 Hi everyone. This is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. Here are five super easy approaches on the piano to accompany yourself. You could be a beginner, you could be a intermediate person or whatever, but these are five approaches which I mean they are easy to play and I think also very easy to understand. It doesn't require a lot of music theory and a lot of the technical stuff and definitely not a lot of notation and things like that. So some of our YouTube videos are like this, a bit more freer viewing so to speak. So I encourage you to get your keyboards out, get a notebook out if possible and play along with me. Whatever I do in the video, it'll be great if you can follow along. If you're new to the channel, hello, there's a subscribe button up there somewhere or down there somewhere. Click that please. There's a bell also for those of you who don't know that will give you all the notifications whenever we go live, whenever we drop a new video or in our channel's cases a daily riff. So without any further delay, let's get cracking. First approach would be a fifth chord in the right hand. Now let's first figure out what a fifth chord is. A fifth chord is not like those major and minor chords with three notes. It just needs two notes. Fifth chords for piano, we just steal them from the guitarist who call it power chord and we don't play it in the power area or the left hand. We played in the right hand instead. So if you take one fifth chord, there's something magical which can happen just with this one fifth chord. So what am I playing right now? I'm playing a G fifth. So G fifth would be root fifth octave, root perfect fifth in the octave, right? You can invert that chord as well. You can do D, G, D. You can also do G, D, G. And remember this tutorial is to accompany yourself on the piano, not necessarily to play a tune on the keyboard. You're going to be singing something. So you go fifth chord, just hold it or play it on a pulse and let's say this fifth chord is part of a scale, G major scale. What's the one of G major? G, right? So play some G's. And I'd always encourage you to try and sing something because it's for the purpose of accompanying. So you should sing. What did I do there? I moved from the G root to to a very legal note in the G major scale, right? E is there. So I moved from the root to the sixth. And the bass movement makes all the difference for your harmony. It's not necessarily what all you change in the right hand. Yes, the right hand change does matter, but the left hand dictates it. It governs the way your song is actually moving in a journey. So. To check that out, right hand did nothing to move it. It just stayed there and look at the left hand. It just played G, E, C, D or something, something in the G major scale. Let's just keep exploring. Sometimes your voice can influence the choice of the left hand. Sometimes the left hand could decide or influence your voice, what you sing. Like, for example. That's a bit more uplifting. So. You end up singing what you're playing. So. That's the five. So usually at the five, it's a cycling note. So it's the five of the scale. So it's a dominant. It wants to come back to a loop. And then I would encourage you to do it. So you can do it. You can do it. So you can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. And then I would encourage you to create a loop using the fifth chord with a moving bass. Don't overdo it with the bass. It doesn't have to sound this peaceful as well. The fifth chord is not telling you that it's happy or sad. It's like a very neutral sound. So if you're on a G minor key or some minor. A lot of rock songs use this. I'm on the G minor now. You can do these things which you could never do with chords. You can do like a minor sixth going to a major sixth. That's something you can't do with when you're playing actual chords. It's very tricky. Even if you're a guitar player watching this you may agree with me. Now even that F sharp which is wrong it kind of still works. You can get a very Phrygian sound by playing those dissonances D to flat. So the fifth chord don't think of it as happy or sad. It's a very neutral sound and it's all down to your left hand doing its thing. Usually the right hand of the piano is considered the creative hand but with this way of harmonizing or accompanying I'm sure you'll agree that it's actually your left hand doing all the work. Your right hand is well just fixed. It's just a pillar. It's just staying there. So that was one way I think you can use as a beginner or at any level to just make some music or accompany yourself or if you're given a chord progression and maybe you don't know inversions or shifting of chords becomes a bit tricky. You could read the chart. G E minor C major D major. Let's say that's your chart. You can just play G major. Don't think of it as G major. Think of it as a G fifth because you're in the key of G and just play the root notes of all those chords in the left hand. Left hand. You can also use this technique to kind of freely accompany yourself playing songs you don't even need to know the chords to. For example, I don't know the chords to this song. So I'm just kind of feeling it. I know I'm on the G scale. I'm just looking at any of those seven notes. And the sky is the limit here. Also kind of makes you sing something creative. It's also great for gospel music because a lot of the hymns we play in church are extremely sophisticated harmonically. The notes move in counterpoint. They move in choral or orchestral harmony. So it becomes very tricky to kind of play chords for a hymn or for a traditional church song. So this technique can really help you. For example, if we pick... Kind of works with just a fifth there. You can explore. Kind of helps you to navigate through very complex songs as well like hymns in a gospel scenario. So this is a good strategy I think to get cracking on the piano. However, I'm not done with the lesson. I have four more. Let's move on to the next way to accompany yourself super easy on the piano. So a lot of people on our channel seem to watch my arpeggio lessons. So for some reason I tend to go overboard with the concept. There are a lot of advanced things out there on the channel where we add some notes, we do some fancy runs and stuff. But in this part to accompany, you just need to take a chord and just go, just figure out how do you break this up over a pattern. So let's say you're counting quavers one and two and three and four and then this is my chord two and three and so how do you play a note for all those divisions right one and two and three and four and so you could do something like this. There we go. So while playing this arpeggio just look how basic it is right. It's just the chord starting with the bottom note, the middle note, the high note and just kind of rounding them. And that's an arpeggio. It's that simple. L M H M as I like to call it or you can jumble it around. You can do high middle low middle high middle low middle stuff like that or maybe you could do high low middle low high low middle low high low middle low You could apply this technique to accompany yourself for any song which I guess is more like a ballad like an Adele song for instance will work. So high middle and change your arpeggio. Now if you're on a three four kind of a scenario like you can just play three notes of the arpeggio one two three one two like stuff like this one or if you're doing six eight what you can do is you could play three notes and then add the pinky to add up to the octave. So you can do things like stuff like this basically swaying music. So these are some basic arpeggios to get you to you know accompany yourself and moving forward another strategy to quickly accompany yourself on the piano is what I call as the ballad ratios. Now think of your hands as ratios. So if you take one is to four. This is how you go one is to four one two three four one two. That's pretty much it. So your two hands are colliding at the same time one two and then the other hand kind of goes a bit extra one two three four. So if you take a chord you're going to want to play the actual chord in the right hand as generally you play chords around middle C and above it not you know here sounds very muddy there so right hand two three can play it around here and the left hand you're going to probably play the bass or the root of the chord right but you need to play this pattern such that it's one two three four one two okay four one or anything it could be one two three one if it's a waltz birthday to you two three one stuff I don't know why I'm singing nursery rhymes in all my videos people have been complaining so need to figure that out okay so you take the one is to four again our favorite G minor chord now so check this out so you go two three four and just go four in the right and four in the left F major works for almost everything and to make the rhythm a bit more interesting you could kind of play it with an octave in your left but instead of kind of holding the left like that you can just take the thumb of the left and ghost it as I call it ghosting basically means playing that octave very very softly so you feel the pump you feel the energy you don't really hear it as like that that sounds a bit annoying if you ask me because it's overshadowing the actual performance so stuff like this one is to four I can do a few phrasings if you want like things like that you can always do by following the drummer and other musicians so that's the ballad pivot so any song you're trying to sing and play start with this see what ratio will serve my song is it a three by four in which case a one is to three could work is the four by four in which case a one is to four could work even a two is to four could work and so on and so forth so it's a nice way to like just get your accompaniment cracking you know on track okay so let's move on to the fourth strategy this is what I call a syncopation very much like how drums work so you're learning a song you want to figure out what pattern to play you know the chords but you want to figure out the pattern so think of how your low frequency and high frequencies are going to chat with each other so if you take let's say a D minor chord you're gonna play the root here and you'll probably play the chord there but don't collide them together unlike the earlier version ratios which is still good for ballads but here we're trying to make more dancy and more groovy kind of music so you instead of going colliding both chords together I can do things like left right right or maybe left left right left left right just literally calling that out this can evolve into like a nice bass line you can also inspire other musicians who you play with or if you're doing this with another singer you can do other things like if you know certain rhythms if you're reading a rhythm pattern let's say you're reading a song clave which is a very common salsa rhythm which goes something like this so if you want to adopt that on the piano why do when you could kind of break it down you know you're not going to have kick and snare in a drum kit scenario going kick and snare together it sounds horrible they would always have an interplay between the two drums of the drum kit or the same thing with the tabla you'll find him playing the bass one and the high one not together it's not going to be like that it's going to be one by one so same story here so if you're doing that cha cha cha cha cha maybe you could consider left right right left right left right right stuff like that you could also gain inspiration from the actual drummer who you're jamming with or the drums in the song you know you could put on a song and try to navigate through only what the drummer is doing you could use an app like Moises for instance which can isolate certain instruments and it's really cool you should check it out so you have the challenge is of course singing it but you have to see what you can do right go all tabla on the piano at some point as well so syncopation is something where you just tell yourself left and right need to chat with each other so how does a chat work the two hands should not talk at the same time otherwise it becomes a useless conversation so it's the first thing the left hand says something the right hand responds like sort of like a Q&A or just a chat an interaction between the bass and the treble so to speak right I hope that will work for you and I hope you enjoy that approach of accompanying yourself on the piano I have one final word of advice on how you can accompany yourself on the piano super easy that would be just start with the melody and harmonize it how you see fit so what I mean by that is if you take a G now that's a note this note will have a lot of chords which can serve it well and there they are G major G minor E flat major maybe C major C major C minor and then E minor you can do so many things with just G for example now what she's singing Adele in the song is she's not only doing this is the end she's doing this is the end but she eventually lands on that note so be aware of well in the melody you have two kinds of notes we have the landing and we have the connecting or the passing note so if you land on G that's going to end up being a note which you want to find a chord for or harmonize as we call it so this is the end you don't want to do this is you want to harmonize the word end or the end this is the end so you choose a chord for that and as it turns out they use three chords for that this is the end G minor E flat major C major and Adele takes a break because she doesn't need to sing anything more there's a note G and the composer has just played three chords for the price of just one G this is the end you have so many examples like this you know where the melody is probably you don't even know what came first it's like a chicken and egg scenario whether the tune came first or the chords came first and sometimes I ask some musician friends you know how did you write that song and some of them actually don't know so maybe when you write a good song it's that chicken and egg thing which is happening you think of the melody then the chord then you think of a chord and then the chord gives you a melody things like that so just off the top if we just build some music that's B minor G minor C that's a D7 E minor what chord to do then what's the chord maybe that stay with the same note la la la stay with the same note la la la E major a glamorous way to eventually come back to A you can also make music which is not very diatonic it can be just music which just has a note there and a chord which supports it and you don't know where it will go it becomes a very adventurous way to write stuff so that's an idea I have for you not only to you know accompany yourself but also to compose and rearrange songs and make it about the melody if you're trying to work on your chords because accompaniment needs chords and it needs a rhythm pattern so let's just recap all the five approaches towards piano accompaniment which I think you can definitely make some use of and let me know what you think as well in the comments whenever you get towards playing some of these patterns so we first looked at fifth chords with basically a bass movement la la la da da da da da da da then we looked at building basic arpeggios three six then we looked at our ballad style which is based on ratios one two three four one in this case one is to four left hand one and right hand four times then we looked at syncopation where you have a groove in your mind like and figure out a way to kind of execute it on the piano and last but not least look at it as an adventurous process where you have the melody as the pivot or the the focal point figure out the landing notes of the melody and then associate chords with it using a variety of strategies like one step would be just write down the available chords of the scale you're in and just experiment just see which chord works fine and when you have to choose the chord and when you have to find the chord for a song you're also motivated to playing it a lot better than when you're just reading it off a chart that's something I like to do very often when I learn songs or accompany songs try to figure it out on your own use your ears use your logic use your brain understand why that chord is being played in the first place what is it doing to the the song right right guys so that's about it these are five I hope super easy ways to accompany yourself or any of your friends or bandmates on the piano and maybe you could use these even in a recording studio you could use this in a band setting I hope you can use some of these concepts on stage as well if you're a singer-songwriter hopefully it helps you to make some music you know as a singer-songwriter there are a lot of polyphonic instruments out there but almost all these instruments the guitar the piano the banjo and what not will always look at standard patterns which we can cling on to while we are focusing on sort of the bigger picture which is composing a melody writing the lyrics putting it all together and so on right hope this lesson was useful continue to support the channel thanks a ton for watching don't forget to hit the like button if you like the video leave us a comment with something you'd like to learn in the future and hit the subscribe that'll be very helpful there's a bell also for regular notifications thanks a ton this is Jason