 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are basically going to look at how you can coordinate your hands on the piano or rather your fingers and both specifically. Your hand independence will be trained by following a variety of what I call as time feels and your fingers will independently work together to play a very very simple melody which I'm sure you would have played at some time in your life learning the piano, right? So without any delay, let's just get cracking with the exercise and as I teach you the notes we will get started and if you haven't already don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel turn on that bell icon for regular reminders and notifications and share the video like the video and leave us a comment. So for this exercise I'm going to use the metronome set at 90. This is how a metronome at 90 sounds. So let's just get used to that one two three four and for the most part we'll follow a four by four rendition three four. It's pretty much it, okay? So we are going to use that We are going to bring that in and out of the lesson It's not mandatory that you practice with a metronome but the metronome is just to show you the interaction of the two hands, okay? And to kind of perfect the beat and a quick word of advice when using the metronome It's always nice when you can feel the time within you once your body kind of is a clock on on its own You can then rely on the electronic clock or the electronic tool Which is the metronome. So the metronome is always used to further perfect your rhythmic capabilities, right? but the actual rhythm sense needs to come from you and Having said that the piano as an instrument is a very rhythmic instrument You could definitely compare it with any percussion instrument like a drum kit or a bongo or any such thing Primarily because both your hands are independently working or can independently work for different requirements or different tasks so in a sense when you train yourself as a pianist as you excel forward you're trying to look at your right hand as a melodic instrument and your left hand as a bass instrument or your right hand and left hand as Dual melodic instruments, you know or one being harmonic in nature and one being Purely rhythmic in nature. So if ever I were to compare the piano with anything even though by nature I guess it is a stringed instrument. It's part of that family I would compare it more to a percussion instrument like a tabla or a drum kit basically, okay? So this exercise revolves around pretty much just five notes. I was thinking of making it CD, E, F, G, but then you know how it is every YouTube piano video you'll ever find Will have these five five notes. So I've kind of kept the key of C, but I'm preferring that E flat whenever you go minor As you'll watch from a lot of my lessons the minor really adds that emotion and just makes it sound musical Instantly the major somehow in cases like this When you have five fingers playing these five you note C, D, E, F, G kind of feels like a finger exercise So this is a finger exercise, but when you go minor As you probably watched in that intro video, it just sounds musical and you can use it Okay, so you're another important thing while watching this lesson is to get your keyboards out You need to play along with me If you don't have your keyboards with you or if you're not a keyboardist, you can still do this exercise With your two hands. So maybe your left hand could hit The chest area. This gives you a nice bass thump. That's sort of a vibe and Your right hand could hit the leg. Yeah, so you're kind of simulating playing the piano, you know, two, three, four or Something sharper Something deeper. It's just my recommended places to hit the hand But you can figure it out. You can even hit it on a desk or table or a book Whatever works for you really so you could practice this drill even without the piano but I would highly recommend the piano while you learn the job and More importantly try to watch this video till the end if you have any doubts or any issues pause the video go back YouTube also has a feature a slow down feature. So use that you can slow this down I guess to 75% of the original speed or even 50% of the original speed and Learn better, I guess. Okay. So the job basically is to get this going with one of the hands So you're basically trying to go up and down the first five notes of the scale in this case the C minor scale So these are my fingers C, D, E flat, F, G, thumb, index, middle, ring, pinkie Let's see how it goes You could just count one, two, three, four, one, two, three. That's pretty much it You can try the same story in the left One, two, three, four, one, two, three Put it together Also try to engage your voice. It'll train your ear parallely so something like Something about the minor key just feels awesome right This sounds like music immediately just because that E became E flat Okay, let's try this with a metronome just to give you an idea of playing it with the artificial or the electronic tool Okay, as I said earlier you want to set your metronome to 90 beats per minute Okay, the app I'm using is called pro metronome, which is free for both Android and iOS devices With the pulse with the click so you want to hit every note on the metronome So this is actually the preparatory stuff which you need to do for the exercise Just play with the metronome Okay, so that's basically the start so I would like all of you to get that Before all the other chaotic stuff which is going to follow so once you've got that under the belt So to speak we can now start doing different hand combinations or finger patterns or finger interactions Whatever you want to call it. So The first thing I'd like to mention before I give you all this stuff and it'll be really easy then is how beats are Generally structured you have your main beats With the click so one two three four So this is a unit of time which is moving one two three four But being a unit of time it's lasting a specific amount of time. Isn't it let's say X amount of Milliseconds right maybe 500 milliseconds, which is half a second or maybe quarter of a second or whatever So as it goes faster and faster you can feel the pulse. So that is the beat value So what musicians start doing is after you know the beat value after you can feel the beat value, which is this one right What you can start doing is you then gets into the beat you then start going inside the beat by divisions of the beat Okay, so common practice for musicians would be to divide the beat by two by three as well as four These are the units you could divide it by I'm not saying you can't divide it by five and seven and whatever else you could But the common practice for us musicians would be divided by two divided by three and divide by four So if I go one two three four, I'm not dividing at all So if you want to divide by two you can practice One and two and three and four and one and two and I'd request you to first actually Say that before you even touch the keyboard three and four and one and two and three and four and one two and three okay, then one and a two and a three and a four and now we're dividing the pulse by Three so the beat we've gone inside the beat one and a two and a three and a four and a one and a two And a three and a four and a back to division of two One and two and three and four and one and two and three and three one and two and three and four And right and a two and three you can even divide by four which if you're a beginner student you can perhaps ignore it So it'll be one and a two and a three and a four and a one e and a reason why I guess they choose these Syllables is to make it easy on the tongue while saying it in fast speeds I guess so one e and a two e and a three and a four e and a one e and a two e and a three e and a four And each one has a different vibe. So if you're perhaps stressing on the ease One e and a two e and a three e and a four e and a one e and a two e it is the music changes doesn't it or one e and two e and a three and four and one and two Very reggae four and one e and two e and three. I'm doing nothing. I'm just making that sub beat louder as one year To me sounds very Indian folk maybe like a Rajasthani or a Gujarati kind of rhythm So, it depends on how you enunciate the division, so when you divide the beat, you can accent, you can sort of subdivide and then, you know, remove and not play all the beats. You can also do things like dotted notes, you can also do things like triplets and then do slower triplets, faster triplets, so there's a lot of stuff lined up in this lesson. The first thing we'll do, of course, is take the same drill and double it, so you go feel the metronome, so doubling meaning eighth notes dividing by two, two units, so you go, you can even count one and two and three and four and one and in comparison, that's the original pulse. You can even do it with two hands, do the pulse. Now let's double that pulse. Now the fun of this exercise is one hand will hold its ground, the left hand for instance, it could be either hand, the left hand will go pulse, okay, basically same melody, while the other hand is going to say to itself, let me divide the beat by two, so that's going to be, so that's what you try here. Instantly the music also sounds very interesting all of a sudden, right? Because the notes are harmonizing with each other in very different ways. It's also a nice practice to sing each hand right hand, left hand, little tricky, right? So again to recap, pulse, divide by two together, put in some emotion, dynamics, remember you have to make it musical, following the metronome as I mentioned set at 90 beats per minute, played with feeling and you could also, I mean if you're having an issue getting the hands together, perhaps you could take the slower of the two hands, which in this case is what the left, right? And knock off the entire melody, don't play all the notes, you can just start with one note, okay, simplify that and then double the right. Maybe if you could play like a little chord, once you've got that integration going, you can then play the melody. Okay, so that's basically about dividing by two, so the beat got divided by two. Now what musicians do very often when we divide by two, we can play either straight, which is going to be what I showed you earlier, we call that straight. You also have a swing variant, which sounds something like this. You kind of make the and go a little later, actually in a triplet vibe, more on that maybe in another lesson, but this is the swing field. And what jazz and blues musicians do is they will stress on that and a bit more than the main one. That's the articulation giving you that swing feeling, sort of a sense of moving sideways as opposed to front, you know, there we go. Now swing version, straight end, you rarely will combine straight and swing just to give you an idea, swing, that's the swing field. Okay, so division of division by two straight as well as swing, the other variety for you will be division by three. So what happens there, the left hand is going to probably hold its ground, or the right hand will hold its ground. When I say hold its ground, I mean play the pulse. So back to the that one. And the other hand divides by three. So first get the feeling of three division. What will that be? I'm just mumbling something. But usually people will add something like one and a two and a three and a right, or ta-kitta ta-kitta ta-kitta ta-kitta ta-kitta ta-kitta ta-kitta. If you're a karnatic musician or studying konopol ta-kitta ta-kitta ta-kitta. So right hand now has to do that ta-kitta ta-kitta, right? But you'll have to play the same melody in the ascending and descending direction. So that'll be, you know, these are triplets in the right hand, isn't it? Just to show you. Now, the challenge with this exercise is the notes don't really, you know, meet up. They take a while to actually resolve to show you now the cycle kind of sort of resets itself or re-cycles itself. Why did that happen? Well, it's just the maths behind the exercise, right? There is I am telling myself that I should not go, you know, in normal triplets. That's how you would hear it normally, right? Instead, look at my fingers. My fingers are happily just going up and down. I'm not changing the motion of my fingers in this entire exercise. There's no, nothing much is going to change. It's just, we're just playing it up and down in triplets. And that with respect to this, that's three notes for everyone. Now, three for everyone always. And look at the order. It's going as per the Sare Gama Pama Gare principle. You can do all sorts of independent things like what if the left hand can do staccato while this is happening. Now, that'll start getting a bit, a lot more movie theme like, you know, it's almost as though this is a different instrument. And that's the point of independence. You want to make both your hands do completely different things and serve different requirements or roles in the music piece or in the song which you're trying to work on. So staccato left hand playing the pulse and triplet right hand. Officially, we call these as eighth note triplets. Let's try that with a click. Oh, little slower. So always get to your pulse. Imagine the triplet thing. So the triplet sound beautiful. You need dynamics. Before you get dynamics, you need a lot of control and a lot of practice. It's a dynamics which ultimately tells the story. After a while, it's almost as though you're not in control of the piano. The piano is just doing its own thing. Your fingers have just taken up a job of their own. You have a mind of their own. So you need to practice, right? It's going to take you some time. So the same process. Now the left hand will do the faster triplet stuff and the right hand will do the pulse. So let's figure that out. Let's only do left. Like I said earlier, if you're uncomfortable doing the entire melodies of both hands, just keep a single one. This applies to me as well when I practice. So relax. Focus on the music. There we go. So that was triplet left hand and pulse right hand. So the final thing I wanted to mention in this part of a two part series, the second part we're going to go even more crazy will be division of four. So dividing by four conceptually is just double of dividing by two. It's just going to test your fingers a bit more and improve maybe the control over your fingers because you're playing faster with a click. So you may should not run away, especially weaker fingers like the ring and the pinky, you know, it tends to run away. So you may go, the slipping, you know, tends to happen. So in that regard, it's good to practice dividing by four. But if you're newer to the instrument, perhaps you could just stick with two and three for now. Let me demonstrate four and then we're done with part one. So one e and a two e and a three and a four e and a one e and a two e and a now. Okay. Slightly faster, right? Compared to divide by two. So again, do this with the left hand pulse. See now the same melody in the left hand while the right hand has to do with some emotion. If you want to like get your fingers acquainted with the new speed, maybe you can just do simple root notes in the bass, you know, still sounds good. Then staccato. Okay. And then of course we have to flip the hand. So left hand has to do the one e and a 16th notes. So first get the right hand and left hand used to each other. Then I'm demonstrating on 90. It's too fast for you. Go slower. Maybe you can do 80. Let's try 80. This is good work. Even slower up to you. Right guys. So in this part in conclusion, we have basically taken the same drill. We've done it in different speeds in both of our hands. In the first titration we looked at dividing by two straightened version as well as the swung version, where one hand is double of the other and vice versa. In the second option we looked at triplets. So there it's rather tricky because the exercise takes very long to recycle. So you need to practice it a bit harder. Triplets again, 3x the speed in one hand versus 1x in the other hand. And last but not least, if you can, we do semi quavers, which is dividing by four in one hand and single pulse in the other hand. But the job or the point of this exercise to bring about finger independence where the two hands are essentially playing two different melodies as the speeds change. In the next part, we are going to start looking at a couple more interesting topics when it comes to rhythmic practice. We are going to look at dotted note creation. We are also going to look at triplets and accents. So three more things to come. So practice this one hard and make sure to head over to part two. And if you're watching a video on our channel for the first time or if you haven't subscribed, make sure to subscribe. Otherwise you're not going to get these notifications. There are so many videos on our channel. So it's very important that you hit the subscribe button, right? And you can also get the notes, support our channel, head over to Patreon. You can get notes of this lesson, as well as all of our other stuff in the past and now present and definitely in the future. That's what Patreon is for, for all the notes. And if you consider yourself a beginner musician or a beginner student, we have a structured foundation piano course, which is there on YouTube as a playlist. Check out the description. It'll be right there. Head over there. That'll give you ongoing lessons which are very structured, as I said. So it starts off from the very beginning of rhythm, harmony and melody. Again, thanks for watching. This is Jason here from Nathaniel School and I will see you in the next one.