 Hi guys, welcome back. So, in this lesson, I just wanted to share or talk about the importance of dynamics in music. Okay, we use this word sometimes loosely. I think, you know, if you are a physics student, I think it kind of means some form of change, some physical quantity changing over time. So, in other words, if you measure anything, like let's say temperature or, you know, the number of coronavirus cases, which is the most popular graph in the past few years, basically, you're measuring what is happening over the x axis, which is time. And music is a very time driven art form, right? It's not a static art form like, like painting, for example, where you just have it in front of you. Yes, you can imagine things around it, but actually, it's just a static art form. Music is dynamic. So everything changes, your emotions change. And it's more like you're telling stories using the audio medium or the oral medium, rather than the visual medium. So when creating music using dynamics, we need to keep a few things in mind. And this would be applicable to you, whether you're an absolute beginner or whether you're an absolute pro advanced seasoned musician. I think these points hold good for all. Okay. And we just, we just need to look at the physical quantities of music, which are available, and then learn how to tweak them, learn how to manage them, and more importantly, control them with pretty much anything we do on the instrument, whether it's play melodies, whether it's accompanying a singer, whether it's following a drummer, anything. And a lot about dynamics is about either you imagining the music, imagining the story it's telling and imagining the purpose of what you're doing. And also another reason why you would need dynamics is to serve your band members or to serve the musicians you're playing. For example, to follow the singers dynamics. Sometimes we look out for singers because of how obvious their dynamics is. Sometimes their lyrics itself would mean, okay, you have some sad sentence. So you have to play the piano in a very kind of sad melancholic way. Or if it's more chirpy or a bit more uplifting, you have to bring up the flavor on the piano. Another great way to look at dynamics is to follow the intensity of the drummer. If the drummer is sort of belting it or slamming it, you need to be with the drummer or follow or combat or work with the drummer to bring out or to make the drums sound better. Sometimes a little bit of what we do should make our fellow musicians also sound better. So a good gig, which you might perform would be a gig where you just make the singer sound better or you make the drummer sound better. And if the singer sounds better, the show is a success. If the drummer sounds better, everyone dances. So there's no harm in kind of staying behind the scene sometimes and exploring dynamics. So dynamics could be used in a visual story-like context where you are imagining a story or you're trying to work with an existing story by, let's say, your music director friend who works with you or you're just playing with the art form, which is a dynamic art form. You want to say, okay, there is a hero, there is a hero going through all these stages in the movement or in the story or in the journey and your music needs to support that. And also dynamics is important to follow your bandmates or your singer or your choir or the overall objective of the arrangement of the song. So coming to all the properties which we can change on the piano or pretty much on any musical instrument is volume. The volume component is the simplest thing which you can kind of float and change and really bring out the art form. So if I take a simple phrase like this, this is at the upper volume, you know, spectra. So instead of that maybe, play it softer. Why not combine the two? Reach a kind of a crescendo or a decrescendo where you're kind of climbing down. And a lot about playing dynamics is also working from within your body. What you have within you, what you clearly know you have is breathing. So if you can time your dynamics or time your performance with your breathing, it kind of helps. It's worked with a ton of my students and it's obviously worked for me to play something like this and breathe. So just focus on your breathing, you know. So what happened there, I just took a deep breath inside and the volume just became louder and then I couldn't breathe anymore. So the volume kind of stayed where it was. Come down, rest. So I've taken a breath out. So time your dynamics, time your performance with your breathing. Volume is what we've been chatting about now. Volume is the most organic way or the easiest way for a musician to bring about dynamics which is a change over time and thus creating a more storytelling environment which is what we need for our art form. The other kind of dynamics which you can do on the piano and a lot of instruments would be legato and staccato. So if I take music like this just a chord progression, you see the smoothness is what we call as legato where it's connected versus same music but played in a lot more staccato. So that means the length of each of what I'm doing, each note or each chord is trying to be zero. So obviously you cannot have zero sustain. You'll have to then be very percussion like it's just like a clap. So there will be some kind of tail, some kind of sustain but with staccato one technique which I find on the piano which is very useful is to flick your fingers and create a fist like this. Or sort of like a recoil when you're playing a game of carom or something. You get a nice staccato vibe. Don't go, don't lift your whole shoulder like you're getting some kind of an electric shock or something. You don't need to be getting a shock doing this. It's just a flick. Just flick the fingers back towards your palm and you should get a staccato while legato. You just go through the motions, the natural motion of playing the piano and if you like even more connection or more legato we have the sustain pedal which is, there we go. So with holding the pedal gives you this sound without the pedal not so much legato. With the pedal more legato and obviously staccato without the pedal and with the flick. So you could have one section of the song which is staccato and then the next section could be legato and then the emotions come through back too. I hope you're feeling the difference in emotions. That's the key. That's the point of dynamics. To change your mood, change the story, change the landscape, change what your actor is doing in the movie through these simple things volume so far and then the duration of the notes legato or staccato. What's a nice another great way to build or progress with dynamics on the piano. I would just say the other quantity of sound we've covered volume, we've covered the length of the sound we have not necessarily yet covered the pitch of the sound. So a sound could be very deep or very low or very high. So you get a very kind of a thin sound when you go towards the higher registers. So this could be more like a melancholic scene where someone has lost a loved one or whatever. You'll probably have all these these sort of music played in the higher register. But if I go lower and play the same thing, this is more like it's a struggle going on. But I kid you not, I'm playing the same music. I did not change my notes. I did not change my chord. I did not change the speed or the rhythm. I didn't change anything. I think see now just played it lower. Now you get that epic brave kind of sound or like there's a lot of destruction, you know, or like the spoils of war or something also with intensity because you can combine volume with pitch. Remember both the elements of dynamics. Same music played higher and lot of these things it's like we didn't really do anything. We're just playing it lower and then playing it higher. You're just leaving it to I would say leaving it to mother nature to just beautify the sound. So as a player you have to showcase these things. You have to showcase these kinds of movements in music. So again dynamics coming back to the definition change over time. Another final way to talk about dynamics to leave you in this lesson would be what I call as density. Okay. Density basically in in physics means something heavier per unit volume or mass per volume, right? kg per meter cube if I'm not mistaken when I learnt in my engineering courses. Okay. So with musical density you have the same volume which is in this case the beat or the bar. The volume is the amount of time what I call as a time container. But how much are you squeezing into that container will be your density value. What is your density? So to give you an example I can play everyone's favorite song. So it's just one, two, three, four, one. So I'm not really going inside the beat. So with density we don't really change the melody or the chords or anything. We just try and add something deeper. What did I do there? Something has been added, right? I've added like what we call as quavers. Now we can add more making it a 16th note back to a more timid way or a more uplifting way. There we go. So that's how you add density in the same amount of time you add more and more elements, right? So we've looked at volume control. We've looked at pitch control. We've looked at duration control, legato, staccato, and finally I like to leave you with that term musical density, right? Where you add more subdivisions to your performance or explore more subdivisions with your performance and to cap this video off the importance of dynamics is huge for you as a professional musician or an upcoming aspiring musician. What you could hope to achieve, the way I like to put it for my students is if you have 100 people who are in a kind of a hall or whatever and they are asked to play the same music, right? I can guarantee you if someone is judging those 100 people and let's say those judges, some of them were musicians. Some of them are not musicians. It doesn't matter. The top 10 out of that 100 will be the people who play that exercise or that music with dynamics. The remaining 90 may show off a bit more. They may color it. They may really play very, very fast. They're not going to win the prize. The guys who are going to win are the guys who can show off their dynamics, right? The effort of showcasing the physical changeable quantities of music, which is pitch, time, pitch, duration and volume, length of the note, velocity or the attack or the loudness of the note and the where you're playing the notes. And finally, we have density. So if you want to be in that top 10% group of people, play with dynamics. Don't think about the other stuff which everyone keep talking about. Let's learn how to play fast. Let's play super, super speed or things like that. You know, those are the things which are quite attractive for a musician, but may not be the things which actually attract your audience or whoever you're playing music for, right? So from the audience point of view, what can they feel? They're not going to enjoy music played supremely faster. They're not going to enjoy music which has more complicated chords or more complicated things. They may, but they will feel the thing which they feel will always be dynamics. So you need to also keep it immersed within you and then project it to your audience. I hope you found this talk or this rant about dynamics to be useful and I hope you can apply it in your music. Remember, it is a very, very important tool. It's going to make you pro immediately. You're just going to go from something to a professional player. All you have to do is take the same data you're doing, same music and add all these dynamic ingredients and start telling even more, you know, rich and beautiful stories along the way. Cheers and catch you in the next one.