 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson, I am basically going to show you a good number of five finger exercises. Obviously, the exercises will include your five fingers, the thumb, the index, the middle, the ring and the pinky. And then we are going to look at a lot of patterns around these fingers, which is what makes up the exercises in the first place. Now, traditionally, five finger exercises are used to improve the strength of your fingers, the dexterity, the control over your hand in general, and also to improve things like speed, flexibility and what not, as the books or other YouTube videos will tell you. But five finger exercises, I think, are also the stepping stone towards a lot of creativity and a lot of musicality. So, there will be two sets in this series. The first set will be focused on traditional five finger exercises, which are great for beginner students, great for anyone really, even if you're looking to warm up, it's always good to do five finger drills. And the second set is where we are going to try and take these exercises or these techniques or these drills and make them really creative, very musical, bring out your ear and a lot more hopefully. And that's generally what I have to say when it comes to learning any drill or any pattern which you have to do on the piano. Once you finish with it or once you're done with it, it should become something which you're proud of. You should make it music, make it musical, convert it into a song, a small tune or whatever it may be. So, let's get started. I'm going to choose the key of C or rather my thumb will be on C. Some of you who follow this channel might be a bit happy because I rarely choose C or some of you who follow it and don't like C may now be a bit angry. But believe it or not, we are going to take C and then we are going to evolve it to a point where it doesn't even feel like C major or C anything. Okay, so stick with me till the end of the lesson. And if you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe to the channel and all that other stuff. Let's get started right away. So, you need this handhold basically for the five finger drills. C with your thumb, D with your index, E with your middle, F with your ring, G with your pinky. So, in this lesson, I'm going to pretty much show you all the drills in the right hand. But remember that you can always do those in the left hand by playing pretty much the same tune where in the left hand will be a mirror image of the right hand. However, I may also do a little bit of other things in the left hand, bring about a base line, hold the pulse, which is why I'm tending to play all the exercises in the right hand. Okay, so C, D, E, F, G, thumb, index, middle, ring, pinky. Okay, and the first exercise is quite simple. This is what we all do when you when you're given five notes. What's the easiest and coolest thing to do? Go up and down. So, C, D, E, F, G, F, E, D, C, right? E, F, G, F, E, D, C. Okay, a couple of things to keep in mind when you play this drill, try to always think of two notes for every pulse. So, in other words, there is one snap in my left hand for every two notes played in the right hand. So, I like to imagine these as eighth notes because melodically speaking, you don't want to generally play quarter note melodies. It doesn't sound so great. So, at the word go, just treat these as eighth notes or you're dividing the pulse by two. So, you count one, two, three, four, one, two, three. Sounds a lot nicer, right? You get the on beat, one, and two, and the off beat. So, it immediately adds some color right there, some rhythmic color. So, that's what you want to do. You can accompany it in the left hand by just playing the same thing which I snapped with C, the pulse or the root, C. There we go. I like the octaves because I can either play them together in my bass or I can go one after the other. Also, what we call is toggling. It's pretty much it. Either play them together or go, toggle. Right? So, a few more exercises for you. That was the first one. The next one now, you may realize that playing it ascending and descending is not a great mental job because it's just one by one. So, it's easy on the brain. So, as we sort of skip some fingers or skip some notes, things get a bit more interesting. So, the next drill is to basically play in thirds. So, instead of playing C D, you're playing C E. So, C E D F E G. Okay? G E F D E C. And what I like to do is stop at the end. Okay? So, that it kind of adds up to four beats in a bar. C E D F E G weight. G E F D E C weight. C E D F E G weight. One and two and three and four and the same pulse again in the bass and the same five fingers. Right? But I'm not playing E with my index. So, we have a tendency to kind of flip over one finger to the space of the other finger. So, don't do that. You need to hold your ground with respect to the fingers. For the purpose of this exercise, the thumb is sort of allocated for C. The pinky is allocated for G and so on and so forth. Weight, weight a little. E G E G E F D E C with the bass and so on. So, that's exercise two. Coming to exercise three. Basically, exercise three is to play your music in triplets. Triplets, what do they do? They divide the beat into three equal units. So, you go one triplet, two triplet, three triplet, four like that. Two and three. There are a lot of ways to count it. Right? So, get that three into your system. You're dividing the beat by three and this is how it's going. So, with triplets, I'm not going to skip. Rather, I'm going to play packets of three notes. That's C D E, D E F, E F G. Now, G F E, F E D, E D C on the descent. Okay? So, here's how it goes. Again, you wait at the end. So, then the four beats will end. One, two, three, four and up. four and okay. Same fingers for the same note. So, with the toggle pulse. So, you see the pulse now is sort of dividing the beat into three. You're playing three notes here for every one pulse here. Right? So, toggling okay. Those are playing in triplets. So, what have we learned so far? We've learned linear. We've learned thirds which is skipping. Then we've done sort of triplets and doing sets of three. Okay. And the last one basically focuses on playing two notes together, which you need to learn how to do on the piano keyboard. So, what are we going to do here? We're going to play C E together, D F together, E G together. Okay. And then D F again. So, move forward here. This one you may want to play in quarter notes. Like, don't divide the beat. Just go one hit for every beat and then maybe do eighth notes, which is two note hits for every pulse so that yeah, you train your fingers in a kind of a step by step manner. So, first off, so you go thumb middle index ring middle pinky index ring and it goes on. And then the pulse. Okay. So, these are your four finger exercises. Right. So, you may find a lot of challenges with your fingers. One is your fingers may keep lifting all over the place. You need to work on that. A few guidelines would be don't keep your hand too stiff. And another thing would be not to drop the wrist. The moment you drop the wrist, you're going to hurt your entire arm. So, keep your wrist up. Relax. Keep your hand also in a kind of a round state, not in a kind of a creepy horror movie state or a flat state like this. Keep it round and play. Okay. But now, as I told you at the beginning of the lesson, I want to make this stuff sound a lot more exciting, a lot more creative and a lot more musical. So, that's where the left hand, the journey of the left hand will begin. Okay. The left hand basically is just playing the root or the saw, which is C. Why not add a couple of notes to the equation. So, the notes which we have for our lesson are C, then F, which is the four. A, which is the six. G, which is the five. C, F can do this with all the exercise. G. You can also not play those notes. You can play other notes. For example, E. E there. Right. It goes on and on. You can do the other drills. Okay. And while you play all these exercises, so we have the left hand doing a steady pulse, creatively choosing a variety of notes. I'd also like you to focus on your ear as you play by doing something which we all do in any case, which is sing. So, basically just sing the tune of whatever it is you're playing. This can add another layer of challenge for you and help you grow more like an all-rounder, rather than just a piano player whose job is to just play this exercise. I want you to also grow as a musician while you do anything. Right. So, something like this will help. If you know your swaras, you can go or you go or well, I can't really sing that. You can't sing two notes at a time. You get the idea. Try to sing as much as possible. If you're not sure of Sare Gama Pa, perhaps you may know the soul-fedge language, which is Dore Mefa. So, that's not all folks. We are going to now look at how this exercise can be taken into even more overdrive and even more creativity and more sonic possibilities by taking the same old five fingers. But here's the thing, you're not going to mess with the thumb and the pinky. The thumb is going to stick on C. The pinky is going to stick on G. It's the middle notes which I can mess around with, change a little bit here and there and then play it in the same patterns. And then that same patterns but different notes. So, how do I build my different note possibilities? First of all, keep your thumb and pinky on C and G. Now, let's observe just the third, okay. It's a very important note. You have your E here. Now, you can either play the normal E or you can lower the E by one step. It's also called as flattening. So, you could lower that E by one step and become E flat will become okay. So, your middle finger just goes off to the black note here. And don't play it too deep. Play it somewhere at the edge and you got yourself a nice minor vibe. I love this sound. So, you don't have to practice a five finger exercise on the major scale. If you like this, it's still a five finger drill. Sounds a lot more emotional, a lot more meaningful. We all tend to like minor actually, come to think of it. Okay. So, that's not all. The middle finger either can play this one or this one. That's the major third. It makes a huge world of difference, right? So, major, minor. And if you know your minor scale, you could also access some of those notes here. A flat. I just like to play octaves in the left hand. Then you can groove it, you know, right? So, if you're like an intermediate or an advanced kind of player, you could look at the possibilities of exploring your left hand to kind of play different notes, play different grooves, emulating like a drum kit kick with the pinky snare with the thumb, if you will, and just hold your ground in the right hand and play whatever you're supposed to play. So, major E, minor E flat. So, you have your major third, minor third. What else can we do? We have the four, which is F. So, that F could either be F normal or I can't flatten the F because then it'll become E, which is redundant. So, I can raise the F. Very ambient, very dreamy, very mystical. Right? A beautiful sound. Now, there's some fun you can do here, right? Now, the third can either be major third or minor third. The four can either be perfect fourth or the raised fourth, which is also called as a sharp four, augmented fourth. You could even say tritone. So, that's sharp four. That's perfect for, but remember what I said earlier, the third can either be major third or minor third. Now, that can happen independently of the fourth. So, collectively, you could have an equation of like two, two square, which is four possibilities, right? So, you go that one, which is major third, perfect four. You could do minor third, perfect fourth. You could do major third, sharp four. And I quite like that minor third, sharp four, perfect five. You can just digest that a bit. And here's where you want to get a bit more experimental. Why just plate up and down? Maybe you could do the other drills like in threes, right? Or you could figure out some songs also. A lot of tunes also could be influenced by maybe this exercise, you know? Yeah. And if you know, if you know your way around scales, ultimately, you're on the C scale or the key of C. And you have this interval permutation. Now, if you go to G, you can get the same sound on G and I quite like to do that to kind of push my, my ear and my eye around the keyboard. You know, you could do change to G. You're almost going to a different world. D, right? So, that's how you play around with the thirds. You go major third, minor third. And then that's how you play around with the fourths, where you go perfect four and sharp four. We have one more, don't we? We have the second. I've always been playing D. What else can I play? I can play D flat, right? Very sometimes chaotic, but you'll find that it's used in a lot of Middle Eastern and Arabic music and it sounds very beautiful and soothing. So, it's not always a tense sound, right? Even the tritone, we think it's very disturbing. We even think that the minor second is disturbing, but not when we play it with, within an array of five other notes, right? Or four other notes in this case. So, if you go beautiful sound, you just take the D and go down and so right now I have my major third, perfect fourth, but I can also do a flat three and a flat two. It's like it's very Spanish, if you ask me. A lot of Spanish flamenco scales are built around those intervals. There we go. So, you have minor two, minor three, minor two, major three. You see the complete cultural change by just moving one note to the other, right? And then of course, you can flip around the four, normal four, there. That's as chaotic as it can get. You've completely removed all the major scale notes. You've just kept the root in the fifth or really like this one. So, you get the really weird ones which I've sort of saved for the end of this lesson. So, let's just recap what we've done, everyone. We've looked at four traditional five finger exercises which you're probably going to do in a similar vein through maybe another YouTube video or another teacher or another book or resource or whatever, but then we looked at these four exercises. We also looked at the importance of the left hand, what all it can do in terms of starting with the pulse, then creatively exploring the world of the scale and the notes of music in general. That's what tells the story, the left hand floating around while your right hand holds its ground. Then we also looked at the importance of singing. I also told you a bit about how to keep your hand when you're playing a few tips there. And then we took this exercise into a really creative space. We basically flipped around all those middle intervals, the second, the third and the fourth, two becoming normal two or flat two, three being normal three or flat three. Flat basically means going down a semitone or going down a step on the piano or in music in general. While the four couldn't come down, so it went up by one. You raised it and you leave the root and the fifth comment. So, that's basically all I have for you in this lesson regarding five finger exercises. I'll be happy to share a lot more of these drills as well. So, do leave me a comment. Let me know what you thought about this exercise. Also, what you'd like to work on as well. And don't forget to be part of our channel, right? If you're part of our channel, you can interact with me. You can leave me your comments. You can tell us what you'd like to learn. And we also go live quite often focusing on your doubts. So, stay tuned to the channel, subscribe. Don't forget to turn on the bell icon for regular notifications. And I will see you in the next one. Cheers.