 Hi everyone, welcome to part 3 on the series on exploring scales from new technical perspectives and always trying to sound creative while doing so. We are going to basically continue our study with this by looking at thirds in today's lesson, practicing scales using thirds and as always it's good to study it using both a major scale as well as a minor scale and we are looking at E major, E minor, let's build the scale first, E major, E minor, more specifically the E harmonic minor that's the harmonic 7th major 7th if you will. So to form a third the first thing we try to do is stay diatonic to the key in other words if you are in a major scale or in a minor scale use the notes just as part of that particular scale. So the best way to figure out your thirds is to first write down the scale in a neat round circle that helps you to really get the formation going and then get your third pairs going or your groupings of thirds if you will. So if you take E major to form a third what you do is you press E, you skip the F sharp which is the second interval and play the next diatonic step. We say diatonic because it's derived from within the key, we are going to get the notes from the same parent scale we are currently working on. So in the E major scale E F sharp G sharp, G sharp becomes E's third. So E to G sharp becomes that pair E G sharp and then what happens from F sharp, F sharp is third, diatonically you move up a scale step F sharp G sharp skip to A. So you so far have E to G sharp F sharp to A and now what's the next note G sharp right G sharp to B and then A C sharp it's also good ear training exercise then B to D sharp. So as you are going through the third intervals it's also important to sing that way your ears get a lot more accustomed to it and why not right why not develop your ear as well as your technique and the theory all at the same time. So E to G sharp that's a third F sharp to A then G sharp to B then A to C sharp then B to D sharp then C sharp to E then D sharp to F sharp and then E to G sharp. Another great way to train your ear while doing it is play the E get accustomed to the G sharp which is the third E G sharp. Once you sung it and once you have a fair idea on it then you could play and check whether what you sung is in fact what you thought of and what you actually imagined on the piano. So the third pairs need to be written down for all your E major notes E G sharp F sharp to A G sharp to B A to C sharp B to D sharp C sharp to E D sharp to F sharp and finally it repeats with E and G sharp. These are diatonic thirds again how did we form them? You write down the scale in a neat round circle you take any note from the scale skip one you get your third and thirds are the building blocks of even chords if you think about it right. If you are building a triad it's going to be a third then another third you get yourself a chord right. So when you are exploring thirds the first thing you could do is just do your scale exercises you can perhaps just go ascending and descending something like this okay so what we normally do so with each note I am playing its third and then I am climbing to the next scale step so you go E G sharp keep going generally with respect to fingers while playing thirds you want to just pretty much use the first three the thumb the index and the middle finger on descending maybe you could also engage with the ring finger but I don't wish to stress too much on fingering because you need to also focus this exercise on multiple scales and it will change the fingering will change so just keep in mind these three fingers while doing the job so E G sharp F sharp A again again the left hand is playing the pulse with E so yeah simple rule of thumb with no pun intended will be the thumb will stick on to the white notes and whenever it goes black the index finger could come in because it's a taller finger it can reach those black notes but you can even play the black notes with your thumb like this it just gets a bit more tricky you don't get that much room you have to angle the thumb a bit more inside and a few other challenging things so maybe you could just keep the thumb for the white key and the starting white key and keep the index finger for the starting black key and just follow that process coming down pretty much the same way as you went up so using this platform you have two melodic ways of playing the thirds right you can play E going up to G sharp that's E and then the higher third or you could play the third G sharp and then come back to the root which is E so you could do E G sharp or G sharp E so you could practice your thirds either that way E G sharp or G sharp E okay so if you do G sharp E what's gonna be next AF sharp third root so you're starting with the root with the third and then its root okay so while the earlier approach started with the root and then its third the other objective could be you could also mix things up that's going up then going down but then with the next third pair then that to me is already very melodic right there isn't it so on the way down go thirds going down then going up so that's how you can get really creative just with this direction of movement you know E going to G sharp or G sharp going to E that itself could give you so many possibilities actually it could give you four permutations you could do all going up or you could go all going down that's the thirds going down to their root or you could jumble going up and going down up down going up down going up down okay or you could go down up up down up down up down up all of these give you a lot of melodic possibilities with respect to thirds so thirds becomes a very very important thing to practice when it comes to your major scale or even the minor scale because in the real world when you compose music with chords or with melodies you're going to definitely use the thirds as a very go to interval isn't it so if you take just E major in thirds you can improvise and actually create something very melodic and rememberable you know just keep the pairs of thirds slow it down a bit groove it a bit develop your own patterns using of course that's not my pattern but you get the idea a lot of music a lot of melodies are just constructed using just thirds in different permutations either the thirds go up or the thirds go down so that's pretty much how you use this let's try and explore the same thing using the minor scale because I'd like you to practice major as well as minor especially in an exercise like this which deals with scales we shouldn't be biased primarily towards the major scale because there are a lot of songs which are also on minor and it's good to maybe tackle the same key E but with both the variants E major as well as E minor so if you take E minor these are the thirds so again you need to write that down write down the scale in a neat round circle plot your thirds bring them together get your pairs going the whole idea behind this exercise is how you can kind of take the thirds as a subject as a technical practice routine and then make it very very creative so most of these exercises which we've done in this three-part series are basically like that it starts by being something very technical if you remember the first drill focused more on the hands stretching out and coming back together that's your compression expansion kind of thing then we looked at the pendulum where you're practicing crossing over and in this exercise we are really trying to get a grip on to our thirds so these are the three ways to practice scales creatively and technically at the same time it's something I really love doing when I'm practicing my piano time flies by really well you enjoy your time and you're always as I say in the hunt to kind of try and create music rather than say okay I'm putting a timer for half an hour where I want to just practice my scale that usually doesn't turn out so well when you all when you're trying to look at the same information and say okay I want to make something today or I want to try to create something you know of my own I think that's a great mindset to to go with whenever you're practicing not just scales but pretty much anything in music right so again this is Jason here from Nathaniel I hope you guys have enjoyed our three part series on exploring scales from hopefully three very different perspectives have fun with the lesson keep at it practice it on multiple scales as well in this video series we've been looking at E as the main key E major E minor but yeah it's just a matter of writing down the new scale maybe having a couple of weekly goals like maybe three scales a week if you can if your time supports it and keep journeying forward thanks a ton for watching this video and our entire lesson series if you haven't do check out the entire series and you can also watch some of our other videos which are for beginner players for intermediate players which cover things like chords chord voicings rhythm and a lot of other things like improvisation and so on and so forth stay tuned to the Nathaniel channel if you haven't already subscribe give us a like give us a comment share the video with your musician friends and most importantly turn on the bell icon for notifications we'll be hitting you very shortly with live streaming with more videos and a lot more exciting things at the Nathaniel School of Music cheers