 Hi guys, this is Jason here from the Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, I'm going to basically show you how to use one rhythm pattern, just one bar of rhythm to play anything, like literally whatever you need to ever play on the piano or music in general. So what is this anything? We have to quantify that. So that would be melody, that would be a bass line, that would be a chord pattern, an arpeggio or maybe also take like a rather boring finger exercise which you've been doing for a while and doing it with a little bit more fun and thus becoming a bit creative and then when you get creative, you don't know where it can take you. So all of these approaches, I'm going to do over a specific rhythm pattern and over a specific chord progression. Just to keep the lesson focused, however attached on our Patreon page will be a very detailed PDF study guide of all this stuff with notation and also you'll have new rhythm patterns a few more to challenge you. So just to give you a heads up, I'll be giving you one rhythm pattern really diving into that, that itself will take you a fair amount of time, but I want you to do a lot more with this field of practice. So do consider heading over to Patreon, you can get yourself that entire PDF file and a bunch more rhythm patterns. And hopefully this is the first of a lot more videos where I talk about what you could do with just a simple rhythm which you stare at visually and let that inspire you to actually make music. So this lesson may appear like I'm showing you how to practice music, but actually to be honest, it's also very much a method to make music, to create and compose music, produce, arrange and all those other creative aspects of the field. Okay, so let's get started. So you have a rhythm printed there, right? You have a rhythm there. So if you observe that rhythm, the first thing you'll realize is the beat is being divided into two. So you go one and two and three and four and so there are two divisions for every beat. We also call them as quavers in classical music or we just call them as eighth notes. Okay, so eighth note rhythm patterns first of all divide by two, but you'll also realize that there are just four permutations if you look at one beat of information, right? And I'm creating those permutations using the laws of music, nothing, nothing else. So it's dependent on whether you play a sound or whether you don't play a sound to play or not to play. So if you take a beat where you divide by two, you could play play that means you could do one and two and three and four and one and two or you could play only the on beat one and two and three and you could even leave a rest after that one and two and or you could hold it on one and two and three and four and so you call these as crotchets or you miss out the on beat and you play the off beat so that'll be one and two and three and four one and two and three you could do this with a chord one and two and three and four and one and two and okay. So double play play play only at the on don't play the off play at the off but don't play at the on and last but not least everyone's favorite once in a while will be don't play anything right that will be the entire beat is silence we call it a rest so you see those symbols there which we've put out for you to revise okay. So those are your options for one beat however you can also consider two beat phrases where you use things like tied notes to kind of extend a note by 1.5 times its value so if you take a dotted crotchet that would be a beat which lasts for one and a half counts okay but then you'll have to follow it up maybe with a quaver and then together they add up to a beat of music another thing you could consider is using tied notes to kind of extend your music across bars and then assure that the next bars first beat does not have an attack so it'll be one and two and three and four and one and zero so this also leads us to what we call as rhythmic anticipation where you kind of precede what would be the normal starting point of the beat okay and the final point I'd like to make in this introduction to the video would be when you play eighth notes you can either swing it or you can straighten it so if you swing it'll be one and two and three and four and one and two okay versus if you straighten it straight so when you divide beats you either straighten or swing okay so that was just a overview of the world of eighth notes okay so start off by beat by beat permutations play play play don't play don't play play don't play don't play you have those four beat options which which you can read then you can start building patterns around that using dotted notes using tied notes and then the overall structure could be the swung or straight so in this lesson I'm going to just pull out one rhythm from the hat of like so many rhythms and practice that really hard develop a lot of options for the piano it's a two-handed instrument so I'm going to tell you your right hand is going to do this specifically and your left hand is going to do this specifically and there's always going to be room for your creativity I'm going to give you some introductory stuff just to get cracking but then it's your job to navigate through and actually make a song make a piece of music make a section using these rhythm patterns so you're literally going to be staring at a rhythm pattern and asking yourself what do I do with this for the next half an hour or for my one hour practice you can literally look at that rhythm pattern and practice for one hour you don't need a book you don't need anything right so that's what I'm going to get you guys to do in this lesson more than improve your piano playing it's also a very simplistic approach to practice so a lot of the times you have so much to practice that you don't even know where to start there's so many things to do so this is something which I also do very very regularly especially when I'm stumped for what to do should I should I practice arpeggios should I work on some songs should I do a classical piece should I do a jazz piece you get all these things in your head and then you eventually do nothing so always start with some simple stuff when when you're a bit confused as to what to do and I guess it doesn't get simpler than one bar of music eighth note divide by two stare at the pattern and all I'm here to do in this lesson is to give you five really really catchy ways to make music using that one rhythmic pattern okay before we get started again a reminder to subscribe and turn on the bell for our youtube channel leave us a comment with things you'd like to learn in the future so that we can work on some more exciting lessons with your suggestions we also have a patreon page which is going to have the notes of this entire lesson and every lesson which we've done earlier and what we are going to continue to do so it'll be very nice if you can subscribe support our channel of course by paying the five dollar or so subscription and also you get yourselves a lot of things you join a community where a lot of things happen and will be happening and you'll also get specific things like for this lesson you're going to get all my handwritten notes and notation as well as a lot more additional rhythms for you to practice which I've kind of curated for the piano so head over to patreon and support our channel let's get cracking right so that's the first approach so you take the rhythm now the rhythm pattern is dupta dupta dupta dupta dupta but the way I'm saying it is slightly different I'm not saying it as ta ta ta ta ta or I'm not going reason being almost anything you want to do with respect to percussion needs a low pitch and a high pitch at least so that would mean a very drum like approach or a kick snare combo right you need to get the low frequency of the drum to chat with the high frequency of the drum they have to have a conversation so when you practice a rhythm pattern like this which is the pattern by the way it may not yield creative results so the first thing I would encourage you to do is instead of just clapping you could go dupta dupta dupta dupta dupta and I also show this like an imaginary bass player where a bassist would go the low note and then the high note dum ta dum dum ta dum ta dum ta dum ta or a drummer would go dupta dupta dupta kick snare kick kick snare so that's the first way to approach the pattern okay however you could start by clapping it or tapping it on a table or your leg or whatever it may be but after you do the preliminary assessment of the rhythm the the first challenge I would like you to do is create a drum groove first with your voice or a bass line with your voice and then we try and bring it on to the keyboard right this is a very exciting pattern but before that let me just give you a brief on the chords I'm doing because we have to do some chords so the chords I'm doing for this lesson are e minor g major second chord c major b suspended four and b normal b major so that's b sus four going to b major is quicker one two three four one two three let me show you the inversions as well so that you can navigate better b e g e minors played as b e g then g majors played as b d g c majors played as c e g and then b sus b e f sharp and then b d sharp f sharp let's just start by maybe playing it four four times each g major c major b and the bass goes the root of each chord e tried with octaves g c b b goes for both the sus and the major because the suspended is pulling to the major one more time with and the right hand voicing I hope you've got that one might argue that this is in the e minor scale it is but then I'm using the normal flat seven which you'll find in the natural minor in some cases I'm using the natural seven or the major seventh which is found in the harmonic minor scale so I kind of give a name for this I just call it the hybrid minor so hybrid minor meaning here and there you do the d or here and there you do the f the d sharp so I use that combo a lot that's why we call it just for want of a better word or for want of a official word which I don't think there is I'm just calling it a hybrid minor scale okay that's about the chords and the theory and the inversions and the voicing let's now get cracking with your first mission which is to play a bass line in the left hand of a drum like bass line or just a drum line in a drum groove in the left hand with chords in the right hand so I'm going to explain it let me play it first so you have the same hit points but root octave root root octave root octave root root octave so I'm demonstrating on E minor the low E is your root played with the pinky the high E is the octave played with our thumb that's your pattern so now the right hand has to also do stuff the first thing I would suggest the right hand to do is hold on to your chords just hang on to them one chord for every bar except the last one where you need to squeeze in two so that will be a minimum the rest is just a whole note or a semi-brief C D sus major if you're not getting the entire chord progression initially just do one chord get acquainted with that and then move forward whole notes in the right keep it simple some of you may be you know getting a little bit of pain you know in your hand maybe your hand span is not that much or maybe you're a kid watching this video which is also awesome if you are if you are one so what you do if you cannot stretch so well you use your wrist to give you that additional what is this maybe one and a half more inches of space so just remember that just I'm not telling you to play the octave together if you can't reach it's fine but use your wrist to track that higher E that way your wrist is used you're not going to get a hand pain because your hand will hurt if you stretch it too much so if you're finding a bit of pain use your wrist a bit and the wrist also kind of pushes or balances the effort put in by the entire arm okay otherwise the pain will be constrained to just one part of your hand and when you're when the stress points to one muscle or one part it's going to hurt then you'll have to stop playing which you don't want okay so the pattern again so the right hand has three opportunities first off semi-brief whole bar then minimus that'll be at the three just watch out that the three hit point does not have anything to do with the left hand because the left hand has a rest at the three right that'll train your independence one and two and three and four and one and two and three and last but not least with most rhythm exercises once you've got a groove going here you need to play pulses in the right hand there we go so with the whole chord progression playing quarters now or crotchets put some dynamics if you're a singer compose a melody if you can it all got built with this rock solid groove in the left hand which is and before that it was a nice rhythm piece over one bar using eighth note so we are just using that and the right hand we have increments of practice semi-briefs full bar two minims half bar on the pulse okay let's move on to the next way of approaching reading a rhythm what you can do by looking at the rhythm and where it can go how it can inspire you let's move on to part two right so now the second way of approaching this same rhythm pattern which is dupta dupta earlier we did dupta dupta that was very drum like now let's look at chord patterns okay so this is going to be right hand so you take the e minor chord for a start the first thing you can try to do will be block chords where you just whack the entire chord all the three notes following the rhythm pattern so it's already quite a nice pattern i like to generally make the last hit a little longer or louder so you do e minor then you do that for the whole set of chords for b sus you'll have to break it love to do three hits of b sus and two hits of b major so now apart from blocks you could also do broken chords which are nice the the technique i like to do is first play the chord outside and then play the remaining note which you did not play because there's one middle note play the middle note after the extreme notes so the pattern outside and then the inside we've done a lot of videos and tutorials on broken chord playing including arpeggios which i'm going to come to we'll put that up in the description for you so you go broken with the with all the chords you have to just be a bit watchful of the b sus 4 and the b major because you just have one bar to figure that out arpeggio time now so if you take the same chord you can go so the the suggestion i have for you is start from the low note and then get a pattern across so if it means b e g e g you need to repeat something fair enough but start with something maybe start with the bottom note or start with the top note and you could also consider holding the first note you start with if it's a top that's ringing with the pinky or 2 b is ringing so this makes it a lot more pro so do this okay another trick would be do arpeggios for the first three chords and play like a flurry of notes play all of them at the last bar at the b chord just to give the listener a sense of release and tension as you do any form of construction of a story or anything for that matter there's always the tension and resolution which you need right so instead of that you do all the hits all the eight notes so whole thing or pattern now i'm playing the pattern everything if you don't like arpeggios at the end you could just go g c play it as blocks at the end just hold it on you know so that's why i gave you these four chords so you can mess around with them with one pattern but then remove the pattern at the last chord just to add that tension and release effect okay and then what is the left hand doing same as earlier playing the roots but maybe in this operation you could go root plus octave whack them both together and the same movements or the same technical movements you go semi-brieves one for every bar then you do half bar or you do the pulse that's in the left with the with the pulse you can make it a bit interesting by maybe toggling your fingers quite like that right so that was about the second approach towards reading a rhythm look at the rhythm same old rhythm but you're playing a chord pattern in your right hand over that rhythm over the chord progression the chord pattern can be further divided into block chord approach broken chord approach and arpeggio approach the left hand keeps it simple with whole notes half notes and then finally pulse notes let's move on to another exciting way to read this rhythm right so the next approach when you're staring at one single rhythmic phrase which is one bar is you could look at building in a bass tune or a bass line as we call it so you take the hit points and generally when you're building a bass line or even a guitar riff something on the lines of a rock composition or something heavier and groovier or even funkier you tend to prefer two very sought-after scales and very simple easy on the year scales that would be the pentatonic scales so for this lesson let's just focus on the minor pentatonic which is the root the minor third perfect fourth perfect fifth the minor seventh and the octave one flat three perfect four perfect five flat seven octave okay and the right hand let's just do chords so for this demonstration let's just take one chord I know we've looked at more chords earlier but let's just keep it simple let's just do one chord E minor so now if you just do the rhythm pattern with one chord or rather with one note of the pentatonic scale it's not going to sound so great so maybe you could do something like you can add the the blues note which is the flat five basically on the pentat or the blues which is the flat five generally you start with the root to build that pattern you can do stuff like that you've created like an entire phrase on that one rhythm another word of advice so yes first form the scale devise the pattern and let's say you've committed to this pattern in your left bass figure out some independence with the left hand in the right hand right now I'm playing minims I could also do pulse or you can start off with just whole notes E minor in the right hand minims and three and four and one now where this can get quite creative is now you have E minor chord why don't you now copy the same pattern or transpose the same pattern on the next chord so let me show you that I'm going to take two chords E minor and A minor but I'm going to take the same pentatonic pattern or the blues pattern it'll be changing this way you practice your chord shifting but it's the same pentatonic or blues pattern one five tritone perfect fourth minor third so this chord obviously supports that now A minor then B that's the power of the bass you develop a very simple pattern and then transpose it from E minor to A minor B B minor in this case maybe B you can just do random minor chords it's a great way to practice your chords and scales as well so in a nutshell what happened here there is a pentatonic scale or a blues scale where you add the bluesy note in the left hand to build a left hand pattern and a lot of us don't do that much work in the left hand as we perhaps ought to so this is a very good left hand workout okay and a fun left hand workout I hope so you go on the rhythm whatever assortment of notes you prefer but it should be on that rhythm keep the right hand simple with just chords pulse minims whole notes nothing fancy in this case minims or keep it simple semi brief and there we have it so that's about building a bass line using a one bar rhythmic phrase let's move on