 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. This is a rather unique exercise, at least for me, because it doesn't have too much of theory. There's no real chords going on. I think it's very easy to actually execute. And what you heard in the intro performance was it just sounds like anything a pianist would do in like a movie, you know, or in any kind of background score or theme soundtrack for a film. It's sort of like what a piano player will end up doing. Maybe this is a song in a movie, I don't know, perhaps, right? So it's a very popular technique if you want to do like a thematic stuff or scores or those sort of piano arrangements. It's also great when you're doing solo piano work, like if it's just solo piano, no singers and all of those other people, it's just you on the keyboard. So you do... You can kind of play that and it's a song, so to speak. So I've developed this exercise in a very easy to understand way. I'm just going to give you three sets of three notes, okay? For the need to kind of explore different scales and different finger positions, I'm going to give you three note combinations. So the first one will be on C sharp, which I'm going to demonstrate on so that'll be C sharp, D sharp, E. Got those three notes and generally you want to play those three notes with the middle fingers, the index on C sharp, the middle finger on D sharp, the ring finger on E. That's going to be your consistent or pivots which will not move throughout the exercise, okay? Then the other set of three notes will be C, D, E flat, okay? Again, you can play it with these three fingers and lastly we are on D, E, F. That's the next set of three. So we have C sharp, D sharp, E, then C, D, E flat and finally, D, E, F. So I may be explaining it on either of these three notes and I may be explaining it on either of these pivots and it'll be written down so you can check it out and learn accordingly, right? So now we are going to add one more note to this set which is going to be a floating note and thereby creating the music and then we explore it in different time signatures. That's our goal. We'll do it over a six feel. We'll do it over a four by four feel. Then we'll do a ton of variations. Then we will ask a question to what the left hand should be doing amidst all this depending on your knowledge of the scale, etc. With these three notes you can perhaps already kind of figure out that okay, it's part of some scale. Like C sharp, D sharp, E could be part of the C sharp minor family that one or C, D, E flat could be part of the C minor family which is well, the D, E, F could be part of the the D minor family either the natural minor or the harmonic minor usually you can always interchange those two scales whether you want to consider it as the natural with the flat seven or the harmonic minor with the normal major seventh or the raised seventh but the D, E, F becomes the first three notes or the sare ga of the scale sare garesha sare garesha or sare garesha so those are the three notes which are never going to change that's what makes it very kind of thematic when you have these clusters even playing it together like that is quite interesting right makes an interesting vibe or of course that's not what we are going to do ok so let's get cracking and all that's going to happen now is we figure out how to float notes and when you float the notes it's pretty much going to be within the scale so it's good to know your scale and write it down and obviously the notes are provided which you can check out as usual on our Patreon page where you get all the stuff written down for you so you could download a pdf and watch this lesson before we get started it will be great if you haven't already please hit that bell for notifications a lot of you have subscribed which is great thanks a lot if you haven't please consider subscribing and also turn on that bell let's start so if I have to take let's just start with D E F or no let's start with the tough one not really tough actually I find this the easiest so we'll just begin with C sharp D sharp E now the bass in this hand you can perhaps consider G sharp which is part of the C sharp minor I don't want to go too low because then your hand will get a bit too stretchy or tensed up let's not do all that so the two ways of playing this would be go in 4s groups of 4 so you can even say 16 note counting your terminology is like 1 E and a 2 E and a 3 E and a 4 so you've got yourself an arpeggio so the arpeggio is built out of the unique note in this case G sharp and then the consistent notes which is C sharp D sharp E let's get this going so this is style number one or pattern number one arpeggio now you could do something very easy with the same arpeggio and make it more swaying give it a more swaying feel or a 6 by 8 feel by doing this what did I do here I just went up and came back down so that will be 1 2 3 4 5 6 so if you add the going down you'll get a 6 8 arpeggio flavor so style number one or rather this was style number 2 and style one was that where you just do 16s 1 E and a 4 1 and 2 coming back to 6 8 2 strong beats right 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 now you don't have to just stick well this sounds quite awesome to my ear but you could you need not just stick with this G sharp you can kind of float it around as long as you're in the key or even outside the key may sound good because right now you haven't committed to anything I've just told you 3 notes and a G sharp to support it now let's support it with some other note maybe A I'm doing 6 8 A A sounds quite nice yes so toggle G sharp A I don't want to go too much below because it may hurt my hand so keep your hand relaxed when you play A let's see what A sharp has to offer or B flat now that's outside the key of C sharp minors right why not sounds very James Bond like some left hand you always have those 2 flavours so you could do even a B could work you could just support it with some kind of a root in this case C sharp seems to work great you see the float in the bottom C what G is also quite interesting I have no idea which scale I'm in it doesn't matter you just move your thumb float the thumb and just see what you like and then piece a pattern together so A G sharp maybe B B flat or A sharp A that's my progression and that's how intense it sounds with literally no bass movement in the left hand that's like zero harmony that'll push a bass player to sleep isn't it so you go what if you change the bass or what if the bassist or your left hand starts waking up you know A there F sharp and maybe you could do G coupled with an E flat I always like to think of the left hand as being forming a third with the right hand somehow that way you get some intense harmony right some of them may not work you know actually works or stay on that now I'm just exploring but I hope you get the idea that the left hand if you just even if you stay on C sharp which is the root it sounds quite intense maybe you could build your theme with C sharp don't change that make the theme intense with your floating thumb you're creating some tension which you release at the next section with the bass movement changing simple bass just hold it not really thinking of much there's no chord theory there are no chords also going on here if you think about it where was there a chord you may extrapolate a chord from this information but we were not thinking oh C sharp minor A major like that we were just saying three pivoted notes a floater and then floating bass if you so choose to do so now let's just so what do we have so far we have a pack of three which won't change we have a floating thumb and we have well the thumb can float around and we create an arpeggio sequence either with force or with sixes which I tend to like a bit more sounds a bit more lazier laid back we have those two patterns so we are going to keep those same two patterns throughout let's just see how this sounds on the next grouping so let's see what happens with the next grouping what did I tell you earlier C D E flat so start with a G A flat B flat and so on you play with it you're on a new scale you think like you're perhaps on C minor which it is I think you could even keep this consistent and move around your bass very similar to that Led Zeppelin song or the Beatles song which you all know this is even without changing the floating thumb you know you're floating the bass so you decide you want to float both this and the left hand feel free you want to float only the left hand feel free keep the left hand static float explore the thumb feel free but make sure you're in the arpeggio set or in the arpeggio motion which is that or ok let's just take the next set of three notes which is D E F the trio of three this will not change let's see what happens fairly similar right so what can we do to kind of spice this up further well we just use a few logical movements or logical progressions from where we are now I think this already sounded quite nice but you can think of simple simple systems where instead of going what happened here the movement of the arpeggio is just going up or down if you're doing 6-8 what if it goes down or then down and up on the other one it's completely different vibe well similar vibe but different theme or you could play this higher actually sounds familiar even to me for some reason yeah I'm sure you'll find that this is very common if you watch a lot of movies which I probably need to start doing more off now or you do the going up version going down again you just take the information and kind of bring it down ok and the pedal is again something I'm not able to show you at the moment but I'm trying to use the pedal to give that resonance between these neighboring notes apart from the pedal holding the notes down apart from the the felts hitting the string and kind of keeping them to vibrate they are also in resonance with each other so because of that it creates a very interesting sound a very dreamy sound versus without the pedal so with the pedal gives you additional harmonic content which is provided because the resonance created between those notes and the hammer is hitting on a real piano ok so either you go up or you go down float the thumb as always now what else can you do you always ask yourself what you are doing now and then try to figure out what is the opposite of what you are doing now that can be a very good tip as a piano player so you are floating the thumb what is the thumb next what can we do remove the bottom remove the bottom most note and start floating it from the top end there you are probably going to use a lot more of your pinky and the ring finger perhaps so maybe let me demonstrate this with a C minor system may be easy for you to understand so now the pinky is floating and maybe I could bring in the ring as well so basically the top note earlier the bottom note was floating with the same pivots now the top note is floating with the same pivot so then go descending up or down and now I am floating the top note and now your next section could be with the bottom float with a whole new varieties of note options next section go higher and float if you piece them together what I am encouraging you to do as a learner would be to build more and more sections of music with this information don't just say ok I will practice it and make one part don't be happy with that try to expand it think like you are scoring a piano composition for an entire maybe an entire movie scene like the scene will take some time it will probably take I guess 5 minutes at the minimum so figure out a way to expand this or extend this for a good duration of time be it 5 minutes or at least 2 or 3 minutes of data you should be able to produce and whenever you are saturated with ideas think of the simplest things in music which are volume and duration so if you want to think about it that way maybe start soft and play high you know or now go lower and play in a more intense way same music a different perspective or you can think of short and long this is lagato versus staccato so whenever you kind of feel a bit saturated with ideas make it staccato versus lagato lagato staccato or play higher and softer or play lower and I don't know why I am going low and loud maybe I should probably do low and soft maybe my brain is not really wired that way at the moment so maybe that's for you to do so finally in conclusion some more food for thought or a bonus tip for you guys would be now if you think about it logically you have the pivots which is the index finger, middle finger ring finger when you floated the thumb the pinky was kind of sleeping it was not doing much what if you float both the notes that will be another question you could ask and then you have all your five fingers doing or serving a specific role on the piano so if you thought there is a thing called hand independence on the piano there is also something called finger independence on the piano where each finger has its own mission for the sound or for the music the floaters are going to be this side and that side and the pivots or the anchors are going to be here and then you can do a bigger arpeggio using both the floating notes the thumb floater and the pinky floater so you go so you are building a bigger arpeggio it seems to be in a eight feel right eight set of notes now the beauty of this is you don't have to float the pinky to the same note you are floating the thumb that will also sound nice or you can kind of choose your own note here like F and you blue G here and then we have the left hand which is like free to roam about either inside the scale or wherever else it needs to go it completely depends on the theme you are trying to build the story you are trying to communicate to your audience so basically what you end up doing will define the objective of what you are trying to tell your audience as a storyteller right so ultimately this is your medium of expression these are the words and the sentences and the tools you are using for the language of communication so you have to think about it in that sense you have to think if I do this maybe it will feel like this sort of a vibe or this sort of a theme maybe if I do something else it will sound very romantic if I do something else it will sound like a very very dark theme a very scary theme or something like that so you have to kind of explore I guess you know along with our notes in Patreon I have also notated a simple performance which maybe you could end up playing by the end of this entire saga of things which I have told you maybe you could just start with something very very fixed and focused I am also going to record that melody at the end of the lesson so you can practice just that melody you know at least to start off with and then you can explore on your own or you don't have to do the melody it's up to you really if you are enjoying exploring on your own feel free right I also have an Instagram page or an Instagram channel at Jason Zach or you can tag us at our school channel which is Nathaniel school where if you share us all of your work doing all of our YouTube lessons and exercises and making it your own we will definitely listen to it and share it and tag you and what not so it would be great to hear from you so do consider practicing the exercise as best as you can recording something and putting it up on your Instagram and then tagging us that's I guess the best way to hear from you and feel connected with you guys you know who are you know diligently learning and spending so much of efforts with our constant lessons on YouTube right guys if you haven't already do consider subscribing to the channel if you have subscribed also hit that bell it's very important so you get notifications when we do the next lesson or when the next lesson goes live as well and consider following us on Patreon as well that will support the channel a great deal thanks again this is Jason from Nathaniel