 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this Christmas lesson or what I would call a Christmas piano workout, something you can try out over the season, our goal is basically to play a popular Christmas tune, understand how it can be transposed so that you can play it on other scales that would help when you know you're working with singers and other instrumentalists and you know how people are. There's always bound to be a need to change scales, even for guitar players and other such people. Then we look at building the chord progression. Now the way I propose to build it is even if you don't really have the chords in front of you, there are a few tricks which we can apply to actually get the chords going, just to choose simple chords for a specific melody line. And then last but not least, we'll cap the lesson off with a lot of rhythm patterns which I think will work for the left hand while you play the right hand melody. So we are going to get the melody first, then we are going to get the chord progression or develop the chord progression on our own. We'll also transpose the melody a bit and the chords when you transpose a melody to another scale, even your chords get transposed right. And then after which we look at a lot of left hand rhythm patterns to support the tune really well. For instance, this one or maybe something a bit more complex where you move your hands a bit more. There you go. So let's get cracking guys. Let's start the song on the key of F major. So F major has one flat, F major having B flat. Okay, so the way it goes is. Now the whole story repeats again for the second line. So a nice way to remember this melody so that you can transpose it on a variety of scales would be to write down all these notes with numbers or scale degrees or swaras as we may call it in India. So I'd encourage you to get a pencil or a pen or a book out along with your keyboards of course and actually learn along with me. You'll definitely be able to progress quite swiftly. And while you're at it, it'll also be great if you can hit that bell icon and the subscribe button for regular notifications and to get updates from our channel. That would mean a lot. And also give the video a like, leave us a comment with stuff you'd like to learn in the future. And I hope you're having a great time with your friends and loved ones over the season of Christmas. Let's get cracking. So the way we like to write this down would be five, four, three, two, one, two, three, one. Okay, that's the five, which is the C. And what I've also tried to do is in the notes, which you're going to find in our Patreon page, those of you who are not Patreons do consider supporting most of my videos are supplemented with Patreon notes. So that'll really help you visualize the melody. So I've notated the melody, I've even handwritten the curve, a y-axis and a melodic graph to show you exactly how the notes are arranged. So that will be something like. So that's the scale going down. in the sense of the scale, right? So five, four, three, two, one, two, three, one. Okay, so now that you've mapped that out and you've figured it out on the key of F, where you've literally superimposed it, you're like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And then under that, you write the F major scale F, G, A, B flat, C, D, E. You can also transpose it. So if you write the G major scale, it'll be G, A, B, C, D, E, F sharp, which has that one sharp F sharp. So what was once can now become on the key of G. So five of G is D, D, C, B, A, G, A, B, G, A, B, C, A, B, A, G, F sharp G. Okay, what happens there? Let's go back to the F. Okay. So that's the second half. We finished the first half. You can play along with me. C, B flat, A, G, F, G, A, F, G, A, B flat, G, A, G, F, E, F. And what I like to do is keep my thumb on F. And when you go cross down your index finger, I think that'll work fine. A little slower. In terms of scale degrees. Two, three, four, two, three, two, one, lower seven, one. See our melodic worm also, which shows you the notes as it moves across. Good way to train your ear as well. So whole melody line one, line two. And it repeats. And if we repeat or replicate the same equation on G, it'll be something like it'll slow. Okay. So that is the melody on F and G. And I'm sure you can transpose it. And that's a good exercise to try, you know, get ready. It's a great habit as a professional piano player to transpose. Be aware of, you know, you're starting on the five of the scale. So that's on A flat, D flat, C major, D major, and so on. Right. So we'll stick with G and F in this tutorial. And now let's figure out how we can harmonize this particular melody. Now the way I like to look at harmony is start always with the tonic chord. So let's just go back to the key of F major. The tonic chord is if it's a major scale will be one, three and five of that scale. So in the key of F major, what will be one, three, five F A C F A C with respect to the scale tonic chord can also say the Roman one or the first degree major chord F A C what will be the tonic chord in the G major scales case it would be GBD. So in theory, the tonic chord is a great start and it should work for most of the tune. So let's just roll with that and probably try and keep a pulse going, which is just the way our head moves to the song. Usually in quarter notes, if this is not possible for you, hold the pulse can just hold it like this kind of works with the tonic chord, namely F. Now if you want to harmonize this a great chord add on to this would be the four chord or the five chord, especially for more happier songs, you can sort of survive with just the major chord. So you can go F major. Now if you want to change the chord so fast, you can do that or you can do the five chord F major that's C major. Why am I choosing C major? Because there's a land on the G and F major chord does not have the G in it, while a C major chord has the G in it. So I'm just choosing a chord which happens to have the melody target note, the target note will be the long note of the melody or the landing note of the melody, the strong note of the melody. Okay, so now you could also play you could play like a four chord there, which is a B flat major and then a C major, which is the five. So you could do a quick change there. I quite like that, both the four and the five. Then now now because Fa la la la is starting on G, you can't play the F major chord. In fact, now as you can hear it sounds doesn't sound workable compared to the Fa la la la. So that's the dominant chord. That's the five. So Fa la la la la. Now that there's a clash there. So now I'm landing on A, which among the three chords we've discussed so far, F major, B flat major and C major has an A in it, the tonic, right? F major is F A C, the subdominant or the predominant chord is B flat D F doesn't have any and then the dominant chord is C E G, which is C major chord. So you need to play back your tonic or you can even do the minor tonic, but we leave that for another song. I don't think this song needs to be very sad. It's a Christmas song. So you go F major. Yeah, so you could either do boughs of holly as boughs of holly, boughs of holly. You could do B flat C F or you can just do boughs of holly. I kind of prefer the four going to the five going to the one. Why? Because they seem to have a note of the melody. The melody is not going to change. So you have to figure out a chord which serves the melody landing note. By landing note, we mean the long notes, the strong notes, the notes at the beat one of the bar, or sometimes the notes which are also important, lyrical notes. Anyway, so that's how you harmonize. So let's do the same thing on G. What's our chord progression now? One, four, five, one. Now if we do that on G, what is the one chord of G? G. G major. That's C D G. C D G. Okay. Now what would we like to do there? Let's come back to the Fa la la la part. I'm going back to F. Sorry to keep toggling between F and G, but that that's the intention of the video. I want you to learn the song on at least two scales. Coming back to F. Take the holes with boughs of holy. Now Fa la la la. You need a C major there, which is the five because it has that G in it. Fa la la la la. That's your F tonic. Five, one, four, five, one. You can do la la la la. That's the same. Four, five, one again. One, F. Yeah. Five, one, four, five, one. Little slower. One, four, five, one. Five, one, four, five, one. Repeat five C major F major B flat C on G. It'll be G major D G D major G major C major D major G or you can do D major G. Come back to D there D G. It'll become like a D sus four. Right. So that's basically how you can harmonize the song. Yes, we have another part of the song as well. Right. There's another line. Let's try and quickly learn that that's your melody on the key of F. So that's two, three, four, two, three, four, five, two. So what chord works with the G? Definitely the C major. So the chords could be C major F major. Now there's a little bit of a clash there. So you could come back to the five chord. Or you can even stay on F. Okay. Stay on F for the one chord and then we go. Okay. It's a very interesting melody change where he goes. First of all, we have a B natural, which is a sharp four. If you think about it, because F, G, A, B flat, this would be a normal four. B natural would be a sharp four. Let's just do that again. Now changing what chords can we do there? You can stay on F there. You could do like a G major there because there's a B natural. And G is also the five of the C major. It's sort of like the five of the five chord. So it works well in terms of a cadence or a resolution. So F or E major. So I'm doing F major, the one chord. I'm sticking on F and then that's the two major, which is the five of the five. And then it repeats. I like that at the end. The melody goes to D. So you could use the subdominant or the four chord there. Come back to one. One. Okay, let's do the second part again. Stay on one or come back to five at the end there. Then G and then back to F. And that because you have a D there, you could play a B flat major. So you could do four, five, one or just the five going to one. So that's your song on F major. I'm sure you can now transpose the chords. It's written for you in our notes on G major. Do check it out. And just so that we can move ahead with the lesson, I'm going to now talk about a bunch of rhythm patterns, which you can play in your left hand, which are again notated on our Patreon. So it'll be great if you could consider getting a copy of the handwritten notes, the notation on Patreon, not only for this Christmas lesson, but pretty much every lesson we have done in the past few years, and which we'll continue to use as our portal for placing our notes, notation, and other such tracks, which will help you aid the learning. Okay, so coming to the patterns, I'm just going to show you on the key of F. So the first pattern, which I like to follow is just a simple broken chord system. So if this is your F major chord, you break up the chord and go F. Another nice thing to say could be like this. So the first thing I would encourage you to do before you actually get the melody going, play the pattern and sing the song. And whenever the chords change fast, you could avoid the broken block, the broken thing. You can just do blocks. So wherever possible, you do the broken system. Um, or the umpa. Or you could do it fast. Or keep it simple. Just block them. So that's the basic umpa pattern. Now to modify this, what I propose you could do is instead of just doing, okay, let's bring in the melody first with the umpa. C, F, B flat C, F. I'm just sticking to C in just C major or C seventh for now, just to show you the pattern. C, F, C, or C seven is a nice broken strategy. Now if you want to improve on this, you can go. There we go. F, C, F, C, F, C. That's umpa, umpa, umpa, umpa. That is root chord. Come back to play the lower fifth and then the remaining notes of the chord. Okay. And any groovy song, this would kind of work well. That's your umpa, umpa, umpa. Okay, we can obviously modify this a bit better. If you want to get some sub beats into the system, you can go. So instead of doing one and two, instead of doing one and two and three and four, we can do one e and a two e and a three e and a four e and a lot more groovy, I think. So you can either do the normal umpa, modified umpa, which is umpa, umpa, you can even swing it. Okay. Another nice way to kind of make this song or this groove a lot more dancy would be to play it in a thresio kind of style, which will be something like this. One e and a two e and a three e and a four e and one e and a two e and a three e and that's what we call the thresio three three. So you can play around, you can modify the rhythms. Thresio, umpa, just blocks, thresio. You could also combine the various patterns together. You could start with a thresio like this and then do blocks, umpa, block, block, block and thresio, umpa. Okay. And you could obviously play around with that. So this is a nice way to bring in some left hand patterns and if you're not so sure of the chords, another nice thing I would suggest if you are a newcomer to the instrument is don't play the whole block together. You can just play roots of the chords with maybe an octave for variety. You're still getting the vibe of the chord and you can even get the rhythm pattern of the chord by doing root, octave, octave, root, oct, oct, thresio. Earlier we did with the chord now with just the root and octave. You can pretty much do this for a variety of songs which are groovy. Maybe this one or you could play the chords. Right guys. So those were some left hand patterns. So let's just recap what we've done in this lesson. I guess you would have learned three things so far which we've covered. One is the idea that the song could be on pretty much any scale and you need to have the toolkit to transpose it into whichever scale you need to. So we took F major as well as G major. You can check out the notation as well. It's there for you. You can also then look at the chords and how to choose the chords. Just simple 1, 4 and 5 is all we've done in this lesson by finding the chord whose notes or at least one of the notes of the chord has to match with the melody at the point of you playing that chord. Okay. And then we looked at some left hand patterns. We started with standard blocks. We just held the chords after choosing it. Then we grooved it a bit by breaking it up. Then toggling. Toggle the umpa. Umpa. Umpa. Right. Toggle. Then a little bit of the offbeat stuff. And finally the thresio. Which is the most dancy I guess. Right guys. Again this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel. Hope you found the lesson useful and do check out all of our other lessons in our Christmas playlist which we've put out on YouTube. And before I sign off here's wishing you and your family all your loved ones a Merry Christmas and a great new year ahead and have a lot of fun playing music and entertaining a bunch of people along the way. Take care and stay tuned.