play the minor first and then I'll diminish it if you're not already comfortable with playing diminish chord St the bat so those are our chords and if we wanted to make a progression so let's go with that example of one 425 so a major D major B minor E major so I could play something like [Music] this hopefully that makes sense and we're going to move on to the minor scale chord framework exactly the same way as in the major scale our key chords are going to be the 1 four and five except contrary to the major the 1 14 five are going to be reflective of the scale so one is minor four is minor and five is minor everything else is going to be major except the diminished second okay so the diminished is going to be at a different location compared to the major all right again to quickly recap major scale 145 is Major everything else is minor minor except the diminished 7th and for minor scales 1 145 is minor everything else is Major except for the diminished second so we have chord one as minor chord two is diminished so that's a b diminished if I took a B minor it would be like this but again we're diminishing it then a C major then we have a D Minor an E minor and F uh major then we have a G major back up to the one and then it can repeat like that and again notice here how none of the chords are surpassing the key signature of the key right A minor has no key signature it's all of its notes are white so you're not going to be playing any black notes Here depending on the scale that you're in and the court progression that you use you can find yourself eliciting different emotions now of course there are other things that factor into creating set emotion such as Dynamic U articulations uh pitch temp many other factors like that but let's just stick with the framework itself something uh like a minor core progression in maybe a particular cor progression would elicit a more Sinister emotion another one might be a bit more dramatic maybe another one in major could be upbeat and happy um sort of like um uh sentimental even but you have seven different chords and you can put them in any order so you have a huge abundance of options now how can you sort of get an idea for what works well there are two main methods that I would recommend you either explore which I find a lot of enjoyment doing I would just let's say I'm in a minor I would just sort of play around with what works like a minor let's say I go to C Major G okay that's like there are so many songs that are in that chord progression if we analyze the actual progression itself we have so 1 3 7 6 so you can explore and try different combinations uh the second option which I also recommend is to play a lot of songs play a lot of um particularly songs that you enjoy playing um and if you go onto either reading the sheet music and looking at the chords is asking you to play you'll find it usually in your left hand um and you can find it even sometimes you're not as basic as the Triad sometimes they'll be extended out like this right um and then you can sort of hear on how to return it back to the Triad form um so you can look at sheet music or you can read the actual chords like I showed you on Google so you can follow along in that way and you can analyze and say okay so that's the one chord then it goes to five then it goes to two then three right there is a third option um if you don't want to really like develop it and you just want to just outright know what works you can also go to Google and type in piano chord progressions and you can find plenty of websites which will show you okay um great things that work for major uh scales you can go into one four 5 2 for example and here's great ones for minor and then it'll show you you can do one you can do all of them you can do one of these options you can do both you can do all three of them if you like a great tip that you can use for when you're trying to develop your own major core progressions and this is especially for the major scales it doesn't work as well in the minor because you have a different sort of tone um but in major you usually want to start or end on the one four or five so for example you want to maybe start on a one and then let's say you got a three uh then we got a six and I can end on four or if I did six and go to five or if I did 1 3 six back to one so that's another tip that you can use sometimes when you end on let's say a three right like if if you're in a C major and you end on three it feels like it wants to it wants to go somewhere but you're trying to like keep it in there and trying to Loop it so for example uh if I start on one and you don't actually have to start on one you can start somewh else you can start on two start on four um it doesn't really matter but most commonly You' start on one so one and you can hear like it's it's really trying to go somewh [Music] like and you can go from there but you know like you can be aware of this the the sort of tone that you're ending on right which is why I recommend that you also um actually play song that you enjoy because you're going to see how it works and why plus you're sort of taking in a lot of source information about what works and once you do that multiple times you have many many sources and then you're going to be sort of creating your own style like an average essentially of your innate style the style that you know you naturally feel like you have and then you're taking a lot of different sources that you enjoy and again like you're sort of mixing all together to create something very unique that's most of material that I wanted to cover in this lesson but I did want to run through a couple tips that's going to you know just generally keep you away from uh particularly very common mistakes and to generally improve your actual um improvisational skills the first thing is just to be aware of the location of the diminished cord when you're in major it's in the seventh and when you're minor it's on the second sometimes you're playing around with chords and then you just you hit something and just does not work at all sometimes it's because you're playing the natural minor versus playing the diminished chord now I wanted to also say something here these are not rigid rules okay so what you just learned here is not something that you must obey at all times this is just telling you that when you're in this particular scale these are the chords that Naturally Fit um the the most right they fit very very naturally you can play some other random completely different other chord that you experimented with and you accidentally played it and it turns out to be like maybe did it by by acci like there's plenty times when I've played um I was trying to play a chord and then I accidentally did this and that's actually an A flat diminished chord but with an inversion right so I can I can that's sort of like reverse engineer it to find out what it was because I I thought it sounded nice so these are not rigid you can obviously move away from these boundaries it's just more of a guideline so it feel like if you were playing a couple cords and something came out and it sounded interesting maybe you wanted to go somewhere with it and then you thought to yourself no no no that that couldn't be right um so you can actually use things outside of these boundaries just thought I would keep that in your your mind don't worry if your beginning improv sounds maybe super basic I still remember the very first thing I ever improvised I took this like you know that very famous song it's like and all I did was shift around the chord pattern instead of doing 1 6 4 5 I did 1 5 6 4 and that was the first thing I ever did then I took it further and I was like well what if I start in a different place and I go upwards instead of downwards so I did and then I started to add in some Melodies which we're going to go over later so hopefully you can practice chords progressions um maybe even practicing songs that you enjoy and even having a go at some modulation I mainly want you to experiment and keep on improvising not worrying about what's correct and what's Incorrect and just figure out what works for you so great job this lesson and I'll see you in the next one okay welcome back everyone to another video in this lesson we're going to be talking about Melodies and how to make more memorable Melodies how to make them sound nicer how to make them sound uh more harmonically fitting and just more pleasant to play and listen to now we did already touch on the idea of anchors and how when you're playing a Melody it should sort of hover around these anchors depending on the chord you're playing so if your chord progression goes like this and repeats like that your Melodies would ideally hover around the Anchor Point which is the actual notes of the chord while using the rest of the notes as passing notes for example [Music] something like that but what we're going to be talking about today is going to be a bit different in fact if I was to just summarize this for you in two words the most important things to keep in mind when making memorable Melodies is firstly space and secondly Direction okay now what do I mean by this now when I say space I'm really talking about the space in between the notes in between the phrases in between you know the moments in between where you're actually playing and the moments where you're not playing and it's that little Gap where the space you create is so so important because not only it gives a lot more depth to what you just played since now you have some contrast to separate them but also it gives the listener um you yourself as a listener and player but also anybody else who's listening to you just a bit more space to really appreciate what it is that you just play and absorb it right it's very common at the beginning to just want to fill out all the spaces okay and it's something that I did for I think two years before I sort of came across when I was playing it that you know what it sounds better when you leave space um so I'm just going to give [Music] example I'm going to just repeat that in my left hand and I'm going to show you what I mean in my right hand when it comes to melodies [Music] and although it fits harmonically because there are you know following the anchor notes it doesn't have space it's always always going let me do a similar example but I'm going to add just a bit more space in between uh the phrases [Music] and you can see the effect it had it made it a lot more memorable and such a very easy and quick thing to do but it added a lot of depth and keep in mind we didn't change anything else we I kept you know I kept the core progression I kept mostly the Dynamics I kept the tempo the notes that I was actually playing were very similar so I had a general tone that was pretty much exactly the same as before and I just added some space and look at the difference is made now with space we can use it in a lot of different ways we can add in space and we can take away space And depending on Our intention and what it is that we want to achieve uh maybe we want to add some tension and build it up to a certain Climax and then remove a away space for example or we want to do the reverse thing I'm just going to keep it simple here so that you can see what I'm doing particularly with the adding and removal of space to achieve different things and how I might combine it with uh increasing or decreasing Tempo and particularly Dynamics you can see I'm also going to probably add in the pedal too so just trying to pick up as much information as you can from this demo [Music] is [Music] that's an example um obviously I did a lot of things there I changed my left hand pattern completely I went from cords that were um had some space between them and then I went down to the climax where I went all the way down to the low pitch and I you know I went I think it was Forte and didn't have that much space in between but the right hand also the tempo escalated in both hands but in the right hand the actual Melodies were tighter right um they were more repeating so for example I did that is just a very simple um F major arpedio and then that is a a minor inversion but also in an arpeggio and so you can see how I took a lot of elements and I put them together in this way and again this is not the level I'm expecting you to improvise at but I just wanted to prove the point of you can do a lot of things with space okay now when it comes to Direction this is something that you also may have noticed in that improvisation you have to have your Melodies um in general your piece but in particular your Melodies moving in a particular direction right or some people call it story instead of direction for example if you have your Melody playing the exact same thing and not really moving anywhere then that's uh a very particular kind of um improvisation where it's more for like passing time for example like I said if you're at an event or something and you know people are just uh being welcomed as guests or something and you're just there for background music you don't need to have a lot of Direction but if you want to create something that has a lot more depth uh emotional story um something that will really Captivate the listeners direction is very important so here's an example of something without [Music] Direction and it would sort of repeat like that but if I took that same idea and I gave it more direction to a more exciting clim actic area where it's more upbeat and uh more emotionally involved and you can see all the factors that I'm adding in here uh if I take this idea and I [Music] go and you can keep on going and just with adding those Dynamic swells it was giving it so much more energy so much more movement and flow now what was I doing there with in terms of uh the harmonics like what was I doing to add so much more complex and Rich Harmony now if I just uh break it down I think I did this so This is actually just this but more stretched out it's the exact same notes right so here that's just the normal chord but I'm not adding this um f Shar because I don't like to have too many notes in the left hand because it start to sound muddy and then in the right hand that's an inversion of the D major which actually I would put my thumb over here but it's already taken which means I have more fingers to add in more [Music] notes and with the pedal then I went this is actually an F minor 7 but to break it down F minor so I went from D major to F minor then so you see how I'm still playing the chord but on different fingers and in my left hand I'm sort of giving it more base on the left and in the right I'm just extending it out and this is the seventh note of that scale because F minor uh F minor this is the seventh note [Music] so let's take another look at Melodies and see if we can add anything else to make it a bit more memorable and unique please keep in mind that the question and answer concept is much more of a guideline to what word Works generally in Melodies rather than an absolute rule you should not be you know trying to create a melody and thinking yourself in an incredibly critical way of No No No this must be a question this must be an answer answer this is not a good answer this is not a good question um it can't be anything else of course again like asking yourself this could be a nicer question here to fit this theme that's fine but just try not to be incredibly rigid with this again it's just a guideline and try to follow your ear and your intuition which is going to be developed the more you do this so let's say that you were playing around and you did a Melody like [Music] this that works um you can add in a bit more question and answer through the Rhythm okay so maybe you can do [Music] again you can really play around and and experiment and find your own thing until you uh think you have something that you like and if you want to add more Direction I would recommend finding variations of that Melody where you can go up or down the pitch so for example let's say you really love this as like a repeating [Music] Melody and you really tempted to just keep on looping that on forever and although it is a nice melody if you made that you can uh again add some variation in Pitch [Music] so and you're going to notice that um you're going to sort of look for the things that work usually usually around those anchor points your fingering might also get pretty uh messy just because you're improvising you don't really know what's going to come next at this stage you're really focusing more on the sound and then you can you know optimize your fingering later now the last thing I want to talk about is integrating it with a chord progression okay namely uh taking your Melody and fitting it with a chord progression there are two ways of doing this and you can try both I personally like doing both depending on which one I want really focus focus on more you either start by creating a melody and then finding a core progression that fits with that melody or you start with the core progression that you like and then creating a Melody to support that now there are pros and cons of each method for example if you started with a Melody you're going to probably find yourself doing more experimentation with the chords um but if you start with the chords it's usually easier to find a Melody but you might feel a little bit uh restricted in terms of your creative freedom but for beginners I absolutely recommend just um finding a core progression first and then looking at melodies for example let's say you were let's do something a bit more complex here let's say you did [Music] this so in terms of the Roman numeral uh section we have one so we're in c minor we have one 3 6 7 now if I play those as their chord variations rather than the octave it would [Music] be and you can use that to figure out where your anchor points are until you're sort of comfortable right remember that especially this middle note when you play a Triad if you put a Melody that usually anchors around this note it works particular ularly well um for [Music] example so you can see that's the middle note then down here this is a passing note because it's not as part of these um the three anchor [Music] points that's in the middle [Music] there so let's say that you maybe changed it around to find something that you like uh maybe a bit more than your first try so uh so I like that then I can revert this back to the octave again I just prefer playing in the octave but you might have your own style I can add in the pedal and try again [Music] you can see how I even changed the pitch and that's how you add in a bit more variation and make it a bit more interesting you can see my left hand I like doing this where I'm basically playing octave and then I take my second and I play the you know the third jump from [Music] it because if I play the chord it's that middle note the third [Music] one and again um you have the other option of actually starting with a Melody first and then finding a chord progression let's say you had a nice melody like this that you thought was good that you wanted to attach a chord progression [Music] too so the first thing I come to mind [Music] is you can see how similar these notes [Music] are but with this method you have a lot more options to choose from when it comes to chords because you could do something completely different if you thought it would work better you know through some experimentation so you could do [Music] so you change from repeating back to the C minor instead you're going to play the a flat major instead so hopefully that makes sense and it helps and once you practice these things I'm sure that you're going to make a lot more higher quality improvisations good job this lesson I'll see you in the next one okay welcome back everybody to another video in this lesson we're going to teach you how to play some piano runs fills and nice patterns that's going to elevate your playing ability and I'm actually very excited about this lesson because I'm going to be giving you a bunch of tools or templates even exactly like a drag and drop file as if you were on a computer except it's about a technique right now when I'm talking about piano runs and fills what is it that I'm describing well these are essentially patterns that you can uh play at any point in different sort of contextes and really Elevate what it is that you're playing so let's say that this was your cour program [Music] ression back up to a now you can add in a pattern in your left hand that sounds like this now if I added that left hand pattern into the chord progression and I added in some pedal and Dynamics here's what that could sound like [Music] [Music] now you can hear the effect it had on the chord progression because just a very simple pattern but the exact same you know actual progression it sounds very different like this was the chords on its [Music] own it does sound nice but you can just hear how big of a difference it made now as I mentioned you can play this pattern in any chord in any chord progression any scale um but just something to keep in mind when you're actually trying to figure out what the notes are keep in mind what your key signature is because if you playing this and you're going to be in a minor it's going to be different to when you're in a major because a major from this a a third above the a is not going to be a c it's going to be a C sharp okay because if you took that original Triad that's a major that's a minor and let's say you wanted to do this in some random other key like let's say um let's say C minor so the C minor uh actual chord is like this so when you come to play the uh this pattern you would put your five and one on the octaves then your two would play the fifth note as if in the chord because 1 2 3 4 5 this would be six okay it's tempting to play that but actually the fifth on the G and then a third Above This top C is going to be the E flat not the E again you can tell very very easily just from playing the chord so if you are comfortable with the chords which hopefully you should be um especially with the chords you've been playing uh frequently you should sort of visually tell where a third up or even a third down would be so in this case and like I said you can do this in other uh [Music] Keys before I show you the next pattern we're going to learn uh keep in mind that these are very variable you can interpret these and uh change these as much as you like you don't have to play exactly like that you might want to change it you might want to do for example leave that space you might want to change one of the notes you again this is simply like a template which you can do whatever you want with Okay so this one is it is a pattern um it's very simple something you have come across a variation of before so basically you're going to take the arpeggio of a chord you can do some right hand or left hand but for this example we're going to go on the right hand and you're going to play the extended ARP it's not an official term but you're you're taking a an arpeggio and extending out essentially so for example E minor if you extended It Out by simply reshuffling your fingers so that your pinky can hit this e so one then two 3 5 and you can just uh play those notes you can either do it in order like up and down like so or you can do it all up upwards or all downwards again you have a lot of choice but this is simply a framework now what I personally like doing is doing an inversion of this so I like to take the chord make an inversion so I can do this I can do a second inversion and then Shuffle it down the octave so that it's a bit more pleasant to listen to and then reshuffle my fingers so my first note here is on the B so my pinky will also go on a [Music] b this is still E minor you could even remove or add notes so if I removed a note I could for example take away this G so I'm only playing the b e and B again again this is still actually in E minor so I can do which when you listen to it sounds very similar to if you did that um but in the root position so on E or I can said change this G for the B like I said you have a lot of options here this is simply a template which you can use to uh accentuate particular parts of your improvisation or you want to just add it in to make it sound nice so in example of that being used maybe if I were improvising I could use it in this [Music] way and you can see there that I actually used that pattern and I shifted my pinky around to make it more of a Melody because you can hear I actually added also an accent on that top note to make it stand out a bit more so then once I sort of shifted that pinky around to make a Melody it was a bit more obvious okay so the next pattern we're going to go through is one of my favorites actually that I use a lot and this is very simple one actually so we're going to go to for this example G minor so if I play the G minor scale for you real quick you have a B flat and E flat in the key signature now if you pay attention to those notes again look at the notes that I'm choosing here I'm going to take this one so the B flat the a the G and the D okay so look at their relation to the actual uh root note which is G I'm start I'm personally starting on the three going down to two to one down to five and I say five because you know once you reach one you're going to count backwards from seven so this would be 1 7 6 5 and so on so this is what I'm [Music] doing like I said you can do this in any key for example a minor or C minor or D major same principle now going back to that G minor example again you can hear what I'm doing with it I can go up and down or just up or I could even continue up and this is the key one that I like to teach so I'm going to play this and then I'm going to almost like in a scale I'm taking my thumb and putting underneath to reach the D then continue maybe even again and then back down my fourth hits the B flat and again fourth hits a B flat so if you did it a bit faster the key is in that transition when you transitioning up you have to obviously uh give your thumb a bit time and space to reach that you don't want to keep your thumb locked there until the last second because it's going to sound like you're delaying like that same way when you're coming down as soon as you're done with that note your fingers if you look at my wrist and my whole hand here actually it's already going down I'm not waiting it's sort of you know always moving and flowing so one of the ways you could fit that pattern into your improvisations is if you're playing let's say this chord [Music] progression maybe I can use it in this [Music] way and so on remember that when you are playing faster notes faster Mel these even your left hand or right hand remember to count okay either use a metronome or count out loud for example one and two and one and two and one and two and one and two and to keep in time now the next pattern I'm going to show you is going to be in the left hand and I personally love using this and I love playing it because it's just very fun to play and it sounds really good fits you with pretty much every right-and Melody that I usually play so I'm going to play this melody for you in a minor so you can see exactly what I'm [Music] doing now although at first glance or at first time you hear it it sounds pretty complex but when you play and and you know really break it apart it's very simple so you're going to take the octave chord or just um you know the actual a minor chord and then give it the octave roots and then play play that fifth note in the second finger play that as an arpeggio so with five 2 1 then your fourth finger is going to play the next note up so on the B your third finger will play the next note up on the C your second finger will actually play the E right because we're trying to stay within those anchor notes of the chord to make a sound like it fits um and the D is not really part of that and then we're going to go up to the a play that with your thumb the one and if I play that back down for you 1 2 3 4 1 2 5 obviously it's going to take some practice just to get used to how you're going to be moving your fingers on what notes what sort of structure and what you know what kind of distances you're putting in between each note um and so if you did it a bit faster it'd sound like this [Music] if you're going to try and play that I would first definitely recommend that you just start off practicing on the actual fingering first don't worry about your timing just take it very slow to get the right notes okay like I always say go slow enough that you can't make a mistake then you can go faster and if you want to really get good at this much quicker keep it slow put a metronome on okay either on the Internet or on your keyboard if you have one or if you bought a separate one get a metronome and just let it time you so let's say my finger is a metronome with this pattern in every single pattern that you're going to be learning in this video and any pattern you're learn in the future get good at it first before you try and add it in with any other hand or you try to add any complexity to it just get the Bas line down first and then you can build as always you can do that in any chord so that was the a minor chord right so based on this now if I went down to F major and again same principle you're going to take that chord as your Baseline if you need to construct it to be able to see where your anchr notes are then do that but if you're already comfortable with what the chord is you can just eyeball it so you you take the arpeggio of the chord um the extended chord obviously then your next note up with the four the three C is going to be on two and then F on one back [Music] down if you're having trouble with this or with any of these patterns break it down okay you don't to do the entire thing all at once you can just start by practicing just this and then adding in the next little [Music] chunk and so on for the last pattern of this video we're going to take a look at the left hand once more this one's definitely going to be easier than the ones that we just did in fact it's going to be very similar to one of the earliest ones we did in this video so instead of doing this it's sort of be going to be like a variation because we're playing very similar notes we're going to do so very simple you take that extended chord arpeggio add in the third note up obviously keeping in mind what notes are in that chord so this one's very s explanatory you always know what that third up is based on the chord itself so note third up is going to be a c natural you can sort of see the chord over here and you're going to be doing that with any chord that you do this to for example G minor F Shar minor C Shar [Music] minor uh D major again you're just doing that extended arpeggio chord and then then you're going to look at as if you were going to play the full chord but you know that third note very easy to know what not you're going to be playing on so of course these are not the only patterns that exist there are many many others um some of them you could even make your own like if you find yourself experimenting with different patterns in your left hand trying to even come up with your own it's very likely that you'll come across one that was also made by someone else and if you even searched online you look for more patterns you will find plenty but I did not want to give you too much in this video otherwise it would be definitely too overwhelming but here are some options you can take one of them or all of them and even apply them to your compositions so good job this lesson and I'll see you next one ...

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