 go we are live so hi hi everyone in this lesson we are going to do a few things a few important things on the piano and in music in general so do stay around and try and follow all of the topics and all of the styles of improvisation which we are going to do let me start with an introduction to the lesson what we are going to learn and again welcome for those of you who are attending the class live thanks for joining in and if you have any questions you can leave them in the chat and similarly anyone who's watching yeah you can leave them in the chat and I'll answer those questions after I'm done with the lesson structure and let's get rolling so today we are going to look at five levels of five methods for improvisation now improvisation is the way I look at it it's more like a quick way to compose music so ultimately you're using the same principles to make songs make tunes make chords rhythm but you're just doing it on the fly and you're trying to do it as spontaneously as possible so with today's style of improv we are going to look at about five things first of all we take the chord tones of a chord progression and see what we can do with that stuff then we shall take how do we connect between those chord tones now that we have a grip over the chord tones so connect the chord tones and then we have options for melody which are more pattern based things so we look at melodic patterns how to build melodic phrases then we look at what I call the anything goes scale or officially known as the pentatonic scale so we look at the pentatonic scale and how to improvise a bit with that and then we look at some organic methods of improvising so improvisation for today's lecture will be melodic and rhythmic but the main goal will be melody so what's going to exist will be a chord progression a tempo some form of time signature or some meter so what will exist again will be the rhythm the structure will be the chord progression and just for today's class I'm going to nominate or just going to pick up one chord progression which I guess we'll all deal with for the chapter so if you have your pianos out do get it out and start playing along with me so you can get acquainted with whatever we are trying to learn so the chord progression I have for you is 1 4 6 and 5 1 4 6 5 quite a decent chord progression so let's do this on the key of F major so just a little bit of the theory F major F G A B flat C D E is your scale and you will have the available chords of the F major scale F major G minor A minor B flat major C major D minor and E diminished right so our target chords are 1 4 then you have your 6 and you have your 5 F B flat D minor and C major so a chord progression generally will come as part of the scale so in other words we call this as a diatonic chord progression so a good start would be to get acquainted with the notes of the chords and try and practice them with the correct inversions so I'm writing down the chords as F A C B flat D F D F A and a quick trick would be if you don't know this you you can basically find the notes of the chords through the scale circle by just playing F skipping one you get the next one skip the next one you get the fifth so generally a chord will have the root the third and the fifth and even when I write the chords I tend to write those also in a circle so it helps with inversions which are to follow inversions are also known as chord shapes so you have F major D flat major then D minor and C major these are your chords now you can play them with relevant inversions like for example if you started with F major F A C instead of going to B flat major all the way here I can go I can just go here I can find the common notes between the chords which in this case if you observe will be F right F is the common note so I can just keep my F either here and not move it so this creates like a wall and I go F A C and then the next chord will be F B flat D F A C F B flat D okay you can try and play that along with me generally in the left hand we play the roots of chords so you can go F in the base and B flat the next chord and then we have to do the next two chords which are D minor and C major so that'll be F A C F major B flat major which I'm inverting and playing it as F B flat D and then D minor I'm gonna play it as F A D because it has that again F in common and a D in common so these outer notes are in common so there we go and then finally you can end with C major which is C E G so F F B flat D F A D also try and sing it along that'll help F A now for this lesson we are going to play all the chords in the left hand so whatever you do here you need to now practice here now you can start with F A C or you could start with A C F or you could start with C F A these are the three shapes or the piano shapes of the F major chord I'm sure if you know your inversions these are the shapes F A C A C F C F A now if you feel it's going too high on the left hand and eating into what the right hand will do then you could play the chords here you may not want to play it so low I think that sounds very annoying and quite muddy so may not be there so here would be good so those are about your chords so this is the chord progression we are going to use I've talked about the respective inversions how you can move from one chord to the other and if you need more help in inversions there's always our YouTube channel which you could check out and we've covered a lot of these concepts in great detail so with our inversion studies or our inversion chapters you have you know a lot of exercises right hand inversions left hand inversions and you can go to YouTube there's a playlist called chord inversion so do check that out chord inversions are essentially easy ways to fit between the chord notes or the chords in general okay so now coming to the the job at hand we are going to improvise a melody in the right hand in five different ways as I told you at the introduction and the left hand let's just get acquainted with a few patterns like one way you could play your chords is using blocks like this stuff do this a couple of times with me if you wish if you like to start your F major shapes from here feel free whatever works whatever gets the chords nicely unified together in one area of the keyboard the other thing you can try are some easy arpeggios check this one out this I think is cool because I'm playing some random chords but let's follow the progression which is mentioned there F major B flat major try and play along with me guys D minor C major the arpeggio I'm doing is L low note H high note middle note and high note so H M H H B flat along with me C major this is all left hand even build the arpeggio by adding an octave here maybe another nice pattern which I like to do if I'm swinging the song would be a broken outside inside pattern which is quite like this pattern especially when I'm playing bluesy stuff okay it's swinging and we count it as one and two and three and four and one and two and if you're well versed with spread voicings of chords that means fifth and the upper third you may need a sustained pedal for this if you're well versed with this you can go F major B flat major D minor C major the spread voicing allows you to go deeper in the piano B flat it's a fair stretch so use your pedal lift your hand and then jump and spread and so on and so forth you can do a lot of stuff you can just create your own arpeggio patterns if you know the lesson is not so much about the left hand it's more about holding the left hand with some stuff in the right hand and a few concepts of improvisation along the way so now let's look at the right hand I hope the left hand is sorted with all the available patterns which you might have again you can do blocks you can do arpeggios you can do you can do swing stuff you can do whatever you want the right hand is now going to have some fun so let's look at the methods of improvising or the methods of improvisation the first thing you can consider is just sticking with chord tones and you ideally need to play with me as I'm talking through so the chord tones of each chord now if you let's go back to the progression F major B flat major D minor and C so if I say F major B flat major D minor and C major I'm gonna try and write down the roots the thirds and the fifths of each of these respective chords okay each chord will have a root for an instance F major its root is F its third is A its fifth is C so the chords are going to have the roots the thirds and the fifths the root of F major is F the root of B flat major is B flat root of D minor is D and the root of C major is C and the thirds A D F E then the fifth will be C F A and G there we have it so now you have some kind of a plan to improvise so in the in the right hand when you improvise you could just start with whole notes or just semi-brieves of chord tones and just see how that goes because the the thing about improvisation is you have to be realistic on the piano it's not something like where you know if there's an idea in your head you can just immediately play the piano is a technically challenging instrument as we all know and it is technically challenging because the idea in your head you may actually be able to play it but then you can't play it with the left hand so then you have to either simplify the left hand or simplify the right hand so you have to have that reality check in that sense so if you take let's say simple block chords in my left hand and maybe I play them four times or so I guess so you can go this one then the right hand can go start off with the roots of each chord so I'm going root of F is F root of B flat is B flat root of D minor is D root of C major is C so let's do that together I'm gonna slow this down roots of all the chords keep going if you get bored with the left hand pattern you can maybe up edged it C quite melodic but may not be as interesting as what it could be so then you could do the thirds of each chord which are written here let's do the thirds it's quite a melody we are building it's just rather simple but it's not too bad if you ask me in fact if you play that melody let's say with octaves it'll sound quite full I imagine a violin playing this we've covered the roots of each of the chords that's awesome we have covered the thirds of each of the chords and what's remaining the fifths of each of the chords let's see how that goes the fifth of F I've written all the stuff in this row the fifths of each chord so okay now what you can do now that you have these are what we call as landing notes so we can start jumbling these landing notes like you don't have to do root to root to root to root it can be root to third to fifth to root okay now that I said that I have to do that so let's see so root of the fourth chord okay so just awareness of each of the chord tones is a stepping stone in a very good or in the right direction towards improvisation so be aware like at any given point even if you have to play a simple old semi-brief or a whole note you need to know what is its role in that chord is the root of the chord is it the third is the fifth now I know improv can happen with fancier chords like 7s and 9s and whatnot but this is a start I think this will be quite a challenge if you haven't done it yet or haven't done it enough so I'm just going to fool around with chord tones and as I fool around I realize that there's a wide jump like a so I can probably go from A to D visualizing that this is a source and this is a destination and saying to myself maybe I want to climb via a ladder and I call this the scale ladder or a diatonic ladder so you can go okay so that's F major with A as my anchor or chord tone B flat major to its third and then land on the third okay so let's say I just want to do thirds of each chord third of the B flat eventually land on the third always third I quite like that the in-between stuff the in-between notes you add is just pretty much up to you they are just random sketches or just random patterns or maybe it's not so random you just go and then I'm just laddering up to B flat just think of it as a ladder down ladder get used to that so you have a landing and you have a passing set of notes so I hope that distinction is clear a landing note is usually a chord note or a chord tone it lasts a lot longer and in your improvisational journey start with the landing and get really used to the landing notes as best as possible and once you get used to the landing notes you can then connect the landing notes with the passing notes okay so I have a couple more styles of improvisation which I think before we sign off for today's lesson another thing which I like to do very often is look at simple melodic patterns so if you take just two patterns for now just think about it over the week or so of practice if you take an F major chord let's say you start on the F one nice melodic pattern would just be a set of three notes like that now the set of three notes can either be played going up or going down but it all started on F or it all ended on F the chord tone right now you can do you can mess with the rhythm you don't have to do tongue tongue tongue tongue tongue tongue it can be and now if you want to start from the A that'll also be cool do that for fun see where did I start my improvisation I started on A which is the third note of the chord right and that is allowing me to just take a set of three notes and just go up and down with it and it's your job to make a nice rhythm out of that set of three notes so doing the same thing over the chord progression isn't it which we discussed at the beginning of the lesson as F major B flat major D minor and C major again I will I will request you to play along with me so let's say you do that lick and you need to do that on all the chords so change with me change now start on the thirds of the chord that's a simple melodic pattern created using three notes you can even do thirds so if you take F build a melodic pattern just using F and it's third then then this one and then this one that's third third of each chord by the way imagine if you had one pattern for the thirds and one pattern for the groups of threes that will be it pretty much that's this that's the tune you've composed so so I did threes and thirds for every alternating chord then with a little trill that could work so it's just that idea you know take three notes then take a third put it together and I think you can create some fair music again it boils down to the fact that you need to know your chord tones when you're improvising especially for I guess western music or the style of music which involves chords so that was how we look at melodic patterns very good directionally very good to create catchy stuff and so on so I'd also like to talk about a very interesting scale not a interesting scale you could probably call it like a like a cheesy scale or the anything goes scale we call it the pentatonic scale and it's a five-note scale I'll just show you the notes so we are on the key of F major so if it's major a major pentatonic will work great now how a pentatonic will work is it's 1 2 3 5 6 octave so this is an anything goes scale in the sense it tends to work with every single diatonic chord progression you throw at it or if you use this over any diatonic chord progression it tends to sound really nice so just let's take it for a test drive you have okay now let's do it with the other chords pretty much all that I played now was on the pentatonic scale and you can get quite carried away with it to be honest because it sounds good with every single chord including that diminished chord you know put that works with every single chord of the of the scale so so far we've looked at improvising using the existing chord tones of the chord progression then we looked at connecting between the chord tones we are passing tones in a ladder like approach or in a zigzag random approach if you wish then we looked at creating tiny melodic patterns like groups of three or third intervals we also looked at the pentatonic scale currently the major pentatonic is in motion because of the major scale being used if this was a minor chord progression then the minor scale would minor pentatonic would be used which is so the last thing I'd like to say before I sign off would be how you can try and do all so far I've given you some principles which are feel a bit too mathematical I guess for your liking you may be thinking hey improv is just about being in the moment and just playing whatever you feel like right well the honest truth is you need to first develop your skills you need to know your chord tones and you need to learn how to change them at will and then you will start thinking more freely or I would say organically so the last two tips I leave with you for this lesson would be how you can organically improvise so the first thing you do is you play only the left hand so I'm going back to the progression only the left hand and just sing whatever you want like now your job is as you keep singing that it registers in your mind somehow figure out how to play that now so just for fun I'm just going to do a kind of a call and response activity so as you watching the lesson try and do it along with me you can even see the notes but then I'm going to sing so you won't actually see the notes you'll see it eventually so you could watch the video later that would help now so let's see how it goes okay simple stuff try try and copy whatever I'm singing and let's play it on the piano together so two bars of me singing and then two bars of you playing that stuff it may even be one bar let's see how it goes okay same chord progression if you're having a problem playing all the four chords it's okay just play the first chord F major no problem so do that so I'm just choosing a simple old arpeggio so I'm gonna sing some stuff okay now only you okay new one play that so quite easy I think okay now if you came up with this idea on your own you know which I encourage you to do try and play with it maybe change the last note see some notes just sound really bad so play around some will sound good some will sound bad let's just go forward with just a few more fun just call and response things so come on you have to play it in time with me with your left hand exactly okay so just try those call and response exercises either for homework by watching the lesson and so on and so forth so it's very important to practice improvisation even though I did talk about a lot of the standard stuff like theory chord tones pentatonic scales passing and landing tones but the bottom line is you have to learn how to do it organically I would also agree that doing it organically comes from practice you need to know your scale you need to know the fingering around the scale but yeah try and do it eventually you should practice so well or so hard that whatever you play at least in the right hand will be very organic organic meaning naturally created you have done it like there's no like everything is spontaneous it just happens and that I guess is called improvisation where you have a lot of things in the head which you've practiced really hard and at the spur of the moment because you've practiced it so hard it just happens it just comes out and I'm sure that's the same with any walk of any any field we would do you could theoretically improvise doing anything would you do be an have a cooking improvisation you could have improvisation in sports you could have improvisation in designing some fashion gear or whatever so any any walk of life can be improvised but I'm sure you'll agree in order to improvise you'd have to know the ground roots or the rules of what you're doing you don't want to leave the scale you don't want your fingers to run away or you don't want to have no clue about the piano before you start you know treating it as part of you so a good way to also look at improv is when you do play the piano it's an extension of your voice it's almost like you're singing through this instrument and if you can feel that way well hats off to you you would have worked really hard and the reward will come as you create these things spontaneously so that's about it guys I'd like to leave you with a few final words of advice transcription is very important if you come up with an idea try to write it down don't lose the idea you could also record it on a phone and then kind of bring it out later maybe you thought it was worthless to begin with but when you hear it back the next morning you really love it so use your phone or a recording device like an ipad or a anything a microphone if you have and try to record it and also understand the importance of simplicity and having a reality check of what you can do doing something simple is great because the end listener doesn't care about the flurry notes and the fancy chords and speed at which you play they want to remember and feel an emotion or feel something while you play the piano or compose your music so simplicity and having also a reality check of what you can and cannot do at the current moment so if you're not able to do it well you need to go back to the drawing board and then come back right so also I'd like to say that it's very important to play what you want you know and not what you can play you know technically you can play something but you should play what ideally what you want you should play what's in your head or what comes out of you that's what you should play you should not play what you can play at the time because then you're using the piano as just a tool you know and that's about it guys so for the youtube audience thanks so much for watching you can also join us on our members only portal thanks a lot for watching thanks to all of you who've joined on youtube just to give you an idea of what's going on this is a live lesson wherein there are students in the class with me which is quite cool so it makes me feel a lot energized as a teacher otherwise I'll just be looking at a camera lens which is really weird so thanks a lot to everyone who joined in especially the youtubers who I'm going to leave you with now and what generally happens in our live streams is we take it to a private portal where all the students can join in with me and if you guys have any questions regarding whatever you just learned now or any questions in general which you'd like to ask you can do so now so thanks a ton we'll now go into a q&a and for those of you watching on youtube do consider being a patron on patreon.com slash jason zack that will help support our channel with whatever we do recording in progress and help us move forward from strength to strength and try and create better content for the channel so you could and if you're watching this video 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