 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to learn how to play Billy Joel's for the longest time on the piano. Now, you may be thinking, this is not really a piano song. It doesn't have piano in it. But at least as far as I'm concerned, these are the sort of songs which I like to teach and which I like to perform. Because it gives you a lot more opportunities to rearrange it and create your own version of it, if you will. And trying to create or trying to retain a lot of the important features of the original song. So like the melody, the chords, of course, right? Of course, you can reharmonize stuff which we don't really do in this lesson. It's just the same chords, the same melody, but a lot of interesting piano stuff going on. So I hope this arrangement does some justice to the song and makes you enjoy it a bit more if you're already a fan of it. And it's a good workout in the sense that there are four sections in the song. Let me just run through the four sections. The A part is, Oh-O-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh. For the longest time, Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh. That part. Right? The second part is, If you say goodbye to me tonight. Ooh-Ooh-Ooh-Ooh-Ooh-Ooh-Ooh-Ooh-Ooh-Ooh. That's the second part. Na-Na-Na What else could I do? Na-Na-Na-Na-Na-Na-Na-Na. to hold you for the longest time right and that kind of repeats then you have a D section like a fourth part where he goes and so on right so this entire version is not really to get you to play and sing it even though you can you can follow the chords and sing it's meant for you to play everything on the piano the melody and even the vocal harmony which we observe very well in the song since it's an acapella song right so you learn the vocal harmony you're also going to learn some rhythm and wait for it till the very end where I've done an improvisation a lot of cool bluesy and some jazzy licks stuff like that just to embellish it at the end because as a piano player if you pretty much play the same thing in the first verse or the first chorus into the next choruses and verses it's going to sound a bit boring because a piano doesn't have that much expression or dynamics as the human voice or as any other lead instrument you would observe right and the piano can't play lyrics which keeps the song more and more interesting as you keep skimming along so let's get cracking right away before we do it'll be great if you can get your keyboards out and learn with me because I teach quite slow and in a quite detailed way and very importantly we have the staff notation the MIDI files and pretty much all you will need to learn this song visually and technologically so to speak you'll find that all on our patreon page and just for a $5 subscription you're gonna get this song and pretty much everything I'm going to do in the future all my learning material as well as stuff which I have already done in the past almost for the past three to four years you'll find content lying there and it's just five bucks a month so consider getting yourselves a copy get your pianos ready and let's get cracking and one more thing try and hit that bell and the subscribe button if you haven't already that'll help our channel go a great way let's get cracking right so the songs on the key of E flat major right that's your E flat major it has E flat F G A flat B flat C D flat so I'm just gonna go section by section and you can read it in the notation as A B C D and so on even though you may argue B and C are kind of the same thing it's okay I've just put it separately because the improvisation later is going to be slightly different okay so I start and my my intention is to follow the song as best as I possibly can and at the same time make it physically possible to play it on the piano so that that's the main goal and I ended up having a lot of fun teaching this in some of my classes as well so that inspired me to make this YouTube tutorial so the beginning in the in the actual song we go this weird chromatic thing so let me take you through the first a longest so I try to get that long the bass part so let's do that I'll probably teach you maybe a four four bars at a time okay longest okay let's break that down okay so that's index finger on C thumb on C sharp or D flat and then you go B B natural and then you can whack your E flat octave and then we have a choral way of playing our chords in a block style trying to get the soprano or the melody out in the top end of your of your treble clef in the right hand so if you hear the top note that's exactly the melody line which Billy Joel is singing right so it's a bit tricky to play on the piano because you have to keep moving the inversions around but you get this really nice choral harmony so I would encourage you to practice it hard so there we have it let's do that again and the the second time I do this I do just for some flavor okay whole thing again it's also a nice strategy to snap while you play the tune so snap at the two and the four of the bar that generally gives you that swing feel which we generally desire of especially for this song which is on a swing feel so how am I playing for the longest I'm playing a B flat major in second inversion with the D on the top and just floating around my top fingers to do DC DC and this repeats again so I block my chord for the longest there we go for the longest okay so whole story again long list base I try to hit the base as a dotted minimum and then as a crotchet or a one-counted note okay let's do it all the way till for the longest time for the longest time first two lines of the song okay let's do that a bit slower remember I told you that just for some flavor for the longest same way as earlier for the longest let's do the whole a section very slowly in the I call this a choral style because your right hand is pretty much playing like how a choir would vocalize this and that's what the song is in any case it's an acapella song right so okay now let's do the B section and I have a nice style in the left hand let me play it once for you okay now let's simplify it let's do the second line if you see the notation the second line looks rather chaotic so I'll let's assume that if you're a new comer to the piano perhaps you haven't got your chops that much down yet you can still do the first line of the B part and repeat that twice so let's do the B again okay the left hand is quite tricky but let's figure out the right hand first one more time play along with me if possible so now you could do you would kind of do all your five fingers some some students get a bit confused with that so this is one way you do it that way or if you if you if you you can kind of bring like replace or swap out the index with the thumb at the G that kind of works so that's your right hand the left hand I've designed a nice tenor bass choral combo if you if you think about it that's E flat and I'm pivoting or anchoring B flat for the first two bars and the pinkies following the chord tones E flat G minor C minor B flat A flat that harmonizes that quite well I think so okay now you could repeat the same line could play those you could play it the same way the same style or you could look at the notation in the second line however arranged it so it goes okay let me do the first line once more then do the second line of the B okay and now the fun begins I harmonize my right hand okay so I've kind of thrown away the melody a wee bit try to get all the parts of that arrangement into the piano so you go E flat G D F C flat E flat G D F C E flat back to E flat G and then some la la la la the higher desk and voice goes but then you want to also get the soprano if possible I'm doing that's your below part with the other twin okay and my left hand is grooving a bit more so doing like an oompa rhythm as we call it so I'm just keeping that G and B flat consistent okay and the second line has different chords so that's in the second time that's F over a that's an F7 so I'm doing F that's F dominant seventh in this spread version so one more time left hand so only your pinky will drop now F over a F7 B flat and then we'll come to that later because that takes us into the C section okay so line one okay you end the B with an inversions of the chords F B flat D E flat A flat C that's B flat A flat G okay I'll do the B again a bit slowly we enter the C part so for the C part I'm gonna walk you through the left hand first all the chords are gonna be played in a spread position so G G major C minor B flat major E flat major A flat major F minor B flat major E flat major okay so only the B flat I've designed it as a B flat dominant there right okay so that's leading into the C first plate normally in the right hand okay now to embellish the right hand so I'm doing like a nice harmony there a tenor harmony and filling around with the soprano instead of doing I do I'm doing okay so again more tenor harmony I did that I like that minor embellishment there okay so again whole line against the C first line so I'm doing I'm harmonizing F minor like an F minor if you think about it if you cannot do that it's fine you can just do the tune okay the left hand is more than enough because the left hand sounds rather full with the spread voicing right so again some tenor harmony okay whole C section there we have it so now let's move into the D or the bridge part and see how that goes I arranged it quite well so let's move forward right so the D basically has very simple melody right that's all it is so some nice things to do in the left hand would again be to follow the backing vocals first off we go okay so how this is exactly how it is in the song something like that goes on right B flat major but first we up agitated and then we block it you want to start at the two three at the two of the bar not at the one there's a rest at the one in the left hand may want to get that independence slightly tricky let's break that down so the chords are C minor D7 E flat major okay so over that it'll be this rhythm in the left hand which is pretty much following the chord tones let's do that line little slow B flat major C minor D7 first time doing D7 there's an arpeggio like that and then in this way okay and then now to do the same pattern but I thought of adding a bass pedal to make it more heavier I guess so because the melody is the same so it may get boring so I do something like so you hit the pinky on the G and then come up and hit the arpeggio okay so that's the G minor chord the second time over one more time with your pedal needing to be down now C minor same strategy but you do C with your pinky and then come all the way up this is the stride version so let's do that again first the third line of the D section now I like that F7th voicing so pinky on F and it's again let's do that last line slightly tricky right so F dominant seventh and it's more that's like a jazzy B flat chord you can call it a B flat 11th or B flat and A flat major triad in the right hand that's a bit tricky because you're again bringing back the bass but all these ingredients are there in the song so I'd encourage you to also listen to the original song more than I hope for more than I hope okay so whole D section once let's do hmm now the pedal striding C minor F7th and it's more a B flat four so I'll just do the last line you need to lead that in the last climb now it's going to be a bunch of fun improvisations which we are going to learn so come to think of it we've actually done the A the B the C and the D and you don't have to play the fancy right hand embellishments you can just play the good old melody I tried to harmonize it with the choral stuff that's all I did in the treble to mess with the tune a bit the left hand I've just tried to incorporate as many rhythm patterns as I think would serve the song best and also get you guys watching the video to develop your left hand a lot more stronger now the party actually begins where we are going to go into some interesting improvisations which I've done on the B the C and the A and the A I've done a lot at the end to kind of finish off the song with a bang to create a nice version which you can perform for your friends or make a video of your own and put it up on your own channels and so on and again to remind you there is notation of this entire song and if you'd like to check me playing the whole performance there will be a performance link as well which is in the description to do so do check out my performance of the song and let me know what you think and most of the times we tend to do detailed tutorials on our channel which perhaps prevents you from sharing it with all your loved ones but there is a performance so whenever there's a performance on our channel it'll be awesome if you could share it and get your friends to to to enjoy the music rather than only learn which we do tend to do on this channel right so let's move forward with the improvised B C and back to the A sections right so for the B section at the end I've created an improvisation this is how it goes okay that's your first two bars I'll try and teach you in two bar phrases so first phrase okay okay it's sort of like if you say good just a improv on it and the chords just G B flat on top ringing dum dum dum and then let's move forward okay so to me tonight but that's like a drill you can even do didn't do what I ended up notating and playing and I left hands doing a spread of a flat there and now I'm going very high like I did in the first B now that's that's your right hand right with the left which goes same thing first line also and then and then I'm doing that pump pump in the left hand because I'm kind of running out of resources in the right so let's just finish the the two lines of the B improv do very slowly now okay let's continue now forward to the C section which I've improvised as well so in the C improv we enter the C improv with and then we develop these licks in the right hand which are on the chord tones that's on the G seventh going to C minor C minor now B flat going to so I quite like that offbeat nature of the E flat landing so we go okay so let's do that again and climb B flat one more time and then I just kind of messed with the timing of the notes nothing great so I did okay the everything else is on the offbeat that has in everything is at the ends you could say hasn't been there for the longest time okay the whole C improv and then okay and then we end with the A as an outro and quite simple is just that the left hand's grooving a bit we're just doing this pattern pretty much this part in the left hand and the right hand goes okay E flat with a G the left hand goes E flat B flat major E flat over G A flat major now B flat melodic anticipation having some fun with the rhythm of the melody that's all so for the longest time let's break that down so first line of the A outro bar 58 if you're seeing the notation it'll be I'm in the third line now in the end of the song you do can do that way oh can do or so okay let's break down that A outro slowly with me the ending lick you could do like with a B flat B flat triad or you can do just without it or what I like and the left hand goes you could end with a nice right guys so let's just conclude with the entire improv section at the end I'm just gonna revise that whole thing and then let's wind up the tutorial follow carefully we'll do it very slowly okay B flat ending A outro okay the very last line fingering perhaps bring back your thumb to the F one more time slowly right guys so this is for the longest time by Billy Joel a great song a superb acapella piece by one of the greatest singer songwriters who has ever lived and what I would encourage you to do if you haven't already is there's a performance which I've done on this song do watch it and share it with your friends and family that'll be really cool also give the video a like subscribe leave us a comment with what you thought and don't forget to get yourselves a copy of the sheet music on patreon if that is not your style of learning you could also get the midi files and there are also other resources of my previous lessons and whatever I'm going to do in the future right and if you'd like to subscribe to regular structured modules at Nathaniel school of music all you have to do is go to our website nathanielschool.com fill up a few forms get in touch with one of our course advisors and we'll guide you with a path which can suit you best right guys this is Jason Zayek from Nathaniel cheers