 Hi guys, this is Jason Zak from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to do quite a few things as an exercise, it will be a very good practice for a bunch of things. Your chord inversions, your study of beat divisions, usage of triplets, semi quavers, quavers all in one and also chords which are broken up, you could call them arpeggios or broken chords and also block chords, how do you use block chords and arpeggios together and I have put it together in a rather real world challenge that you might face on any instrument wherein you are playing two chords, let's say in this exercise we are going to stick with B flat major, B flat D F and D major, D F sharp A, two nice chords which go pretty well together, but the challenge here would be if you play these chords as 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, that's two bars of B flat, 2, 3, 4, 5, 2, that's two bars of D, so the journey between or during these two chords B flat and D is rather boring if you ask me because you're just, you know, people are just hearing the same block of three notes B flat D F in some inversion or the other, that's what we plan to do in this lesson, how to make the journey between chords or just one chord and during the same chord more interesting and what we'll also do is isolate the study, what I mean by that is we will focus on one element at a time and we'll do this over a few lessons, so in this lecture we are going to only focus on rhythm and the pattern of the chords, we are not going to look at changing the chords in any way, so it's still going to be B flat major, but what you watch in the intro video was some kind of arpeggiation and some kind of interest, so I'm going to teach you those things specifically and it's primarily going to be rhythmic wherein the chords would either be blocked, block means you play them together and arpeggiated meaning you break them in certain groupings which I'm going to teach you, okay, my handwritten notes is there to help support the lesson, you can probably get yourself a copy on our Patreon, it's a PDF file ready for download and you'll also get notation, MIDI and backing tracks wherever applicable for a lot of our YouTube lessons which we've done, hundreds of them actually, so do consider heading over to Patreon for just $5 a month as your subscription and before we get started it'll be great if you could consider hitting that subscribe button and turn on the bell icon for regular notifications, let's get cracking, so the two chords B flat major and D major, let's first walk you through to the chords, the shapes and more importantly the inversions, we're going to need to use the inversions throughout the lesson, so B flat major, I'm playing it first off in its root position, B flat, D, F, you can go index, middle, pinky or else thumb, index, ring or you can even do thumb, middle, pinky, see what suits you I guess and if ever you're using the thumb on any of these chords which you will end up needing to especially with the inversions, give your thumb a slightly curved position, don't play it straight otherwise your elbow will have to come close to the body and it kind of put some strain on the hand in general, so curve your thumb or else you can use your index finger, so B flat major this way, then you can also play B flat major this way, that would be D, F, B flat, that's called as the first inversion and then we have F, B flat, D, that's your second inversion, so root, first, second and the left hand we'll just maintain a steady root, B flat, B flat octave, now the other chord D major, let's walk you through that, D major, that's D F sharp A or else F sharp A D, A D F sharp, so D F sharp A F sharp A D, A D F sharp, these are all your inversions, so the job for us right now would be there are two bars of each chord, B flat played over 1 2 3 4 2nd bar and D major played for another two bars, 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4, what do we do, so if you see the notation bar number one there's a rhythm pattern there which is quarter, quarter, quarter, triple it, quarter, quarter, quarter, triple it, 1 2 3 4 and 1 2 3 tuck it, so that's bar number one, so with B flat major and with D major when you encounter bar one you do 1 2 3 triple it, 1 and what are we going to do in bar number two, bar number two I've designed it to be pretty interesting to give you two styles of arpeggios wherein you start with a block at beat one, 1 2e and a 3e and a 4e and a 1, 2e and a 3e and a 4e and a 1, 2e and a 3e and a 4, so it's essentially semi-quaver fillers okay, 2 3 4 that's your bar 2, 2 3 4 that's your bar 2, so if you compare bar one and bar two again, 1 2 3 4 o o 1 2 3 e 4 o o 1 bar 1 2 3 triple it, tuck it so that's the rhythm pattern for this lesson and we are going to try and play this over B flat now the first obvious challenge you're going to face if you play block chords over the faster stuff the triplet variation and the semi-quaver variation is going to end up being as you can see it A is pretty tough for me to block it so fast and it's also rather annoying to listen to when you have chords colliding so fast with each other so that's a great opportunity to break up the notes of the chord and do what we call as an arpeggio so instead of doing something like that we can break up the chord so with semi-quavers and triplets i'm going to give you options so let's let's get that done so 1 2 let's just focus on bar 1 of B flat major 1 2 3 4 o o 4 o o now you could do two things at the 4 1 2 3 4 o o you're going up the chord that is l m h or you can even do 1 2 3 h m l down the chord or up the chord down the chord so this is a good filler and when you fill remember remember the fact that you have multiple inversions per chord right multiple meaning three not too much so b flat arpeggio or you can do b flat dfb flat arpeggio or else dfb flat first inversion la la la coming down okay remember the arpeggio either goes h m l going down or l m h going up let's do that again b flat bum bum bum bum full around with different inversions and different directions of the arpeggio so if you observe what i'm doing here i'm doing second inversion of b flat major and up the arpeggio on the triplet phrasing we call these as eighth note triplets two because they divide a quarter note or a pulse note by three okay to keep things a bit interesting you can also go on the blocks you can in plate not just with the same inversion if you want to challenge yourself further you can go root first second arpeggio you can go all the way up you've accessed a fair amount of the keyboard root first second inversion arpeggio and then just come back down doesn't matter which inversion you start from you can even start from the second inversion you know arpeggio up the arpeggio do it organically do it however you want really ultimately the goal is to practice inversions as well as that triplet filler let's do it a little bit to speed okay looks like we are ready to journey towards the next chord that's d major so b flat major d major d major and b flat sound very nice together they have that d in common so it makes it very interesting at the same time usable when i say interesting they're not part of any major scale or minor scale you right you get these very interesting scales you can build using those two chords but more importantly they share a common bond which is d so you can definitely compose some interesting chord progressions so d major i'm going to repeat the same triplet activity or rather three blocks and then a triplet block block block triplet so let's now toggle between b flat major and d major b flat major triplet d major triplet b flat major triplet d major triplet b flat major triplet d major mind you both the chords are now for one bar long our original goal was to play them for two bars so now what do we do in the second bar we practice that earlier by clapping i counted that for you and just a quick word before we get into the second bar when you're counting triplets it's nice to divide the beat by three obviously and say one and a two and a three and a four and or as we sometimes say in india with conical terminology tuk it tuk it tuk it tuk it tuk it if we divide by four as is the case for bar number two in this exercise you divide by four and you say one e and a two e and a three so the speed of the beat or the rate of the pulse will remain exactly the same it's just what you're doing inside the pulse so one e and a two e and a three and you can also say it in the indian's terms could be takadimi takadimi takajunut takadimi takadimi takadimi takajunut sounds a lot better with different syllables per sub beat you feel each sub beat independently then tuk it tuk it tuk it that's triplet okay now coming to bar two where we do block okay so let me walk you through that first without any shifting i'll do the block now it's a four note grouping but i can also choose to do a three note grouping as i'm going to show you so one two three four and also count it as one two e and a three e and a four e and a one two e and a three e and a four e and a one two e and a three e and a four e and a one i'm doing it for both the chords depending on which inversion you're at and another thing to note with the group of four we have to add an extra note into the chord so the extra note is not a new note really it's just an octave of the lowest note so b flat d f b flat or if i'm playing d major like this a d f sharp i'll play the a on top so block arpeggio arpeggio arpeggio block arpeggio arpeggio arpeggio block but the arpeggio is in groups of four notes right just to make the accent on the beat or on the down beat meaning which it's on the one accent t four so the hit points or the strong beats are projected as two three and four however i can even do groups of three while i'm playing this one two three four so that's three semi quavers in groups so if you do one beat is already taken up so let's do a little bit of junior school maths if you take four by four and sixteenth notes that would be sixteen beats sixteen opportunities to place something into now the first beat one and a four is already gone because that has that crotch it has engulfed a beat so one beat is gone so that you're left with sixteen minus four twelve subdivisions twelve sixteenth notes are remaining what do we do with the twelve you can do three groups of four as i just showed you two three four that's three groups of four semi quavers or else you can do flip that around four groups of three if you do three groups of four three three fours are twelve four groups of three four threes are twelve so it still adds up to the same but when you do three groups of four the accent pattern or the accent phrasing is very normal it's very down on the beat you know two two three it's going exactly with your head but when you do four groups of three it still equals to those twelve subdivisions you get a very accented or a very syncopated sound if you observe my the way my head is moving one two three four one two three four one it's pretty tricky to count it as you play i'd encourage you to do that maybe a bit later but for now at least move your head three four change two three four change two three four sometimes we tend to get confused by these groups of three and call them as triplets you should not call them triplets because they are still semi quavers just semi quavers grouped in threes so the overall division of the beat it's being divided into four units so for example if the beat value was one second or 60 beats per minute then every semi quaver would be every quarter of a second or 250 milliseconds so one two three four that's groups of four one two three four a lot more syncopated so let's just do b flat and d with that syncopated feel in the second bar one two three that's normal one four groups of three you can even say to give you that nice phrasing and now the fun begins because the arpeggio like we saw for the triplets you can do it with any inversion and now what we can do is because the tables have turned in the sense there's only one block one so you play the block with any which inversion so just hit b flat and then you climb in groups of three or in groups of four but you need to climb or you could climb if you can one two three four you can climb with different inversions so if i start with maybe the second inversion of b flat one two three four d maybe down that's groups of four right which makes it not so syncopated if i do groups of three two feel free to start with maybe b flat in another inversion in this case well i did second now i'll do root and d major could change accordingly or i could start b flat maybe like here with its first inversion you get the idea when you're doing groups of three you can keep jumping your inversions okay again like i said feels like triplets but they are not in fact i've done a dedicated youtube lesson which is literally titled triplets or not so we leave that in the description where things you thought were triplets are actually not triplets so it may be an interesting lesson to watch after this one so we have two bars of data now we have uh the block block block triplet block up a joe up a joe up a joe then you change the chord so i feel that this is making the journey of b flat or the the act of playing b flat over two bars which can be very boring and annoying sometimes a lot more interesting and the song also could have its own signature based on what you're doing right now the people might even remember the song based on the style of playing the chords that you're doing now okay so let's put that together and remember the second bar those 12 semi quavers we can group them as four or we can group them as three so i'm just going to do that together and and walk you through and then let's do it slowly so b flat block triplet still b flat semi quaver semi quaver but descending semi quaver d major triplet block semi quaver semi quaver semi quaver but that was semi quavers in groups of three right right groups of four groups of three triplet now you might find our notation and my handwritten notes useful for this lessons or do consider getting a copy on our patreon page and not only for this video most of my lessons will be supplemented with notation handwritten notes or both midi is also included if you use midi software or a midi player now before i wind up the lesson i wanted to make these chords slightly more colorful even though i planned initially not to do it and i wanted to do another video exclusively on the coloring part of these chords that's another thing you can do by the way but let me just give you a taste of it before we pack up and don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell because part two part three i don't know how many parts we are going to do with this concept of what to do in between or during a single a singular chord how to make that one chord interesting rhythmically is what we've seen in this video we would also love to do something melodic something with a passing bass line something harmonically interesting so let's check that out in the future videos now if you take the b flat major a small amount of spice which you can add to the chord could be a an add two which is the c another element of spice could be you can add an add four you can also add another element of spice which is right which is the bohemian rhapsody that's an add six also called as a major sixth you can also do an add seven and that seventh could be either major seventh or a dominant seventh okay so we have a b flat major and what you could now do with the same rhythm pattern so check that out i did a groups of three but i did it with that add nine extension which is b flat major with a c so i can even do groups of four filler so i'm doing even d add nine so these were all just add nines but you can play around or add two as you could also call you can also play around with maybe a an add four that sound and for d you can add a nice lydian which could be a sharp four stuff like that so you can pick this one note and do watch my video on specifically add chords and extensions how to form it theoretically and how to use it i've given some arpeggios as well so you can kind of play that arpeggio line with these add voicings and it sounds beautiful even on minor in this lesson we haven't done minor but but the add extension sound great on minor they sound good on major as well but anyway so you can extend you can add a two you can add a four you can add a six and you can add a seven that's a b flat major seven bring a nice d dominant seven so it's a good combination you know b flat major seventh and then that goes to the d dominant seven kind of makes those chords more obvious for your year to digest right guys so hope you found the lesson useful all the best practicing and if you'd like to learn music in a more structured way you can always consider heading over to nathanielschool.com filling up a form and choosing a course that suits you either as a beginner we have a foundation program or as an intermediate learner and we teach a bunch of instruments piano guitar and vocals to name a few cheers and catch you in the next one