 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, I'm going to introduce you to left hand accompaniment techniques which can go over a variety of soloing or melody playing in the right hand and the main intention for this is to give you these techniques assuming you already know some left hand stuff already. Maybe you know how to do like a simple arpeggio kind of thing going on here or maybe you're used to just playing chords stuff like that or maybe some simple grooves with a melody line. So assuming you know some accompaniment in the left hand as a beginner or as an intermediate kind of player, I'm sure you'll find something in this lesson quite useful for your piano journey. The whole intention is to just add little bit to what you already know and that little bit is going to sound really really pro. It's exactly the secrets done by all the super pro piano players which me and you guys I'm sure already idolize and over my years as a growing piano player, I've learned that you know some of these things you just get one day it just comes to you but it's more trial and error and sometimes you kind of get a bit annoyed that you're doing everything which the great pianist is doing, you just don't sound like that particular player. So there's this small thing which they do which really adds the color and makes it sound professional like the best it can possibly get. So there are five of these secrets or pro sounding left hand accompaniment techniques which I definitely am eager to share with you and before I do it'll be awesome if you can hit that like button, leave us a comment with anything you'd like to learn, there's a subscribe that will really help our channel grow, join our channel, there's a bell which will remind you of lessons which keep coming your way and we also have a Patreon account where all of my handwritten notes sometimes MIDI files and a few other things whenever the lesson supports it or demands it, it'll be available on our Patreon. Let's get cracking. So if you're playing any old melody, let's say a lot of people will play a song like My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean with arpeggios either F C F root 5th octave. You know, now this is convenient for the fingers I understand but it doesn't sound pro. So how do you make this left hand arpeggio accompaniment always work and sound pro? You need two things. The most important is study that chord. There is no third in there. So what do you need to do? Bring in a third. What's the easiest way? Knock off the octave. You don't need that octave twice. What do you do instead? There we go. You have F major now a proper F major and a very deep F major. So even if you want to do a lower chord C major can really make your harmony sound really dense and epic. Now the challenge here is you can't really stretch even at least I can't. I can't really go a tenth interval like this. So what I do is I use the pedal kind of curve my hand to latch on to that A and you just practice that. So now if you take the same melody earlier it was now with this technique also allow your right hand to do a lot more. You can also do dominant chords in a spread way so you need to get used to this system and what makes it sound really thick is actually this spread voicing technique here. It's not really it's sometimes not even the melodic embellishments. You can just play simple melody that's spread voicing for chords and there's a lot of additional content which we've done regarding spread voicing. We have a playlist where I've even walked you through a version of amazing grace where we've done that with fully spread voicings. And we also go very very advanced into the concept of spread voicing. So spread voicings make things sound really pro. Moving on. So a very underrated rhythm on the piano is where you just think like a bass player who plays country music, similar music and just goes tum tum tum tum tum tum tum tum tum that's essentially root fifth. Now you could play the root and the fifth above it or you could play the fifth below it so just keep that groove going. This can really bring out a lot a lot of groove depending on the melody. So if you're doing a groovy melody or a melody which has a few off beats like for example so root and fifth toggling the root and fifth is very very important. Just keep that root toggling and whenever the chords shift fast avoid that. So you can also do this in a very bluesy context. It works for a lot of things. It will really also work for dancy stuff. If your melody is maybe like a dancy melody anything you want jumpy in the right hand you can complement it really well in the left hand with a root and a fifth toggle. So that's the next way to make your left hand accompaniment go absolutely pro. Moving on. Right so the third accompaniment technique is what I call as the magic arpeggio. So what happens there is you just take let's say a chord and you played in an arpeggio which is L H M H. So first of all that makes it very unique I find a lot of students doing that one that's not very professional what the pros do is they go L H M H okay root fifth in this case third and then fifth so you toggle that and you can use your pedal or you could hold your pinky holding the pinky makes it very professional very tasteful with the pedal it adds the overtones you could also for contrast start with the lower root then play the root higher so that's L H M H L H M H L H octave of the L so you can do so many things with this stuff like this do it slowly so L H M H another nice song to learn with L H M H is the theme from the movie amily it goes we've done a lesson on that you can definitely check it out there so L H M H arpeggio really really important with pinky holding with pedal hold very very important moving on so if you want to make people dance on the piano there is one groove you have to learn that is called as the thresio so the way it works is you've heard it everywhere you've heard it in Ed Sheeran songs you've heard it everywhere you've heard it in every modern pop dance song ever ever done so if you incorporate that in your left hand maybe with a let's say G now you could go fully EDM by going root octave octave root oct octave just just makes anything dancey not that you have to make those songs dancey but you get the idea it just transforms it now you could do root octave octave you can even do you can do the spread voicing as I talked about in point number one in the thresio just playing some random stuff but if you're finding this stuff you can even do like this or like that root octave root third fifth root third all of this has to be like an engine while your right hand change the chord there we have it right so the last way to make your left hand accompaniment sound absolutely pro would be to just use the pedal and figure out a strategy to play a very deep bass for example F and then take your same left hand and come over a little bit higher around middle C remember the pedal is holding that see without the pedal it would be over so you hold the pedal play that particular root of the chord come to the right hand and play which whichever chord you're trying to do so if you take let's say you know this Beatles song right so this is a very loungey and very deep dense sound because you're getting the root here and the chord there you know do all sorts of things if you take a minor version should definitely listen to artists like Eric Satie who's a really incredible sort of ambient piano player very classical meets jazz very modern like going from that classical era to the the the more jazzy era right so there are a lot of artists who do this so let me try and put this all together and give you one song with all the five left hand accompaniment strategies why don't we just take everyone's favorite song I'm sure it's your favorite as well twinkle little star there is no song better than that so let's do it with that so what's happening here spread voicing with the chords F major G minor D minor F over a C7 maybe C spread okay so if you take twinkle in that style now what else do we do twinkle with root and fifth toggle you probably want to groove up the melody a bit more because it needs to contrast that right okay now twinkle with the magic arpeggio there we go very classical as well you hear a lot of classical pieces with this style LHMH okay now let's groove it up and make twinkle like an EDM song Tressio not carried away there but the actual groove is okay last version the mellow version chords with the pedal and deep bass could also change it quicker and give it a more stride feel so just by making it more staccato versus legato you get different feels like a nice stride ragtime kind of feel would be you know but the same thing with a more loungy version with the pedal and some deep bass will sound like this there we go so as I've hopefully showed you you're able to play the best song on ever written in all these five ways so now you could do this do it with twinkle and obviously do it with your favorites and my main purpose or my main intention with this lesson is to boost what you already know so if you're already working on a song if you're working on a piece of music which maybe a company is like in a more bland way or if it if to you it feels it sounds a bit simple it doesn't sound the way I heard it on Spotify by the original artist maybe it's one of these five techniques which will help you transform it from a like a beginner or a basic sounding version to something you might enjoy right guys so those were the five ways to make your left hand accompaniment sound professional and I hope you found the lesson useful do consider heading over to our patreon to get some of these notes from this lesson things in the past and things in the future for sure it's a subscription of about five bucks a month and you could also consider a yearly subscription where you get a discount and you get all the notes from all the lessons on the patreon again this is Jason here don't forget to subscribe leave us a comment share the video with your friends and keep rocking cheers