 everyone. This is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music and I have for you five pieces of piano advice for the new year and whichever new year it's going to be with when you're watching this, this is generally five good pieces of advice which people have told me and I have ended up telling myself over a few years of me exploring this amazing field of music. So I'm just gonna get cracking with this and these are just some reality checks you can you probably have some goals for the new year like I want to learn this on the piano I want to go to this school or I want to buy this book or I want to do this course and all that or you may have your own personalized goals or someone you know has given you stuff which they want you to do so hopefully this lesson can put all these things into perspective before we get cracking it'll be awesome if you could give that video a thumbs up and hit the subscribe button it'll be great and again thanks for all your support for our YouTube channel all of the subscribers all of you subscribers out there and let's get rolling. So my first piece of advice for you would be to work on your left hand chops. Generally speaking whenever we work on our piano training or learning songs or improvising or composing what ends up happening is the left hand ends up being very templated or very pattern like so if you take you know a rhythm like this this has a specific groove one e a cut two e and a three and a four e and a specific hit points right one e and a two so that the thing here is if you get that pattern or if you get that chop as we call it which is the way I'm playing the chord or the way I'm voicing the chord number one in this case one five and ten which is the minor third played up top so if you learn that voicing over a few chords of a chord progression right stuff like that stuff like this basically triads is what I'm doing so I'm playing them in this spread shape or this spread position and then of course trying to develop a rhythm pattern around that so there's a lot of activity being developed in my left hand there's first of all the way I'm voicing the chord which is spread and then the way I'm rhythmically performing the chord which I'm not doing you know I'm not just doing crotchets or quarter notes I'm doing a groove in this case we call this the thresio so you keep that pumping and now you may think what do I do around that you know well you can do anything in the right hand you can just hold down chords change your chords of course but the left hands creating that energy now the right hand is adding some harmonic flavor and so on and so forth but you can do so much more in the right hand if you can kind of free your mind from the left hand you know so while you're doing this this has to be like an autopilot mode you know right for instance right now I'm talking to you while doing this particular activity in the left so that kind of means this is not occupying a lot of my conscious brain and my focus is going to exclusively be on the right hand so the advice is a bit weird my advice is focus on your left hand with the hope that you start forgetting the left hand and you start actually focusing on the right hand and the way I see it I don't think we can think of two tasks exactly at the same point of time consciously at least we'll have to make something subconscious and then do the conscious thing you know like any day-to-day task if you if you just think about it right so get your left hand chops because the left hand is going to repeat itself for so many so many scenarios like if you want to improvise on the blues for example or if you want to play maybe a famous tune or maybe a nursery rhyme or if you want to change an existing tune apologies to those of you who like for at least I do too but sorry anyway work on your left hand chops it's really important because it'll free up your mind your right hand is generally the creative hand whatever you want to do is generally coming out in the right hand of the piano and if we compare this with other instruments it's no different if you think about the guitar if you if your right hand is clean if you develop a very engine like right hand if you're a right hander of course you can focus a lot on your left hand which I call like the driver or the steering wheel of the guitar whatever you use on the frets right same thing for the bass same thing for the violin it's about getting your engine as I call it right so we could consider this as an engine so whatever pattern you're working on let's say you you have a pattern which is as simple as this arpeggio try to milk this for all its worth even though you're playing a simple melody don't only play that melody you know do all sorts of things around that arpeggio try to make that the pivotal point and I also call this the bottom-up approach of piano learning which I keep telling students because most of the especially the children's books out there and the exam oriented books out there what tends to happen is they'll start you off on a very feel good process by getting you to play a melody the melody will be only on white notes and a lot of you who watch the channel regularly know how much I this C major so I do that only to encourage you to focus on other keys and other scales and explore that the two kinds of keys which are the whites and the blacks now most of these children's books or you know exam pieces and stuff focus exclusively on the right hand and people almost forget the left hand that and sometimes you have this whole keyboard way of learning so the way in India we are taught we have the piano way where you learn generally learn classical music through sheets or you have the keyboard way where it's only the right hand which kind of does it all and the left hand does some horrific things it basically pushes buttons to produce drum beats and other such things which a real drummer could do so you're actually destroying the point of playing the piano and ruining another guy's profession or a kid who wants to be a drummer will see a keyboard player pushing these ridiculous buttons and think that you know they why drum when some random guy is just hitting buttons and getting some random beats out of it so my advice to you is focus on your left hand and the left hand and the right hand when you play them together it's sort of like walking on two feet it balances your body and you need to put in the same amount of effort for both hands when you play so the bottom up strategy which I generally tell students is start with the foundation start with what is making the audience move it could be a pulse it could be a chord progression it could be the foundation of the music and what comes last always do the catchiest thing or the coolest thing last generally speaking the catchiest thing in a song which you play on the piano is the melody so it's a nice strategy to bring that melody in last because you then invested time learning proper chords and rhythm patterns which may not be to your liking initially but then you realize that you've created a product you've created a template which can be used for a variety of pieces variety of compositions you make variety of songs which you're learning from different ages so that is advice number one you need to work on your left hand and work on your left hand chop so focus on playing chords correctly in the right way the right inversions and also with the right rhythm patterns which you want to do over the new moving forward so another thing I'd like to suggest this is more for those of you who are doing you know classical music and other such things don't think that if you do piano through sheet music or sheet reading it's going to allow you to play your favorite songs you know your your contemporary dance hits or your you know salsa songs or rock songs or pop songs of today so the skill to play classical music yes is definitely going to improve your technique it's going to for sure improve your reading but it's not going to get you to be affluent with timing and understanding of groove so you need to start focusing on your groove and focus if ever you're learning rhythms on the piano try to make it a conscious effort to learn dance rhythms so that that would be advice number two you know things like stuff like that now you may be thinking okay that's not my cup of tea I don't like dance music I like more of the soothing ballads and so on but it's these dance rhythms and dance progressions in general which honestly even I don't like I don't like the chord progressions used in dance music for the most part but I like the rhythms the rhythms are really good and the piano the way I look at it is it's like a drum if ever you would compare the piano to anything I would compare it with a drum or a tabla or a any percussion instrument focus on your rhythmic chops your dance rhythms in specific and that will really help you understand subdivisions and develop syncopation between your hands if you want to get your two hands working like you need a context so dance music gives you the context if you just do walls patterns or just just patterns like that you know it's not going to push or elevate your knowledge to play rhythmic stuff and playing dance music gets you to understand subdivisions all the quavers and the semi quavers the dotted notes the rest in between them just playing things like you know just endless 16th notes you know right now it's it's almost brainless what I'm doing right now it's just my muscle strength or my skill my finger ability to do that but I can easily talk to you and it's not really a big deal where the brain comes into play is where you start subdividing and divide and play less so things like see that was a lot tougher for me to do then then that is really easy to do if you ask me right compared to what I did earlier so rhythmic subdivisions learn them and apply it with a lot of dance rhythms which I'm sure some of you are doing already I'm sure you love these songs these dance songs and if you want to stay current with music going forward you know in in the next years to come well you have to make learn how to play a variety of music and more so a lot of our listeners general music listeners appreciate music which gets their body to move so if you're stuck in a kind of a classical shell learning music which is just to improve your technique or great harmony or great melody I would encourage you to focus on your rhythm don't don't avoid anything be open to different kinds of music and now for advice number three this is a very important thing which I find piano players missing out especially again classical players kids and so on learn the blues you have to learn the blues whether you're a you know death metal musician or a Hindustani classically trained musician doesn't matter you need to learn what we call as these roots genres so start off with our YouTube channel there are a lot of videos in the description we have a series of how to play and not only play also sing the blues while you play so focus a lot on the blues it can be very helpful so get first of all you need to understand that 12 bar blues form that's one into four that's the four chord and then back to back to one and then the five four one it helps you to understand song writing form helps you to understand well poetry as well because that's how a lot of our lyrics are written look at the blues it's a great writing structure and it's been around for generations almost everyone play the blues and have learnt a lot from it doing so so invest a lot of time into the blues listen to a lot of blues listen to artists like BB King John Mayer Eric Clapton and so on and so forth go to Spotify find some blues playlists out there it's a simple chord progression 12 bars but the feeling in which they played that's something which cannot be described in words so you also need to feel music when you play it right you you're not supposed to just see a sheet music or do what someone tells you to do you it's an art form so you need to try and feel it moving forward to advice point number four right so this is a general musical piece of advice there are three I would say pillars of music theory year training and execution or technique theory is knowledge it's knowing and just knowing and knowing and knowing knowing the rules knowing what our great musicians of the past have done and maybe what they have not done and then someone else has done so it's like an adventure so it's always entertaining to learn new things and discover new things it's like watching you know a national geographic channel or something like that you know year training on the other hand can get a bit daunting and a bit mystical or mysterious for a for a person because there's no book to study it the only thing for year training is you and the song or you and the music which you're faced with and there are many ways of or things you need to do with your training you have to train your melodic here so if someone plays you know like a you need to figure out a way to know what happened gb flat a g f d c d c d f c d e flat f g a b flat c d a c b flat a g f sharp or if you're in the karnatic or the Hindustani world and you use swara as well a sa pa ma gare sa nisa stuff like that you need to know your intervals so if you're faced with a melody these are things you need to work on you don't have to call it piano playing a brand your entire life as a musician as being a pianist that i think is also a wrong thing try to think i'm a musician first and i happen to be able to play music with a piano because in one lifetime it's not very easy for one to to pursue many instruments very few do it i'm not discouraging you but it's it's damn tough so considering or assuming your focus is the piano try to invest the time yes and playing it but remember piano is an extension of your musicality so whatever is in your head you need to bring out through this instrument so you need to control the piano in a sense okay it's an extension of your voice sometimes i tell piano students in class i'm i choose sometimes not to sing but i can sing through the piano so the piano is like my voice it's so easy to just sing we have our voice right here it's not so easy to play the piano because it's away from us but that is the job that's what we try to do over the years of practice right so ear training is you know a little bit of a mystery but i would really encourage you to start slow work on your intervals work on your timing work on understanding rhythm that is also very much ear training ear training is not just saying can you please tell me what is the name of that note you know g e flat c a flat you know that is not ear training only and to be honest it's what we call absolute pitch some people tend to have it because as kids they kind of are forced or they start music lessons at a very early age and as we all know children can figure things out a lot faster it's probably like how we learn the names of colors in our school we learned it as kids i don't know what that would be uh how that would be if we learned colors now as maybe an adult if you're an adult watching this it's the same thing with maybe even languages we learn most of our languages as kids it kind of comes into us a lot better so perfect pitch is not something you need to strive for look at relative pitch which is the gaps between notes focus on chords focus on chord progressions focus on you know the circle of fifths focus on rhythm and subdivisions and reading rhythms you have a piece of music with some rhythms in front of you and just like try to clap it out try to clap rhythms that is also ear training now there's theory versus ear training versus playing now i said that in the beginning don't obsess about any of those three you want to always be very free about these three pillars of music because they can kind of obviously you can't take any of them for granted but you you can't over obsess over any of them you can't just say oh i'm a i i suck at music i can barely hear anything well so what if you can't if you think your ears are bad you can still play quite well you could still probably know all your scales your major your minor maybe your interval so it's just something we need to work on and we have to see what we are not so good at and what we need to get better at i guess and again for classically trained people sometimes we tend to obsess about the theory and some musicians tend to believe and some teachers tend to believe that music theory is the ability to read the music symbolic language which is staff notation or whatever it may be some form of notation i don't think that's music notation that's music reading for it's the word reading is there for a reason site reading music theory is just knowing your data off the top like what is the sixth from g and there are two kinds of six there's major six and there's a minor sixth right so music theory the one problem with it is it could become very adventurous it's sort of like you know a football game where you know you watch a game you're not really a footballer but you're a huge huge football fan so you watch it with all your friends and everyone has a great opinion about what could have happened in that moment of maybe some goal being tried or shot at or whatever but then you realize at the end of the day you have a reality check that you know what that person did was at the moment at the spur of the moment with a hell of a lot of pressure and only he or she can do that can do that particular activity so i would think music theory shouldn't be become like that because if you get too much into it then you don't become a performer you don't be the guy who's going to go on stage and i know a lot of friends a lot of great musicians who actually don't know theory like they don't know the chords of the C major scale they don't know that the four chord is F major but they can make some timeless songs so theory is not the end all it's not going to make you somewhere it's not going to make you like a film composer what really matters i think you need to have that drive and that passion for embellishing or improving in all these three departments theory your training and playing you need to have the drive and the drive comes from listening to music and just being a music lover not just looking at music as saying i want to do this i want to do that we all love sports and we all look up to someone who's a great sports player and only then do we actually take up that sport or do we want to go to a coaching or whatever we have that aspiration so music should tend to be like that in that in a lot of senses right so balance of theory your training and playing and don't obsess about anything you want a balance of all these three moving forward so the last piece of advice which i have for you moving forward into the new year would be understanding how to practice piano you know you you have exercises you have songs you know all just generally what we do we say okay i want to practice piano today for about an hour what do i do i'll pull out a book the book will have some finger drill maybe have a chord progression or maybe i pull out a song book or one of those fake books where you have the melody and the chords on top and you just play along or you sing you want to accompany now a few things to keep in mind like try to generally if you're calling it music practice think of it again like sports practice you know you're trying to do something or you're trying to be challenged or generally the way i look at practices you try to do something you don't know or something you you at the moment suck it you have no clue about it and it's really really it it's kind of tormenting you it you need to get better at that so my advice to you is when you first play the piano never play something you know always play something you have no clue about so if it's an exercise great let it be a fresh one let it not be just a song because what i tend to feel again i'm not a mind person i don't study the human mind that that often but what i imagine is we have a specific amount of time in a day where we can be very active and very into it very into the field so give that active time you're all like sweat it out mentally if you think about it so if you put on the piano you need to mean business like don't noodle as we sometimes say in the in the business right you need to play with purpose so whenever you're on the piano my suggestion is start by being creative play freely make mistakes do whatever you want like nothing is wrong right or wrong and most importantly like respect your time on your instrument like don't just play piano to play the piano you should play the piano in such a way that nothing should distract you and that takes time that takes discipline and that needs a lot of respect you need to respect your instrument it doesn't you that doesn't mean you need to close the rooms lock the doors or you know curtains or be aloof you can you can play you can you can be around friends you can be in your house your family could be around you the tv could be on doesn't matter but you have to play with purpose and conviction so i would encourage you to start by playing freely just play without too much of thought it's sort of like how i make my riffs which you some of you follow daily on the channel so that generally comes about you know just having about an hour to spend and you try do whatever you can in that hour and there are a lot of hit and misses when you try to create music so you have to understand that one day you may make something useful and the other day it's absolute garbage so you want to get the garbage out you know it's sort of like a pipe so eventually there will be good water flowing through the pipe so to speak so keep trying and don't judge yourself too much as you keep playing the piano if you if you are new at it or if you feel you're a newcomer on the piano then why do you need to bother why do you need to have an opinion just think of it like a sport go out there and hit the ball or kick the ball or whatever and just see what happens and you you just organically get better at it and you'll know when you get better and most of the time when you're good on an instrument when you're when you play music well there's not going to be a way you will know that you're doing it well because music is for others it's a it's an art form and that means we do it for other people so when we gauge their you know body language or their comments or their opinion or their smiles or whatever it may be or their hugs you know that you've done a good job that you know either your family is proud of you or your friends are you know amazed by what you can do or another great feeling would be an absolute stranger who has no clue about who you are comes at the end of the gig and shakes your hand or maybe shares a glass of beer with you or something like that i would also encourage you over the new year don't just play the piano in your house this is the last thing i will say before i end this rant the don't play the piano only in your house and yes i know it feels good but trust me when you play it on stage or when you jam with people it could be a few people in your own house when you jam with these folks it's a much better feeling so find a singer or two in your apartment or in your school or whatever jam with the guitar player form a band within your office colleagues perhaps stuff like that try to work with other people and also for even for people like me i i tend i'm a generally i consider myself a little bit of a lazy person like i need to be motivated by something in order to do it and then motivation doesn't need to make me like enjoy it just has to push me sometimes so if you have a band in a room who come to your rehearsal space or you go somewhere and they give you like three songs to learn you're going to feel really bad if you don't learn those three songs and then the other dudes have learned it very well right and definitely try and play a few concerts a few small shows wherever possible in and around the scene where you're located send us a recording as well we are on instagram i'd love to hear from you guys a lot of you just type things some amazing encouraging things in the comments but it'll be great to hear from you all so do consider leaving us some of your recordings maybe you've done a lot of you have been sending me instagram clips of some of my riffs youtube videos you've been practicing and you're sharing stuff thanks for that but keep them coming keep them coming in the new year and keep going strong and last but not least if you'd like to start off your new year with a bang or with a blast whatever the adjective is you can consider joining our school which is Nathaniel School of Music all you have to do is head over to our website fill up a form and our course advisor will get in touch with you and figure out something which can work for you as a complete beginner or as a season pro perhaps who wants to come back into it or whatever or whatever you'd like to learn thanks a ton guys thanks a ton for your constant support on the channel do keep it coming it means a lot it helps us to keep doing what we do and i wish you and your family a happy new year compliments of the season stay safe and keep rocking cheers