 this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson we are going to learn quite a few things really in the field of piano playing. We are going to look at chord inversions and how you can primarily use them with secondary dominant chords or chords which are out of scale, which kind of lead into chords or diatonic chords which are within the scale. And once we get that framework or that theoretical foundation going in the lesson, we will then look at how you can voice the chords, how you are going to voice the chords smoothly. As you heard in the intro video, you are able to hear some kind of a melody, right? And I was highlighting it with my voice. So I will show you how you can voice it, not just using inversions but using the knowledge of the chords, knowledge of what they have in common and knowledge of what you want to bring out in your performance, right? And we will also look at an arpeggio pattern as you heard to make it very flowing, very dynamic in nature as well. And last but not least, we will tackle the melodic aspects of this exercise a little further in terms of using inversions to bring out the melody, using notes which repeat to make it more melodic, floating certain notes and of course just shaping the melody in our mind, a topic which I call as melodic curves. So the notes and staff notation for this exercise are found on our Patreon page. You could consider heading over there for a small amount of $5 as a monthly subscription. You can get all these handwritten notes, staff notation, MIDI and backing tracks for pretty much all the content and lessons which we do on YouTube. Let's get cracking. So I'm going to start you off with the chord progression. The chord progression I've chosen it on the key of C major and the whole idea is each part of the chord progression. I'm going to divide the chord progression into four parts. Every part is going to sound from the tonic or the one chord or the root chord. So in the C major scale, the tonic is going to be C major. So you end up doing the first chunk of the chord progression, if you will, will be C major, C over E and then F major. So what's happening here is it's a normal C major and for the purpose of this exercise you can follow along. We are going to play C major in its second inversion in order to squeeze that E out, the melodic E. So this E would be sticking out. So that's your C major first chord and the second chord would be again a C major in the right hand. But the way I'm doing it is I'm playing E in the base. So it's serving as a C slash E chord, a slash chord basically. So So it's making the tonic chord C major rather unstable, if you think about it. You would always think, hey, in the key of C major, shouldn't C major be stable? Well, when you change the base note, nothing sounds stable. The base note is not the root of that particular chord, you know. So C major, C over E. And this is yearning to go to F major. It almost feels like F major is the new tonic. But it's not. It's the four chord. It's the subdominant as we call it in classical theory. C, C over E, F. And what did I just sing? I sang the base notes. C, E, F, C, E, F. And what the melody in the right hand at the top note seems to be highlighting is that's E, G, A. And how am I voicing this? I'm not doing, I'm not doing chunks of chords, rather I'm highlighting, I'm ensuring that I use all the notes of the chord, but keeping it a bit open with my voicing. So the common notes between your second and third chord in this chord progression, or there will be at least one common note, because I've designed it to include secondary dominant. So secondary dominance will pull to the next resolution with one note in common. So you have C major. Now you have C over E. C is in common with the next target chord, which is the four chord of the C major scale, namely F major. So I'm playing F major as A, C, E. You don't need the F there because F is already here. So I don't want, well you could if you want. You could play that, but it sounds too big, too rich, which maybe I don't want at the moment. So C major, C major, still, but with E base and then F major. So this exercise teaches you to retain the common tones between the chord, which in this case is in the middle region. C in the middle, C in the middle, C still in the middle. So that's your first chunk out of a set of four chunks. Again. And we're doing this rather swiftly. So that's, it's all going to be crotchets. One, two, three, four. Only that last chord is a minimum or a half note, which lasts for two counts. Again. One, two, three, four. So the second chunk, let's navigate through that. We go. What happened there? Still are C major, which starts off the chunk. The next chord would be D over F sharp, which is the two major of the C major scale with a three base. So and this again sounds unstable. And you may be arguing, why have you played a chord out of C major scale? I'm going to show you because it serves as a tension chord or a secondary dominant chord, which will then resolve to the G major. That's D over F sharp resolving to G major. Let's do that again. Second chunk. Again, I'm voicing it in this very open way. Same second inversion C major. That's F sharp in the base, A, D, A in the right hand. That's all I need to highlight a D major sound, isn't it? I could also play that extra F sharp if you want. So the whole idea is now to keep that middle finger to be common. There's a D, which is in common between the D over F sharp chord, which is the two major over the over its three to the five major, which is G major. So again, it makes G feel very warm and resolved. Unlike a normal scenario where G is more a dominant chord, which is a tension chord. So far, we have next D over F sharp with D in common. So first chunk C is in common. That's your base C F sharp D over F sharp G and your melody two that's okay. The third line would be or the third chunk of this progression would be to go to the relative minor, which is a minor. So I figured we'll go from tonic to subdominant, which is the four tonic to dominant, which is the five and tonic to the relative minor minor chord, which is the six minor. And so beautiful passing chord, which is the the E seventh over or E major with a G sharp base, which serves as a secondary dominant, which pulls you to a minor no matter what, right. And it's beautiful and it's very interesting that the D over F sharp to G D is not even part of the scale of C major, but it goes pretty well. Similarly, E over G sharp goes very well to A minor. So let's do that chunk three. So the melody is again, I'm voicing it in this open way, starting off as always with the second inversion of C E G C E B B almost like a fifth chord C E C and I'm maintaining the E as a consistent common note. Again, try to sing the top and maybe even sing the bottom and the common note might as well train your ear while you're at it. So three chunks again for you then and now we close the door to do that's that same old second inversion of C major. I'm voicing G major in this nice open way where the G is in the bottom. I don't have room to play the octave. So doing F B D G dominant. It implies it has all the ingredients of a G seventh. So and I'm ending with normal C major, but with the first inversion E G C. So so resolving to the six ending one more time to do that sus and then there is a resolution to the major. If you want, you could do that. There you go. That sounds pretty good. Now we need some movement, some rhythmic flow and the best option we can pull for piano players is arpeggio. So earlier we were just blocking the chords or just holding or plonking the chords with arpeggios. It really brings out the melody and adds rhythmic motion. So let me just show you the original chord was G C E right with the arpeggio starting with the top note, which is E E G and creating a pattern which could either be high middle low middle high note middle note low note middle note or you can do even a high low middle low. But I'd encourage you to start off with the high middle low middle because it's symmetric. It just goes one by one. And you may want to repeat that a because the arpeggio can kind of recycle itself. So let's do that again. H M L M H M L M H M L M H M L M H M. That's the pattern. You can use your pedal for added warmth and resonance and then convert this or transform this to the entire chord progression moving on moving on. So it's pretty much that pattern up middle down middle. Let's do that again a bit slower. So that's about adding arpeggios. Now moving forward let's try and make this a it's already a decent enough melody I think but we can make it a bit more melodic by just thinking to ourselves. Do we need to start with the second inversion of C major in the first place? What if we start with the root position of C major and just think how do I go now G is the top note. You have different melodic options because the top note of any chord ends up becoming the melody in a listener's ear. The listener will capture or catch on to or latch on to one of the three notes of your chord. In this case the highest frequency or the highest note. This is pretty much a common thing with all instruments which is why we voice chords in the first place or need to learn how to voice them. So so using inversions things like that can be very much very much possible. If you want that that's quite cool. Start with the first inversion of C major which is C. So I won't move too much forward you can do this on your own but just understand that each inversion starts you off that way with that shape and from there you can make things sound very melodic. Another technique to make things more melodic if I go back to the original inversion for our exercise which is second inversion of C you can repeat the top note in any rhythmic way you want. For example this will require a little bit more finger independence as we need to practice. There we go. It makes the melody very obvious so you're playing melody and arpeggios together. Then I'm just adding that rhythm and then okay so that's repeating the notes that's another way to make things a lot more melodic than it already is. Another thing I'd like you to consider is to float the top note. Now that you've kind of anchored your fingers around there don't mess with the middle and the bottom mess with only the top. Maybe get a little in the vicinity of the top note. Almost like a finger style acoustic guitar player. They do that a lot. Doing my best to play what I'm singing it's my singing which is kind of pushing the piano. So if you just take the top note and just say maybe just wiggle around between the top note and the one right after. I think that can be playable. Just give yourself a free finger. In this case the pinky is free or the ring get that and then maybe continue the pattern. I like that B flat. Even though it's out of scale. Stuff like the note which is floating that would also be nice and in general when you're trying to make something melodic just look at how you want the shape of your melody to be. You don't want your melody to be static like for example. And then one little change right. So I would think So something going higher little higher or maybe It's a nice sort of V inverted V curve. If you want. So basically you're landing on specific chord tones and you map out a shape or what I call as a melodic curve in your book in your give yourself a blank page of paper and then you get these different shapes. That's just a line going up. That's still a line going up. But if you mess with that that's going very high and then coming down stuff like that could build you melodic curves. We'll write a few in my hand written notes. You should check it out and to supplement this lesson a bit better. You should definitely study chord inversions further if you don't feel that you're on point with the subject where you can learn a lot of exercises on inversions and voicing techniques. I've tried to keep the challenges of inversions very interesting not to make it very studious so to speak. We also have a couple of lessons on secondary dominance which you should definitely check out to understand the theory of what exactly was going on with the chords and why they work so well. Right guys before I sign off it would be awesome if you could consider hitting that subscribe button and hit the like button and leave us a comment with what you thought about the lesson. You can also leave behind your suggestions and anything else you'd like to add and if you feel that you want something more structured regular weekly music lessons coming into one of our classrooms and learning you can consider doing a virtual course or an offline course in Bangalore with the Nathaniel School of Music. All you have to do is fill up a simple form go to our website nathanielschool.com right and if you want the notes if you want everything laid out for you in a neat pdf file head over to Patreon you'll get my handwritten notes staff notation midi and a lot more not just for this lesson but the stuff we've done previous and what we are going to do in the future. Thanks a lot for watching the video. Cheers catch you in the next one.