 Hi guys this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson I'm going to give you an improvisation challenge or an exercise series which will hopefully motivate you to create your own patterns and improvise which is basically to play music spontaneously with some kind of grounding with some kind of ground rules but then on your own organically making patterns on the fly so to speak. For this to work I've tried to define the exercise as clearly as possible but yet give you a lot of freedom to to grow and come up with your own stuff spontaneously and otherwise you could even do this with simple maths and the patterns which we have for you will be notated on our Patreon page you can head over there and download yourself a PDF copy you can even download a midi file and import it into a player and this will also have my handwritten notes not just for this lesson but a lot of other lessons hundreds of them every one of our YouTube videos in the last at least five years is supplemented on Patreon so do give it a check and let us know what you think before we look at the right hand the left hand is going to do something very very static you're not going to improvise in the left hand right so usually when we improvise there will be some rules or the other for example if you improvise over a chord progression the chord progression is the same right you you have pretty much the same chords the tempo will be the same so some things will be the same some things will not be the same so the thing which is going to be static also for the purpose of improving our hand coordination and independence along the way would be let's do the minor pentatonic in the left hand so the way the lesson is structured will have the minor pentatonic scale running ascending and descending in the left hand while the right hand is going to improvise initially not so freely because I'll notate a few patterns primarily to build up a hand coordination but it will incrementally allow you to do your own thing okay so we'll gradually take the right hand using small note groupings of three and four and create some awesome music which hopefully you're going to enjoy in the right hand improving our hand independence our improvisation knowledge and the right hand will be on the minor scale the minor pentatonic scale so we'll break this down in our notes before we get started it'll be great if you could consider hitting that subscribe button and turning on the bell icon for regular notifications let's get cracking so the left hand would basically be C minor pentatonic up and down ascending and descending as I've told you let me just help you with the fingering I'm just using all the five fingers of course but it's a little bit of a tricky scale if you don't follow a couple of things which I'm going to tell you get your keyboards out and play along it'll be I'll encourage that don't watch it and then play try to get it out maybe you want to pause the video and get your keyboards out and play along with me so left hand goes you see this wrist motion is very important for overall hand control and also ergonomics to just make your hand relaxed I'm moving my hand I'm not sticking my hand in one spot and this also gives me some good speed so why am I going in and out is because the thumb has to hit the B flat right anyway I have to do that now one option would be to play like this this is going to annoy the elbow it's gonna just cramp up the whole hand you feel like you're running out of room so move in and out and also curve your thumb while you hit the B flat that is important let's do that slowly one E and a two E I'm counting this in terms of 16th notes you'll see it notated as well wherein we knee and a two E and a three E and a four E so if I do two rounds A sending and D sending I'll finish a bar of four by four right one E and a two E and a three and a four E and a two E and a four E and a four E and a four E so this is going to be ringing or lingering on for this entire lesson by the end of this lesson you have to communicate you have to chat with people in your house friends maybe you should take your keyboard to your office for meetings and just do this in the meeting chat fight I don't know what you want to do but it has to be with only with this pattern while you interact with people talk cook I wouldn't recommend cooking but still so you get the idea you have to do this and create a very instinctive approach now the right hand to get things started let's first break down a scale we'll use since we are on the minor pentatonic in the left let's do something similar to minor in the right and build a bigger scale so a seven note scale built out of the five note pentatonic which is one three flat four five and seven flat those are the degrees of the pentatonic so if you want to practice the minor pentatonic on other keys feel free E flat E F G A and so on and so forth right so you feel free to practice it on other keys and the right hand is going to take a seven note scale from this pentatonic so good seven note scale to consider or a couple of them would be the natural minor scale which is a major scale with a flat three a flat six and a flat seven it's a natural minor you could also do the Dorian scale which is a major scale with a flat three natural six with respect to minor flat seven you can decide which one you want whether you want the Dorian or the whether you want that more sadder Aeolian mode or the natural minor or the more the more braver mysterious Dorian scale okay so we don't have to bother about that at the current moment because we are just going to take three note patterns so our first mission is to take just the first three notes of the scale namely C D and E flat okay they are the first three notes whichever minor scale even the harmonic minor scale will have C D and E flat as the first three notes this continues running in the left and the right hand will slowly but surely do some patterns the first pattern would be so from the top you're going to go down so we go there we go what's happening there quaver quaver crotchet quaver quaver quarter none may be a bit tricky to get your two hands going so I'd advise you to slow it down and figure out exactly where the interaction points are between the two hands so once you finish playing it slowly develop some confidence go a bit faster and then you need to develop some enjoyment as well with enjoyment you need to take yourself away from the piano you need to distance yourself and just enjoy what you're doing right and ideally don't talk while you're playing this as I'm doing right now which is pretty tricky actually so the first exercise is quaver quaver crotchet quaver quaver crotchet short short you can even do reverse those notes or jumble them following the same rhythm pattern you'll gain the same level of independence so you'll not have a problem coordinating if you jumble the notes because the hits are the same hit points so we've done short short long now let's do long short shot that'll be a crotchet and two quavers feel free to explore within these three notes and their patterns maybe you can even get a bit ambitious from here or adventurous and play the same rhythm pattern over other notes of this particular bigger scale okay and I'm singing the swaras completely optional but I'd encourage you to sing something you know that's our second pattern and just very briefly the first pattern just to get you to contrast that second pattern short short long short okay okay now moving on to some semi quavers we can try maybe this one a little quicker so we count it as oney and a two we can also move around I sometimes do this to just practice the swaras since the rhythm I don't have to bother about I just have to bother about the pitches and identifying or recognizing the intervals correctly okay let's move on let's now try so that's quaver semi quaver two semi quavers poses a different technical challenge as you can see hit points are different and each of them have their own beauty you could say so the first one let's move forward so the longer ones in the middle now one e and a two e if you think about these are all binary permutations so you have four four slots and you're saying play three plays and one don't play so that could be the first one I showed you tick tick tick tick tick x tick tick tick x tick tick x x meaning there's no hit there right then you could do tick x tick tick there we go tick x tick tick then you can do something like a tick tick x tick which are all binary permutations if you if you have three ones and one zero right so what's the remaining one zero one one one but in a binary way that'll be quite like that and you can combine you can do maybe um in one bar only you can do two of them or maybe you could also bring in some thirds so there are two kinds of thirds on the piano and in music in general you could look at an upper third just to spice it up these are diatonic thirds so you can see my notes to get a good mapping of all your these are I would call these as upper thirds or tenor thirds as we call it in a choir context and you can even do these wider thirds which is taking the thirds and moving them down which are wider alto thirds which is lower so you get the idea you can do thirds to spice it up and you can obviously change the notes combine that okay now I'm getting carried away you get the idea so these are binary permutations using just for a start just garesa or cde flat now one more pattern before we journey forward to four note groupings I have one more three note grouping I like this rhythm pattern it'll push your independence and it's also very popular you'll you'll recognize it right away we call this as the thresio grouping it's very popular I like that minor third for fun okay and all this with the left hand continuing its job of doing that pentatonic up and down so we've done some nice three note patterns and the job for you is pretty simple two beats are there how many three note patterns can you come up with practice them leave them in the comments for others to learn you can even record it on instagram and tag either me or nathaniel school or both and we'll be happy to check it out and also reshare so let's now move on to four note patterns the fourth note for this demonstration would be b flat so I'm generally doing it in I like that order if lati b flat c it breaks the linearity so okay let's bring back our old faithful left hand pattern one is four semi quavers and chill out for a beat pretty easy I think you can even do to get to get started you can just do four quavers then there we go then let's do the next pattern which is given there that is one let's clap it out first things are getting a bit tricky so let's clap and then play one e and one e and one e and it's a 16th note phrasing one e and first do it with a simple pulse I would guess before you get that pentatonic going once you're comfortable bring the pentatonic scale into the party e and a two e and a one e and a two sing feel the beats okay moving on next pattern would be one e and two e one e and two two slow that a bit quite like this now the grouping of four so next pattern so it's going from very fast to little slower and then very slow ending with a crotchet at the two and the four down if you then let's do a couple more just to take you out of the semi quaver domain I have this last pattern for you which uses triplets namely eighth note triplets so two and so you count it first of all one and a two and a three and let's do this the challenge is if you can take up the challenge keep the semi quavers in the left hand semi quaver in the left hand as you can see it's a bit tricky I'm not able to talk and do this but that's the idea you can try that out and just like the three note groupings try and build your own patterns over the four note groupings and let us know in the comments what you've come up with and as always you can record it and share it with us on your Instagram or that's about it I guess yeah so hope you found the lesson useful and may this be the start of many more let us know in the comments if you found it useful and I'll be happy to kind of curate a few other improvisational challenges for you if you're finding this useful and if it helps you're playing let us know and it will motivate us and inspire us to come up with a lot more like this there's a lot more from where this has come from and I'm sure you'll also agree that there's a lot more we can go from here we can do five note groupings we can do all sorts of things we can start getting into some melodic and harmonic stuff along the way right guys thanks a ton for watching the lesson and don't forget to follow us on Patreon where you can get the handwritten notes you can get the staff notation and midi files and if you'd like to learn music in a structured manner head over to nathanielschool.com you can write to our course advisor by filling up a simple form shooting an email or even a whatsapp message cheers and catch you in the next one