 Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to focus on a couple of exciting things on the piano. First of all, chord voicing for the left hand. I think there are some nice strategies in this video which can benefit you greatly to make your chord sound a lot more deeper, a lot more richer, powerful, at the same time very expressive and very unique and you could also argue very jazzy or that sort of a thing. And in the right hand versus the left hand, we are going to coordinate our hands with a very simple arpeggio which I have developed as you heard in the intro video. We are going to play that arpeggio in two different time fields. Time field is essentially how you divide the beat. So we will do it in sets or divisions of four, we will do it in sets of many things actually and then divisions of two, three and four and then organically try to grow some awesome music together. So you need to bring your keyboards out and learn with me as it's a step-by-step workflow. So I am first going to talk about the chords, the voicing in the left hand, a few alternative options in the right hand and after we look at the lesson from a chord voicing or a harmony perspective, we will then look at it from an entirely rhythmic perspective. And the rhythmic perspective is also intended to help you improvise your own stuff. In this lesson we are tying ourselves down to just the four notes which I am going to show you but in the future you can always go forward with this in many different ways. And hand independence on the piano can be practiced in so many forms. You can do bass in the left hand, you can do melody in the right hand, you can sing and also train your hand independence. You can do chord patterns here, arpeggios there. There are so many permutations of hand independence and it's a widely searched topic as well on the internet. So what you could also do at the end of the video after finishing it of course is head over to our playlist which is in the description on hand independence and you will find a lot of learnings on those subjects. And we also have a lot of topics on voicing of chords. We have spread voicing wherein we again focus on the left hand territory and we look at other open voicings used for jazz music and blues music. So there is a lot on our channel if you are a first time visitor and if you are new to the channel or if you are old to the channel or whatever be the case. If you haven't subscribed to our channel it will be awesome if you could hit that subscribe button and turn on the bell icon for regular notifications. And all of the notes for this lesson are neatly saved on our Patreon page. You can head over there and you'll find pretty much all the notes for this lesson and stuff we've done in the past and also what we'll be continuing to do in the future for just a $5 subscription a month. So let's get started with the lesson. I hope you've got your keyboards out. So first of all the right hand is going to play a simple C F G B flat. You could play it above or you could play it low up to you. Let's start above which is the C above middle C this is middle C this is the C above middle C. What do we call this chord? Theoretically you could call this a C7 sus4. The left hand is going to produce three chords and I'm going to explore those chords in three different complexities which will stretch out your hand more and more. So if you're a kid watching this video and if your hands cannot stretch don't worry there will be a voicing for you or in general if your hands don't stretch. However I would encourage you all to consider playing basketball or a sport which might widen your hands. Just kidding or maybe not. Who knows? Basketball actually helps. I'm not an expert. So in the left hand first of all the chords are some kind of C minor then some kind of A flat major and then some kind of F major okay and I like to think of the chords as being part of what I call as a hybrid minor scale. The hybrid minor scale is a scale wherein the six can either be a flat six or a normal major sixth and the seventh can be a normal seventh major seventh or a flat seven also known as a minor seventh. So that's what I like to call as a hybrid minor scale. So then you can pull in chords from all these different intervals and play them together. So C minor, A flat major and F major however we are not going to play the chords like that. The voicing technique number one would be a sparse voicing using seventh chords. So C minor I'm going to play it as this C, G, B flat. Now you could either go C, G, B flat or you could even add in that F whenever you feel it doesn't sound so muddy or so you know annoying maybe to the ear. This sounds good actually so you could stack over an F but if you find your fingers are a bit tense you can ignore that F and just do C, G, B flat. So the notes would be C, G, B flat, C, G, B flat with an alternate C, F, B flat. So you could either play C, F, B flat, C, G, B flat they both sound good. So C, F, B flat could be a quartal voicing of the C7 sus4 chord. A C with G and B flat could be a C minor 7th or even visualized as a C7 sus4 with a sparse voicing. By sparse I mean you're ignoring one or two notes of the chord. So this is C minor, originally you would play it like that right but this is a bit muddy and sounds a bit bad down below as well. So this is a nice way to open it out, this is a nice way to play it as well. Then when we come to A flat major, instead of playing it like this I'm going to play it like this A flat, E flat and G that would be root, perfect 5th, major 7th and no 3rd. You could also refer to this as A flat major 7th in brackets, some people write no 3. So there's no 3 there because I think 3 will again make it quite muddy and maybe a bit tricky on the fingers so you can get the same similar color without that C. I think this is nice. So chord number 1, C7, then A flat major 7th, no 3 perhaps and the third chord would be F dominant 7th. Now F dominant 7th you could play like this 1, 7 octave but a colorful way to play it would be 1, 5, 7 flat, 1, 5, 7 flat, F, C, E flat okay. So I'm going with this as the initial voicing strategy. So you have C F B flat or C G B flat and then you go A flat E flat G and then F C E flat F dominant or if you wish you can also do F E flat F, it's not so colorful so you could do this. So let's do this with the right hand playing a simple arpeggio or 2 simple arpeggios. The first one would just be semi quavers where you count 1 E and 2 E and 3 E and 4 E and with that chord I taught you earlier C F G B flat so C F G B flat C F G B flat semi quave 3 4 1 and the left hand we can play the pulse 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 and if you observe the left hand there's a little bit of a chord structuring going on. I'm playing the first chord because it's the root or the tonic chord. I'm playing it a bit longer so I'm playing C minor for 4 counts 2 3 A flat major 7th for only 2 counts F dominant for only 2 counts so 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 play it with me I'm gonna do it very slowly and go 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 and again 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 and if your right hand gets bored doing semi quavers it can then start doing another time field which is called as triplets. That will be 3 4 1 and 2 and 3 and we can say 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and or in India we say taqita and if you want some variety in the triplets you can do C F B flat or you can do C G B flat or you could do a combo of both C F G F G B flat so it's a package of 3 it still feels like a triplet so again 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 this will also be nice if you're playing faster triplets like semi quaver triplets 16 no triplet right let's go to normal quaver triplets or eighth no triplets next chord A flat major 7th then F dominant 7th let's do that again with the left hand normal quaver eighth no triplets may flat major 7th F 7th 7 sus 4 major 7th dominant 7th with that sparse voicing of no third ideally except for the C 7 sus 4 which you can play all four notes come to think of it or without the G or without the without the F okay so you can do semi quavers or triplets in your right hand and coming back to the left hand so voicing strategy number one was what I could call as a within the octave voicing strategy where you're never going beyond that high C but now voicing strategy is moving forward will expand our hand a bit more so first chord in in the original style what we learned first chord number one chord number two chord number three that would be C minor 7th or C 7 sus 4 A flat major 7th F dominant 7th now as we journey forward what you can do is open out your voicing more by doing what we call as fifth voicing or quintal voicing or what I would also call as ninth voicing where you go one five and then the second degree of the root but played an octave higher as we play it an octave higher we call it a ninth because a ninth when played an octave higher generally wants to believe or assume that there'll be a third somewhere and you don't want to clutter it up by playing it inside if we played inside the sound would be very muddy so we call it a nine for various reasons I guess the main reason is because there's a third and a seventh in the chord or more specifically a seventh so all of the chords now let us voice using ninths one five nine that's C G D you could also locate it as two perfect fifths around the circle of fifths in clockwise direction C G D A flat A flat E flat B flat and then F C G okay C G D A flat E flat B flat F C G very open and you can play this you can play this very low it's also very modern rock or heavy heavy guitar music you'll find them voicing the chords generally this way as it's cooler I guess otherwise your one note lesser or one note in this case your one note more than creating a power chord this is a power chord which I think is not so colorful while this tells a story and you can even play it lower it's very open so all my chords now with the semi quaver in the right hand let's try all ninth chords or you could call them add nine chords without the third try it with your triplets back to semi semi quavers 16th notes and I like this kind of open style of playing chords because theoretically you can compose on either you can say Dorian or Aeolian in this kind of context Dorian would be a major scale with a flat 3 and a flat 7 so you can do which is a flat 6 that makes it Aeolian that also kind of works because you're not committing to either A or A flat in this voicing right so that's voicing strategy number two guys and voicing strategy number three will really stretch out the hands but gain a lot of the jazz intervals out there so that would be the first chord C minor would now be played as root flat seven and ninth so this would be a C minor ninth or some ninth chord I could probably call this a minor ninth because I'm in a minor world so C minor ninth and now the A flat chord could be played as this voicing now this is a ninth but there's a six also so we call this as a A flat six nine chord it's a six nine voicing and then F I'm going to play it as a F dominant chord with the dominant seventh and the ninth there it's you could look at it as an F ninth but in the left hand you don't have the I guess the budget to play that many notes or the bandwidth to play that many notes because of the frequencies colliding with each other so it'll if you were to it'll sound very muddy so this is a simple way of playing it so you could say third chord is F ninth without the third and the fifth or no three no five so first chord I'd leave it to you I think you could even now combine the voicings together the first chord you could perhaps just keep playing like this because your right hands anyway is doing that just to keep it kind of clear or unified you could perhaps play the first chord like this and whenever you you're done with the practice you can open up into the jazz higher voicings okay I'm just going to show you the higher voicings now C ninth and then A flat six nine F nine repeat A flat six nine F nine but without the three and five you could also play it in this sevens us four no problem or this way this will stretch out your hand a bit more you need to stretch at least to a ninth but only a nine that's it's not too too much of a stretch actually and a good way to kind of get this stretch a good trick would be to move your entire hand away or away from the keyboard or towards you and if you observe my thumb my thumb is just clinging on to the D a lot of people think that you should play the keys here not necessarily you can play them here sometimes you can play them inside you can do all sorts of things at the end of the day the key is just a trigger for an eventual hammer which whacks the strings of the piano and then resonates on the through the soundboard so your job is to somehow trigger that hammer you can do it with your thumb all the way down or in worst case scenarios you could also perhaps use your nose perhaps so you this would be the extended voicing and then you have F nine and then that A flat six nine chord there so let's go through all the voicings we have and then move on specifically towards rhythm so voicing number one within the octave C sevens us for A flat major seventh F dominant seventh without the three of course voicing strategy number two the quintal or the fifth voicing with perfect fifths or you can call them as ad nines very open sounding C ad nine A flat ad nine F ad nine the third voicing which is more jazz using the jazz extensions like the nine and the thirteen would be the one seven flat and nine voicing then the six nine voicing for the left hand and then the back to the seven nine for F nine could call this as an F nine so that's about your chords that's about your voicing so moving on to the second half of the lesson which won't be that much theoretical it's just going to involve rhythm maths and how you can coordinate your two hands so there are two ways of generally doing things on a musical instrument whether it's melody chords arpeggios or whatnot first off you need to divide the beat by something you divide by two you divide by three divide by four five or whatever and then after you divide we tend to have some obvious packages of notes which are created that would be at the division rate for instance if I divide by two I also want to play my notes in sets of two if I divide by three I play my notes in triplets in sets of three if I divide by four I want to play probably semi quavers which is sets of four but this whole lesson is going to kind of take our mind away from that and that's going to improve your independence on the piano as people call it so your left hand is going to keep keep things very simple we'll just do the pulse three whatever voicing you enjoy two three four and the left hand I'm not going to talk about the left hand anymore we've looked at a lot of options so it'll just be the right hand with respect to the left hand now so I showed you the general division system between the right and the left hand already to some level first off we had semi quavers semi quavers then triplets one two semi quavers one okay so that's your division system so you can divide by two you can divide by four you can divide by three I'm not going to divide by two maybe we'll do it later but let's start with the notion of dividing by four and let's take the same semi quaver idea we are saying one e and a two e and a three e and a four e and a one e and a two so this is dividing by four but playing a set of four notes and that set is you could argue subjective because all human beings could value a set differently a set of data but this is made very obvious because of the physics of what's going on that is pitch is changing in a very periodic way it's low higher higher highest or even if it was highest lower even the lowest that also sets up a mental pattern of four groups of notes right one two three four one two three four one so the whole idea in this lesson is to break that notion go against the the mind's natural response but continue in the same world of beat division so I'm going to keep dividing by four one e and a two e and a three e and a four e but I'm going to phrase it differently so we use the word phrase we use the word accent grouping I'm just using the word sets of something so you're dividing by four and in this explanation divide by four and sets of four so there's division of four and a musical performance which is a set of four notes now I want to do divide by four and set of three and that's going to start sounding really cool check this out so if I do one two three one two three one two three one two three one two three in my mind actually and the maths behind all this is one e and a two e I'm still doing a takadimmi dividing by four but now I package it physically on the piano as in threes one two three or you could keep that let me just take cfb flat which is an obvious visual set of three as you can all see but I'm not doing it in triplets I'm not doing that's triplets right I'm doing one e and a one e and a but now keeping that same speed or that same rate of flow and doing three one two three so you could argue you can even count one two three one two three one two three one two three one two three one two three one two three one two three one two and it takes a long time to resolve you need to go back to your fifth or sixth grade maths class and learn up lcm and hcf least common multiple and all of those sort of things to actually understand what's going on or when the two hands actually recycle which is a very interesting fact because if you do three meets five then you need to know the end result where it is 15 three fives are 15 right so one two I could even say but the beat division continues to stay the same and this also is a little bit of a tester for music notation because how do you notate this in an inspiring way for a reader in classical music I guess this the concept of sets sets grouping accents was not so much there but you could still go ahead and put the accent sign but the grouping is usually in force in classical music so at least for me personally it's very tough to read certain things with the sheet notation because it's not inspiring at all and it confuses me because I still look at it as a set of four it's a visual set of four an actual sonic set of three and the maths division of four so that's creating a lot of conflict if you ask me so I would say pause on the reading when you do this lesson you don't need to read too much you just need to play by feel and look at your piano it's one E and your semi quavers but now I take sets of three in the same speed so you want if you want to get this tight with your get it first with your body and say things like one E and a two E and a three and or an easier Indian words now change the takadimi it's very simple takadimi change it to the same speed of takadimi but in the words of takita which is three and automatically your ta becomes a important phenomenon it also creates an interesting polyrhythmic vibe if you ever want to take this into the polyrhythmic world because that's one two three four that's very much of poly so I want to now play it here there we go so what's happening now we've divided by four sets of three and dividing by four sets of four was easy that's what we've been doing throughout the lesson well what about something which maths has to offer which then we have to push ourselves to doing on the instrument divide by four sets of five why not now for sets of five the pinky is sleeping a bit so let's wake the guy up there we go you can add that note with just a simple octave nothing or you can add a D which would make it a nice ninth edition and just keeping it to C for now now one E and a two yeah right one E and a two now check this out making it five I'm saying five for now as it's gonna take a lot of cycles to kind of repeat itself right there we go it's it's a great way to kind of make your arpeggio stand out maybe you can use this as an intro of a song you could use it as the bridge of the song and while your entire band is playing some bass notes you know they could all kind of phrase on those specific accents even though internally these are not quintuplets these are not dividing by five these are sets of five this is a human made set of five what was made by mother nature is how the beats got divided right the maths is dividing time by four you cannot control that that that has been governed by mother nature but what we as humans can then do is to make it subjective and use again the properties of physics which are pitch volume and time or duration to craft it to serve our own brain so to speak so we have sets of three possibility I showed you sets of four sets of five you also have the trivial set of two which could also work a bit boring because it's it's anyway dividing by four and two is an even number but if you think about it makes the performance a lot less lazier than this if I now do sets of two here we go and just to conclude the lesson let's flip the whole process around I don't want to divide by four rather I would like to divide by three so let's start with usual good old triplets now I want to do this but have a set in my mind this is sets of three dividing by three normal I guess we've already done this what if we do sets of four and dividing by three one so first say the division and now going one but in my mind we're going we're dividing by three actually right the triplet triplet triplet so I start starting again with triplet now giving myself a set so it'll take three cycles to recycle again to get the number of cycles it would take you use the LCM of the two numbers so if you take three and four LCM three fours are 12 or 12 multiplies both those numbers right multiplies three as well as four there we go now I've become a maths teacher maybe you should invite people here to learn some maths let's go for it so you go one two three one two three one two three four one two three four one two three four one two three four and then of course you have all sorts of other phenomenon you can do dividing by three but sets of two one two three one two three rather two congested so let's do sets of five while dividing by three so that would be again we pull out our pinky so you'll get one two three one two three one two three but with that five feel and why not start with the pinky all through the lesson I've been going up why can't we go down one two three four five one two three four five one two three four five one two three four five there we go other chords the challenge will now be to play each of these chords four times you should remember that or the first chord four times the second chord two times and the third chord two times as we said you almost don't care when they resolve whether if they are well they will resolve mathematically but you don't need to care because you're already in the division world as well as the set world almost together it's almost like you've split your brain into two or you are two people thinking together so to speak so the piano is a is a freak of an instrument if you think about it if ever I were to compare this with anything I would compare it with a drum kit I could not compare it with anything else which I can think of at least so have fun with the exercise and just to recap we've done some voicing in part a and in part b we have done all this sets grouping accents and we've done beat division as well so hopefully you find this useful have fun practicing it and I have an instagram channel as well you can record your work and send it you can tag me and I'll be happy to to share it and listen to it and so on and if you're a patron you can also chat with me send me your assignments you can check out the tires we have and also receive the notes as part of your subscription you'll receive all of the notes for this lesson you also receive midi tracks you receive backing tracks and a ton more right guys thanks a ton for watching the video I will catch you in the next one cheers