 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zak from Nathaniel School of Music. In this tutorial, I'm going to give you a few suggestions or steps or guidelines if you will over my years of experience towards what I call the future proof piano accompaniment goals which you need to have or a future proof piano accompaniment flow chart or algorithm which you might need to develop in order to play not only the song which you want to play right now immediately. Maybe you have a list of one or two or maybe five songs but you want the fourth or the fifth song to be radically easier than when you first started. You want it to be exponentially easier so to speak. So it may have taken you about two weeks to do a song but then the next song should take you one week. The song after that should take you two or three days and then you should be able to figure out or finish off an entire song in a very very short time compared to where you started. So the idea here is to follow the learning process in a set of steps and as I tell you the steps you just take a song which you're working on. In the intro video you heard me playing somewhere over the rainbow which is a great American Broadway theme song from the movie Wizard of Oz you must have seen. So it's a great movie. So using that song and maybe a couple of others organically I'll try and guide you towards how you can end up with that with the melody, the harmony, a rhythm pattern and the like and so on and so forth on your piano. So before we get started all of my handwritten notes will be available on Patreon for this lesson as well as stuff we've done in the past and what we are going to do in the future and all these lessons will include my handwritten notes, backing tracks to help you practice, MIDI files to help you import into other players to watch and learn with all the technology gadgets out there and you'll also get staff notation for a lot of the other lessons too. And it'll be awesome if you could hit that subscribe and the bell icon for regular notifications. Let's get cracking. So the first future proof step towards piano solo arrangements would be accompaniment. Now you may think hey I want to play the tune on the piano but why are you telling me to accompany? Who am I going to accompany? So accompaniment means you're going to decide the rhythm pattern of your song for the purpose of accompanying the melody done by either yourself with your voice or done by a friend who's singing with you. So I always like to think of myself as an accompanist first and then try and look at a solo piano arrangement because a solo piano arrangement which is a very a freak kind of arrangement because you have to play the melody line, you have to play the rhythm, you have to play the harmony. So in a sense you're still accompanying the melody but you are only playing the melody. So solo piano is you are doing everything including the melody while accompaniment you're still doing everything except the melody where someone else is doing the melody. So only that one part is not there the melody. So if you take somewhere over the rainbow you can first figure out the chords and sing over that chord progression. Let's just take one line. So I'm trying to get acquainted with my chords and when the changes occur with respect to the tune. So you need to get the chord changes first with the song you know. Let's do that again. Somewhere over the rainbow way. Get that minor in if you wish. The plagal minor which is the four minor land that I heard once in a lullaby. And when I'm accompanying myself I first try to just kind of broadly think of my song as ballad or groovy. You know those are two simple words which come to mind. If it's a ballad you can just kind of keep your chords like this. Just play the chords as blocks and just pump it down you know. Or also look at ballad arpeggios. So it's just a simple low middle high middle arpeggio going on. So if it's a ballad you should probably decide do I want to play if it's an Adele song for all you know you'll probably be playing arpeggios. Stuff like that or you know a lot of the Adele songs have arpeggios in them. However if it's somewhere over the rainbow and it's a very kind of it's almost you could call it a jazz standard in the sense so many have covered it so many have given their interpretations and their improvisations over it. You can decide what pattern you want and what I'm trying to point out in this step is it's a lot of fun and it's not very stressful on your mind and body because if you have to put in all the parts together at one go you're going to think very robotically and very mechanically it'll just be oh where do I get the sheet music maybe I'll google it or and then how how do you trust google there'll be thousands of sheet music available for let's say somewhere over the rainbow. Then what do you do who do you trust you may watch a youtube video but then you can you trust that as well you know you someone or the other might have everyone has their own interpretations of the same thing so you'd rather have your own rather than follow everyone around you and start with the accompaniment so you write down your chord charts keep that ready where the chord changes occur is very very important does simple things like somewhere see I changed from a flat to f minor the two tonic chords the major tonic and the minor tonic I changed it after two beats I didn't change it after four beats even though it's a four by four song you can expect those chords to change every four counts so somewhere over the rainbow now over the rainbow what's happening is over the rainbow you can get that secondary dominant going which is the five of the four way up high that's an a flat over C played four times so you have to know when the chord changes occur what are the chords how to play the chords what is the shape you would prefer and then you can figure out how to bring the melody into this whole ecosystem and one common thing to do is you take your right hand let's say you're playing a ballad and you just play the chords in the right hand as a ballad and you sing okay I'll just stick with that now here's what you do you're looking at the right hand and it's doing block chords so why not take the same function of the right hand and bring that to the left hand so as you just saw I've transferred my right hand to the left hand and I'm continuing to sing so if you like the arpeggio line well and good if you want a faster arpeggio now in hindsight maybe quite like this so if you like that busy kind of arpeggio maybe you want to create a folk version of the song so whatever it may be try and test it out with the vocal and now your job will be to bring that to the left hand you may not like this but you get the idea you could have a folk interpretation of it you can even do a rock interpretation which I may not recommend for the the faint hearted even I don't like it actually so let's forget the rock version but you get the idea so you maybe a reggae version with a little bit of swing right so you set that at the very top level and then you commit to the arrangement you want so a solo piano arrangement the word arrangement also is important there right you have to arrange it in a way which brings out your personality or serves your interpretation of the song best and if you commit to the time feel and if you say I just want to do it straight I don't even want to consider swing then what was in your mind your vision will be lost also if what I just showed you the reggae version or the folk version that you need to set at the top level and it becomes very tough when once you have the melody printed in front of you and ready to go you'll always play it in that one way so this is not that's why I call this future proof because you're testing different genres you're testing different time feels you may even want to play it in different meters in different time signatures you you want to do seven or whatever these top level decisions you need to take before you start playing the melody you see I haven't yet played the melody I'm still singing so the song also needs to be in your head the basics are obvious you need to have heard the song enough and more times and then it's running you know permanently in your head and you're trying to latch on to different things which you which suits your whims and fancy so to speak so moving forward we've covered two processes in the flow chart first of all make an accompaniment version decide your style your genre your pattern a b it do it alongside your singing over the chord progression figure out the changes and all the basics of the chord movement then transfer that pattern somehow using your skills using your technique to the left hand practice that continue singing and now organically continue singing but bring the melody because you freed the right hand now the right hand doesn't get to do anything somewhere you put the whole pattern to the left hand so now it's your chance to bring the melody there and what I will say is all of these all of the work starts with the brain the brain sends a message to different muscles different parts of the body to do certain actions so if the brain is able to send a message to your vocal cords to sing the song the same information believe it or not it's quite obvious actually is going to your hands as well so also going to your legs it's going everywhere if you wanted to the brain will just pass that data through the network to reach another body part it is easily reaching your voice your vocal cords because that's what we do in nature with language and speech right you want to get something out it's the quickest way to do so is with your voice and the gestures as well so the brain now needs to send it to the the hand and you the best way to do that is you're already singing it so align your singing with your piano you know and somehow try and get that this is where you may want to maybe read the sheet music no problem but don't stop singing and then slowly but surely bring back that left hand pattern which you committed to and play it together and with singing what's nice from a future proof perspective and also from an improvisation perspective it's easiest to come up with changes in the melody like if i wanted to do you know that's a vocal thing now to do that on the piano it would not have been your your instinct to do that but it's very easy to come up with that with your voice maybe make a quick recording of it on your cell phone voice memos so that you don't forget and then try and work that try to muscle that into your practice see i try to get what i just sang so all that came from my voice you know i would have never come up with that on the piano i feel it it's just come from the voice instead of the usual the word of all the words can be sung with so much of color you see what's happening here i'm not getting it in instantly wrong so take some time to match that at all you could even stick with the original get that going and work on different left hand patterns alongside the a more normal the the correct melody of the song so to speak so maybe you can ab compares in arpeggios with something groovy something groovy like that or maybe something laid back so change your left hand accordingly according to whatever genre you want and the advantage of doing all this i think the last thing i wanted to point out in this lesson would be now your left hand has been given a solid workout because you've tried to check so many rhythm patterns against so many genres with this song that it's now going to give you the confidence or the skill to play other songs maybe you can decide do i want to do a mash up maybe or do i i i thought of doing somewhere over the rainbow and reggae but i don't think it just it works for my rendition but maybe i can do another reggae song with this reggae thing which i learned and maybe that'll be on a much easier scale that'll be on maybe g major or c major you know so you can think about a very think about the future this has to be a future proof strategy and any future proof strategy is not going to come to us instantly we have to wait for things to grow so it will always be an exponential growth curve where it'll start with something which appears to be a struggle which is exactly why i said sing from the beginning because you're not going to get annoyed with the effort or the job singing is always fun so keep your singing into play keep your chord changes get the basics and one one thing i may not have mentioned in the beginning or stressed on enough in the beginning was don't forget the basics of what you're playing the pulse of the song how you move to the speed or the tempo the meter don't take that for granted is it a 4-4 is it a 6-8 is it a 3-4 or something like that decide the cycle length how long is each phrase for define your chord changes which i already told you and the time feel is it swinging is it straight is it a triplet feel or whatever else it might be right guys so do consider heading over to our patreon page as well which will equip you with some of the handwritten notes for this lesson and so many other lessons which we've been doing over the years and what we'll continue to do of course and there's a subscribe button right next to the video which you're watching you can kindly hit that on there's also a bell which you can ring don't worry it won't make a noise just press it and you'll get notifications whenever we release a new lesson or a riff which we do daily on our channel thanks a ton for watching the video cheers catch you in the next one