 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this exercise I'm going to try and cover a lot of things for you as a piano player to get better. First of all, you must have heard by the intro that unfortunately this video is more for people who can already play the piano, intermediate or advanced students or you should have been playing it for I would say about six months or so to a year depending on how you've learned, but if you're a beginner, I would not discourage you from watching the lesson. You can watch it and try and learn some concepts along the way, but as a more intermediate or advanced learner, you're going to learn a lot of things in this lesson. You're going to learn about creating a baseline. You're going to learn about playing accented phrases. You're going to learn about how to keep a steady pulse, different chord voicings, and it's a serious hand-independence workout, which is I guess the main thing people want to learn, teachers, players, students, everyone just wants to get their hands cracking. And I think this exercise has enough and more variations to achieve that for you and get you to be more confident with your hand-independence. For me, hand-independence is not doing it task by task. It's about gradually improving confidence and it's always a gradual process. It's not going to happen overnight. So this exercise could be one step forward or one big step forward towards getting these things going. Harmonically, there's a lot going on. There's spread chords. There's thirds in the right hand, which you're going to learn, and it's on an interesting scale. One of my favorite scales, F minor or A flat major. So let's get cracking. The first thing I'm going to talk about is the baseline. Let's get our keyboards out, get a book out, and you'll also see the notation on the screen. You'll see some of my handwritten notes as well. If you'd like to pause the video and download a high quality copy, do consider going to our Patreon page and getting everything related to this lesson. The MIDI, the notation, the notes and whatnot, all the theoretical things. Before we actually start with the baseline, let's just look at the scale. A flat major or F minor. Could say F natural minor. Not the harmonic. Should also be cool, but this is on the natural. Fine. So the melody we'll see a little later. The melody is very easy. I'll show you that. But the left hand, the baseline I've composed is over a 3, 4, but it's phrased rather differently. Let me play that for you. A very piano baseline. Emulating an actual bass, you could say. But the fingers and let me just slow this down for you. The chords, first of all. F minor. D flat major. E flat major. C minor. Very retro glam rock era chord. That's the baseline. Okay, slow that down. F, F, C, F. F, C. And we do an A flat at the end. That allows your pinky to go and play D flat the root of the next chord. D flat. E flat. D flat passing down to C. First I do. Second time I do. The whole C minor chord. First time. Because it's latching on to that F. Second time. Okay, that's the ending variation. Otherwise the baseline's the same. Whole thing again. C, D flat. It's a little slower for you. You could start with the chords. Just block it in the right hand. Block the chords. Just play them for the whole bar. Until you've got that left hand fairly comfortably. Little faster. Important responsibility of the piano is, piano's always two instruments. This is one of the only instruments where it's actually two instruments. It feels like that. This is one instrument. This would be exactly what a bass guitar plays. And this would be what some other people play. So some people call the piano a one-man band. I would prefer to call it a one-man orchestra because a band is small for a piano. It'll destroy a band. At least I think it can. So it depends on how much you practice. So you have to invest time into these things. None of this will happen instantly. You have to do it. Do it slowly. Have a good night's sleep. Try it again the next day. A lot of the videos we find on YouTube, because of the video needing to reach people, I guess, is to give you an instant high or an instant thrill with an exercise. It's going to last for just that one video. You're not going to actually execute it. A lot of this stuff needs time, especially at a more advanced level. So repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Just go on and on with it. Again with the chords and then we'll bring in our melody and that's the song. E flat, C minor, F minor, D flat, E flat. You could look at the notation and also look at my connecting notes between the chords. First time then. Otherwise it's fifths and octaves. Third. C. Again. Then sound good in the right hand if you ask me. It's a bass line. Anyway, so that's about the bass line. I hope that that's good moving forward. If you would like, get yourselves a copy of the notation. If you read music, it will help you digest this a lot better in your own time. There's also a Mu score file which you can open and spell out the notes for yourself. There's also MIDI available. All waiting for you in a folder on Patreon. Coming to the melody. The melody is played in thirds. Let me play it for you and then teach. It's three by four but it's phrased a little interestingly. One, two, three, one, waltz basically. Very weird waltz. There are two things I do to embellish this melody. First of all I'm playing thirds. Rather rudimentary if you ask me. Stack up a thirds. Check out my notes. I would have written all the thirds for every note. It will help you. That's the melody. You could also do a little bit of a glide. Like a guitar player does a hammer on. You can copy that guy. Another hammer there. So to hammer, just flick like a game of carambord. Flick your index finger into the middle finger. And make sure to lift that index otherwise it'll sound horrible. So you have to flick it. It's a trigger. Another trigger there. Sometimes I add some ghost. So what is a ghost? Wherever you have a gap just try and squeeze in a root. Slowly. There we go. That extra F. Whole lesson that's all the right hands ever going to do. So that's going to stay consistent. Only the left hand. Now let's first do the bass riff which we learned. With that melody. Slow it down so you get all your hit points isolated. There we go. And could end like that with a unison. Faster. This is one exercise if you ask me which will be tougher to play slowly than faster. If your fingers are able, if you've done your exercises and so on. You should be able to play this at speed. But slower speed is what I would recommend initially to improve your sense of timing. To make sure your independence is right. And when you do play it to speed or at a normal speed. Try to always latch on to the pulse. You see my head is moving in a very very consistent way. Right guys so that is your first challenge or main mission behind this exercise to get that independence going. Now a lot of people ask me sometimes what is the time signature of stuff you play. Because sometimes a lot of my music is very prog rock or heavy metal influence. So because of that they play around with the accent. So you don't really know if it's a three four or a five four or whatever it may be. Sometimes I may actually be playing a very simple time signature. But this lesson is actually a three by four just to show you. So to play the three by four in your left hand you could take all the four chords F minor, D flat major, E flat major, C minor. So nice open dense chord spread voice one five octave and play them in a pulse three one two three. If you are not too sure of spread voicing we will leave a link in the description. I've done an entire playlist on this subject slowly so you can head over there after this video. So you want to play the pulse three by four now in the left hand. Three one two so what do we do earlier the bass line. That very prog rock or progressive bass line. Now we are just doing a normal walls three by four but in the pulse with spread voicings. Okay so that's three by four and another thing you could do to kind of conclude this chaos of independence and this work out. You could do dotted notes you could do dotted quavers in your left which goes. It gives you a very polyrhythmic feel right it's almost like a three meets four kind of a vibe. I'll play that and then break it. So let's just look at what's going on with a dotted quaver. A quaver is half of a beat so a dotted quaver would be 0.75 of a beat or three fourths of a beat right. It's going to be a bit weird initially it'll be one E and E. It's going to be all the off beats and almost never the on beat. So that's what I love about dotted quavers used a lot. It's almost used in it's used in almost every metal song you'll ever find every progressive rock song. So I love the dotted feel in music so if you can you could try and achieve that. It's a serious work out for your mind more than your body. If you ask me and two three you're actually counting four because four threes are 12 right. So if you take three if you take the value of three semi quavers and then do three fours are 12. If you think about it that's that's three fours are 12. It's a three by four in the semi quaver world. Four sets of semi quavers would be four threes are 12 but it's grouped in a very very strange way. Let me try and sing it. It's actually a lot tougher for me to sing it and compared to playing it on the piano but you get the idea. Back to crotch it's where everyone headbanks. Now for the heavy part to give you that chaos so that was the first thing I taught you. Then the pulse and now the dotted try to end it. And something for you beginners if you watch this video and you found everything tough. Here's something which you definitely can do so stick around and I hope it at least taught you something. If you can't do it if you couldn't execute it keep trying otherwise do this version which is I think a lot more doable nail your right hand the way I taught you. And just play the roots of the chords in your left hand and see if you want to either whack it as a dotted minimum which is a three counted note. Sounds great I think or the pulse. Don't do the fancy spread voicing yet because your hands may not be used to it maybe you're just starting off with triads and so on. Right guys so that's the that's the exercise which I composed I will probably give it a name or I probably won't give it a name. It's just a chaotic F minor exercise maybe that should be the name who knows let's see. So now what we shall do is conclude everything and then wind up so we did this consistent melody in the right. First we learn that baseline the chaotic baseline that with that. Then we did the pulse and the dotted field and the simpler version with just chord roots and over a pulse. Right so this entire exercise was kind of influenced from one of my riffs which is also there on YouTube you could consider checking that out. And it pretty much a few students asked me to break it down because they like that tune or that composition so that's what this lesson is all about. We've taken one of the riffs which I which I release every day on the YouTube channel and I've just broken it down and hopefully this improves your hand independence a great deal. Your chord awareness your voicing your intervals a lot of things have fun with the drill and make sure if you can if you've done the drill to send it to us somehow and we are on Instagram. So you could probably put it up on your Instagram and tag us and we'll be happy to go through it and also reshare it if that's what it's called. And yes don't forget to get yourself a copy of the notation the MIDI and stuff from Patreon also feel free to share the video with your musician friends. Leave us a comment head over to NathanielSchool.com if you want to sign up for some of our structured lessons courses live lessons or video courses and stay awesome cheers.