 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, I'm going to talk about grace notes, mordents, apogiaturas, turns, all these terminologies used to basically do one thing, to enhance a melody on a piano, to make a note sing out a lot better and to compete or try to compete with other way more powerful instruments than the piano, at least in terms of melody, namely the violin, the flute, the trumpet and obviously the human voice. So for us to kind of match up with these superpower melody creators, it's not really going to be easy and we can only try and learn and most of the techniques which I'm here to tell you are just trying to be inspired or trying to gain some aspect of what the vocals do or what a guitar player would do or what a sliding violin player would do with no bounds between a note. A violin can slide from one note to the other, which is incredible. So even though I'm going to be, it's obviously a piano lesson, we also would encourage you to listen to the ornamentation created by all these other musicians who play other instruments like violin and well even an accordion, a vina, a sitar, whatever it may be or a synthesizer just to kind of know what your goal would be. So then when I'm talking about this stuff, it doesn't seem alien and you're just not doing what I'm telling you, you're doing it because it can sound like a flute or it can sound like a violin. So to explain this I figured let's just take a simple melody, let's figure out the melody. It's a three by four melody which goes it's basically on G minor, two flats. So it goes that's your first trio, E flat D C then cross your hand B flat A G and then repeat the G F E flat and then land on a tonic G minor or you could even land on its relative major. So the chords for this are C minor G minor E flat major end on B flat or G minor. So all I'm going to do throughout this lesson is to now build that melody and try to do all sorts of techniques which actually simulate a variety of genres, a variety of generations of music if you will and yeah genres, cultures and whatnot. So we are going to use all these techniques with the same old melody. You may want to get used to that melody first and then dive in and don't forget to watch till the end. We have a lot of different techniques lined up and each of these techniques are going to help you somewhere down the line with some melody to ornament it or add this embellishment or this articulation which it really really needs on an instrument like a piano like I said which is a very what you see is what you get instrument. It's you play the thing or you don't play the thing you know you played loud or you played soft. There's nothing in between it it's just as you can see black or white if you think about it. So before we get started guys it'll be awesome if you can hit that subscribe button if you haven't already the bell icon for notifications give the video a like leave us a comment with what you taught about the lesson or what you'd like to learn next it'll be awesome for us to curate new content as we've been doing quite consistently on our YouTube channel. The notes for this entire lesson will be available on our Patreon you could consider checking that out along with a few of the articulations as well. Let's get cracking. So the first thing you'd like to do with your melody is figure out which are the beats you want to emphasize. So if you want to emphasize the one of every bar of three which is usually the case. So generally people will play the one of every bar of three or every bar of four slightly louder but instead of playing it louder you could do a certain ornamentation to the note to that note which is on the one. So don't do it with all the notes only on the one. So what's all at the one E flat B flat G D. So target those notes and the first thing you can do are these grace notes which are slides. There we go. Then another slide again and in this lesson everything's going to be like an overkill. So if I tell you grace notes or these sliding things I'm going to use it for everything at the one. So usually at the strong beat is where we are going to ornament or articulate the melody. Now a few things to be a bit careful of. One is you don't want to use your pedal during the slide. The lower you go it sounds more and more cluttered up you know because you are sustaining both notes. So once you have landed at the E flat and have lifted your finger away from the grace note you don't want to do. You don't want to hang on to the ghost note. I also call it a ghost note quite often. So you don't want to hang on to that. It sounds like a minor second which is like a horror movie if you ask me. So be a bit careful. You don't want to do it. You don't want that effect. So it's like a carom board kind of game. You flick and you recoil the other finger. So get that with the pedal. Be careful. So lift it at the sliding point. Bring it back. Practice. Till you get used to that just play either the roots of the chords or root with fifth. This is that fifth. So this is a very nice way. It's an age old way to ornament a melody but you could also do something a little I would say more Eastern or more Indian or Arabic in nature where you go. The same kind of principle but instead of going from low to high in terms of the grace note or the ghost you go. I'm trying to sing it to some level to give you an idea. And watch out while doing all this stuff. You may have an issue with timing. So keep your timing consistent. Move your head for the pulse or use a metronome if you're comfortable with that and don't lose your timing over this stuff. So that's like your Eastern vibe where you go top to bottom. While the other vibe where you go bottom to top which is more classical or Western or bluesy. Now you can't really play genres like blues and jazz without this right. Especially with that lick. If you take the blues scale of course I'm just going a bit off topic here but you can go between G and F you have that blue note or the tritone F sharp. So you could go just slide down or and for some slides or for some grace notes you can just use the same finger if it's black to white but you need to also practice white to black or black to black or you need to do it finger to finger. You're not always going to get lucky and do black to white slide. So a black to white slide you can just use one finger and get away and coming back to our tune versus it really adds that vibe back to the tune so on. So that's what you could call as a grace note or a ghost note or just a slide between one note to the other. That's a very very important ornamentation which you can do with your notes. So extend this principle slightly further what people do with country music with blues music in particular instead of doing this with just the glide we do it with an upper third and that thickens that sound. Remember what I've been telling you from the beginning. We are trying to target the ornamentation or the embellishment primarily to the one of the bar. We are nominating the strong beat E flat B flat G D and now we're thickening up doing something colorful. First we did just the slide now we're doing when you land on the E flat you're supposed to add its upper third and similarly the upper thirds of everything and you want to go diatonic you don't want to. Sounds quite interesting but don't go out of the scale which in this case is G minor natural minor also derived from the B flat relative major. So you go that's an upper third. Remember when you do the flick or the recoil action this finger has to leave it has to go away and these two will be whacked together. There we go again you need to practice it or try to practice it with all your finger combinations because you don't know which one will actually happen. Coming. There we go. Here I can't play the pinky so again an overkill of all of them which is this is very iconic to certain genres like if you think of country music Nora Jones comes to mind you know a lot of great country piano players do this technique it's essentially your melody target glide to it but stack up a third. So again coming back to our melody again. Another thing you can do obviously on a piano which you can't really do with other instruments is look at the melody and embellish it with the chords of the chord progression. So if you take let's say a C minor I'm voicing it such that C minor is there in the chord but it's inverted so that the top note E flat is is prominent so I don't lose the melody let me demonstrate check that out so every strong beat is played with a chord but the remaining notes are just played melodically a little bit of finger independence to work on because I whack it together and then do these independently and I could hold the other two down then lift your hand you could even use the pedal you need the pedal because there won't be a connection could also use another note of the chord to kind of waver a bit and now and another way I play these chords I played in this sort of a motion in a flamenco motion I call it very similar to playing tra you know to a chord on the guitar you either flam it like this you call it flamming flam it like that or you can even flam it from the left to right you go all the way like so get that very nice flamenco sound again so don't go try to do flam it makes the melody a lot more beautiful so that's what you could call as chord ornamentation or chord embellishment it anyway sound good because the chord is the same chord you're playing another very obvious thing you can do is just play the melody with octaves you know instead of going you can go just play the whole thing with octaves especially if you can figure out a way to play your chords in the left hand sounds really good even with the pedal and along with the octaves you could add thirds to the octave so that's e-flat add your third there so it's a very nice tenor layer you need to map out your thirds so octaves octaves with thirds very thick and quite professional sounding if you ask me yeah so the last ornamentation which I have for you are called turns or I guess in some classical understandings they are called as apogiaturas and so on again I'm not going to be the best judge of the names of all these things but I will be sure to teach it to you very well so you have the turns which go like this so what did I do their turn is like this way and that way you're going both directions of the target so so let's say I want to land on I want to ornament C so what do I do the journey of D to C can be ornamented can be colored with you can do an overkill there there or you could ornament D flat you want to go this up and then now if you're landing on the D D just for fun so again when it's longer you can do a lot more so you can even combine some of the techniques learned earlier but for now you do that or you either you either do the turn at the D flat or at the D or you have two options without anything from there from here then or from here or from here and then from here or now you could do this is diatonic but you could also do you have this also so if you add like this if you make it very prominent for the listener it'll sound really annoying but if you slowly bring it in like a ghost note without them hearing it too much it'll sound really awesome so there end with a whatever you can fill up there to add to this turn technique remember what I taught you earlier with the grace notes and adding that G at the top the upper third you can do the same thing with turns beautiful I think we've come a long way from okay so let's just recap whatever we've done guys so far in the lesson and I hope that you'll use these ornamentations not only for this lesson with this melody but you can now pick and choose because I've talked about so many options so you can pick and choose which genre which style what mood you'd like to convey to the audience because the ornamentations really affect the mood of the melody and the general overall objective or the purpose of your song so let's just recap everything and then wind up the lesson so first off we did just simple glides from the bottom or from the from the top then we looked at it with the thirds then we looked at simple octaves with the thirds which was also look at chord embellishments with a flam very rich last but not least we looked at turns of course you don't want to overdo this if your melody demands it if you feel that yes you can make some more juice out of the whole thing by all means try out these ornamentations which people use for pretty much every genre whether it's classical music blues jazz bollywood stuff hindustani stuff whatever it may be almost everyone tends to use the same embellishments and understand very importantly that the piano is a very limited instrument melodically it's not going to defeat even with all this I don't think you'll be able to defeat a violin player who plays good or a flottist who plays with all the expression which they've been trained because those are exclusive melodic instruments you can't you can't beat them they've been around enough and more so you you you just learn from them and try to become a better player and a better improviser on your primary instrument the piano which as I said earlier is a very what you see is what you get instrument hope the lesson was useful guys again this is Jason Zach here from Nathaniel thanks a ton for watching this lesson do hit the subscribe the bell for notifications if you haven't already leave us a comment with something you'd like us to do in the future do consider following us on patreon for our handwritten notes and other awesome stuff cheers see you in the next one