 Hi everyone this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson I've developed an exercise for you to primarily look at a static melody in the right hand and look at all sorts of accompaniment in the left hand for that melody as well as a few right hand embellishments along the way. I've composed the piece on seven by four so that's seven beats in a bar. I'll first be teaching you the melody line which is quite easy to be honest and then we look at slowly but surely taking our left hand from simple bass notes all the way to you know the level at what you heard in the introduction performance you know. Something really fancy like that. So there is something in this lesson I think for students at different levels you just have to deal with the fact that we are not on a four by four time signature. I don't know why but I just like this melody and it ended up being on seven so I think it'll make a great exercise also to practice melodies or practice music in general on odd meters or odd time signatures. Songs are not always on four or three. There are songs on five there are a good number of songs on seven as this one is. So let's first learn the melody which goes right you could also read the notation which if you do read notes otherwise you can just follow along. I don't think you need to know reading if you have other ways of approaching the lesson. Let's do it again. So you may want to feel the pulse as well while you're playing the melody this will give you a much steadier timing. So you could just probably tap the pulse here seven one back to one. So if you observe what I'm tapping here I'm tapping seven crotchets or seven quarter notes one two three four five six seven. So it may help or it will definitely help rather to play your melody along with a steady pulse especially when you're dealing with odd meter stuff which is not so common. So again the same melody and then we'll speed it up slightly follow my fingers as well kind of bringing back my ring there replacing the thumb because I have to cross my thumb back right and then cross it back at the beginning a little faster. Okay so let's now bring in the left hand with simple chord roots in the bass so the way we have it is you have D B G A. Okay I'll play it with the melody and then teach you. D B G A D B G A. Okay observe the notation some notes are minim some are dotted so it's like that because you can't have regular minims it's not a eight by four or a four by four song it's seven so you want to play your A before that let's now do it with the right hand quite full enough right harmonically just the root notes in the bass are quite fair if you ask me you don't have to necessarily play like big triads you can this sounds nice okay so the next approach is where the bass notes are the same but I've added some in between passing notes to the to the performance I'll play it and then teach you okay so you go there I'm adding this E as a passing one more time while the earlier approach was a little simpler right normal bass just roots now we have looked at the passing bass approach you can also see the fingers once for the passing bass see I'm bringing back my thumb G A and I land nicely on the pinky you need to get that first okay great so that's the passing bass approach now let's just look at some chords now this melody line would have sounded good even if you played it one octave lower but now the other approaches which we are going to do may not be possible by playing the melody so low because you have a lot going on in the left hand so you'll have to generally play the melody higher great so the next approach would be with just simple thirds and all of these are harmonic approaches so they are not necessarily ways to just play chords in the left hand chords is a wing of harmony chords is like a subset you know you have various ways of approaching harmony if you look at how choirs and orchestras work they don't do they don't do chords they have another other approaches you also have counterpoint harmony you have all sorts of harmonies which which have been used and are continuing to be used so the next style of harmony in the bass will be third so I've kept it very easy for this variation just to go up and down the scale in thirds just to show you that thirds on their own sound very nice for harmony so also get the rhythm going I have notated a quite an interesting rhythm okay then we are going down the scale then I have to come down now once you've accomplished going up and down the scale you can start doing variations you don't have to go like exactly up and exactly down you can go something like that right so you can play around with third so I just wanted to bring that out in the left hand and in general when you play piano sometimes we just keep asking each other or ourselves what are the chords well so far you did not even need chords and you are still playing it in a fairly professional way if you ask me so we have a bass line we had the passing bass we have thirds now the next approach which I'd like to propose is with actual triads but triads with inversions okay and the inversions start sounding very melodic in nature let me play you the variation and then teach you right so what happened there the chords are used more rhythmically and melodically if you think about it's not I'm not just saying oh D major B minor I'm trying to create a line or a pattern with my chord so in the pattern here is D A B minor G and I quite like this version of A which is like an A major add four just to give you that pop vibe so you want to start with this flurry with the melody and with this variation what'll be nice is if you just do the whole thing maybe staccato maybe the last two could be legato right so that's about triads but triads with inversions with a pattern the triads are almost singing if you think about it it'll more be like a like an orchestral part which you could give a horn section or a string section just to support the main violin or something right okay so let's move on to the next technique so the next technique is designed to add depth to your performance using spread voicings of chord so instead of playing D major up here we could play it down here but then it sounds muddy so what do we do when it sounds muddy you spread the triad instead of playing your F sharp down below you play it higher now we've done a lot of lessons on spread triads I'm not going to spend too much detail in this video because the entire theory is already communicated so do check out the other videos on spread triads which will be available in the description and of course on our youtube channel I'll play you and then teach you right so first thing you'll see is the hands are much more wider you may also argue how am I actually going to do that you know it's even I can't it's I think it's humanly impossible maybe you have to start playing basketball in order to develop this finger width or hand span width it's impossible to actually go D to F sharp at least I can't and it really hurts so a good strategy would be to use the sustain pedal which is anyway something you want to get to terms with okay so this is what the pedal will help you with I'll show you all the four chords in the bass so first chord D major with the pedal the pedal is pressed down but then when you go to B minor well you have to lift it otherwise that's the problem so with the you know with the power of the pedal comes great responsibility right so D major B minor let me just show you how I'm playing them B minor B F sharp D G G D B A E C sharp and you see I'm able to lift my remove my pinky now because the pedal is pressed down well so without the pedal not so great unless you're playing a staccato version okay coming to the melody with this right so how I've designed the left hand pattern it's interesting because it's on seven by four so some of the patterns in the left need to elongate so I do D long you hold this F sharp long as you can see in the notation so B minor G major is quicker change okay a will be longer so the first and the fourth chord the ending part is longer so also push your independence a bit further it's always good to sing the melody before you play it and now of course plate a lot more depth because we got the bass stuff a lot more depth than the maybe the thirds approach or maybe the chordal approach because those are meant to be for that requirement you know to bring about some brightness or a bit more just color while this is to bring about more depth I would suggest to get a get a grip on spread chords in your left hand as much as possible watch our videos on spread chords also watch a video we did some time back which is still I think one of my better lessons using the sustain pedal so we linked that up as well you know how to use the pedal there's a lot of work going on not only with your foot which is obvious because has to press the thing also how your mind works how you breathe and how you think your mindset has to be very clear when you're using the pedal okay let's move on to the next technique now the next technique basically is used for a lot of folk music if you want to get a folk music vibe on the piano let me just play it and then teach you right so that that was the folk vibe right so I started this technique a little bit earlier in my career writing a lot of music with my band Allegro Fudge way back in the day you could say so a lot of our songs were using this technique because it was sort of folk music or Celtic in nature so this rhythm seemed to work a lot and till today I definitely bring it in with the with the bands I play especially when we play folk stuff bluegrass stuff or Celtic stuff it's a great technique so I'm going to show you that with this melody so it's the same tune but the the challenge here is you need to look at your two thumbs the right hand thumb and the left hand thumb like your like this is the this is the percussion instrument or this is the drum so everything to the the other fingers are the melody the harmony and the bass while these two guys are the drummers so without them it would be quite simple it'll just be like the bass line we learned earlier but then with them it's also what I call as the gallop technique so so that if you get that vibe into your system the 16th note vibe it is notated for you to see but I mean it's going to be a bit tricky to read 16 notes especially if you're new to reading I think all the other patterns I we have notated there will be easy to read this one let me just try and give you the approach then I think you can even build it by ear or twist it around to suit your playing let's get that slow it down and my pinky is holding on it's not lifting it's holding on to that D for dear life one more time see I haven't tampered with my melody I've just added that thumb rhythm without that's how much energy those thumbs are bringing into the music this is without the thumbs with and the right hand thumb is playing a because of logistical reasons it can't possibly play anything else right now it'll be a stretch so great notes to kind of do the percussion with your thumb would be the root and the fifth of the scale or the chord because those notes are well everyone likes them and it sounds stable so so so far we have now I'm coming back to the G okay a and then a let's do that slowly a so the left hand is like a kind of a counter melody it's it's like a tune on its own right so if you get the time you can listen to one of my one of our songs from the band Allegro Fudge called Maximum City we've used this technique a lot actually both piano and guitar we both sort of play like that so I'm kind of reminded of that song but I've used it for a quite a few other songs so you go okay we have another kind of variation of that left hand cycle let me break this down for you again in the left hand I'll just play it at normal speed that's the second variation and then we'll break it down so quite a bit happened there right it even ended with some harmony some thirds harmonized okay so okay so that was starting with the third combine it with the other variation folk Celtic variation if you will right and the last one I have for you guys is just to kind of put it all together so I'm going to get that kind of galloping thing and the spread voicing in the left hand and I think it'll sound really grand so it's pretty much the same spread voicing technique we did earlier but with that little ghost note added here in my right right thumb right so let's go through all the variations right I apologize if I chose a weird time signature but I hope the melody doesn't sound too weird because I think it's just a normal just a normal folk or a pop melody you could consider this happens to be on a seven so deal with that so the first thing we did was bass simple bass and bass with passings just like a nice bass line played on a bass guitar then the third approach which we had was with the thirds descending thirds then what did we look at we then ended up looking at spread chords in the bass we also had the triads ideally played staccato and then what else did we do we have then looked at some folk music or folk piano techniques where you bring in your thumbs with the ghost variation and lastly we put it all together with those the folk approach in the right hand and spread voices in the left hand right guys so that was a seven by four workout primarily for your left hand because your right hand just pretty much played the melody throughout the lesson so it'll be great if you can you know do as many of these variations as you can if you can do all it'll be great and then you can even write to us you can write to us at our email you can write with a recording or you can probably put it up on Instagram and you can tag me at Jason Zach on Instagram and I'll definitely check it out so put it up on Instagram if you have an Instagram account or else send us your you know workflow or how you've gone about it and hopefully this approach or these techniques since I've taught you on the seven by four signature rather tricky uncommon little bit difficult to count and to wire your head around it can help you to play other normal music you know ballads on four waltz music on three or six eight it should help you so you can use these same techniques for all that the notation is available for you to download it'll be available as a pdf file on our patreon page do head over there and get yourself a copy and it'll also be a great support to our growing channel and if you haven't already hit the bell and subscribe if you haven't already there'll be a lot more lessons coming your way if you're a beginner if you're in or if you're an advanced student we cover piano topics we cover theory year training and a lot more varieties of lessons on technology other instruments will also be hitting you very soon so it's very important to subscribe to our youtube channel thanks again for watching this lesson i will see you in the next one cheers