 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson I am going to introduce you to an exercise which I composed or a tune I have composed. I tend to call it a tune more than an exercise but it works on a lot of aspects of your piano technique. It will work on your hand independence, your chord changing, it will work on your different styles of melody movement, whether you are trying to you know pivot one note while playing. This has that. If you are trying to do some pattern based playing, this has it. If you are trying to divide the beat into different elements, if you are trying to divide by 2, by 3 or by 4, this seems to have all the options, quavers, semi-quavers, triplets and so on and so forth. Now apart from that, there is also a very good practice exercise. It is also a good way to kind of prepare for something you are going to do like maybe playing a show or getting ready for a rehearsal or a recording. This could be a very good 10 minute workout. So you can think of it as a 10 minute piano workout to test almost all aspects of the right hand and the left hand. Now the right hand for the most part is going to take on melodies, tackle your melodic playing and improvisation there while your left hand is going to hold chords and rhythm. So I think this exercise not only gives you that platform to express yourself with other stuff of course, but it also gives you a mindset. It gives you a way to kind of be in the zone as I call it to create, innovate, compose, jam and of course perform. So I am going to demonstrate this on both the F major scale and the G major scale and the notation for this, for those of you who read music is available on our Patreon in sheet music form. Also my handwritten notes are available for those of you who don't read and you will get both of it of course as a Patreon subscriber. Head over there if possible, it will also support our channel really well. So do consider supporting us on Patreon. Before we get started it will be great if you could hit that bell icon with the subscribe button and leave us a like for the video and obviously give us a comment with stuff you would like to learn in the future. The channel does regular content and also share the video with your fellow musician friends or anyone in your house who likes to play the piano, introduce them to our channel that will go a long way. Before I start teaching the lesson it will be nice if you could get your keyboards ready and also make note if you are not a piano player, if your main instrument is flute, violin or something, it also works on those instruments. Strangely enough I compose this exercise on a trumpet which is another instrument I play and I also tried it out on the bass which I am not so good at, I need to practice it more on the bass but I have a feeling it's not just a piano exercise because I invented it not on the piano and then it came to the piano and it became an awesome drill. So whichever instrument you play, if you would like to try this out on the flute, on the mandolin, whatever it may be, pull your instrument out and let's work together. Come on. So on the F major scale first of all let's revise the scale. One flat namely who, B flat, you call it B flat and then G major which is the other scale we'll be doing in and out of the lesson. So that's your G major with one sharp namely who, F sharp. So I'm going to do it on F and explain the melody first and then we'll do it on G sort of fast forward at the end of the, at the latter stages of the video. So by the end of at least my discussion or my module we'll be done with two scales and I would encourage you and I would also be you know forcing myself as well when I practice to do it on as many scales and keys as possible. So if you wanted to do it on F major which we are going to do now also try to do it on maybe an F minor. So on a major it would be but on a minor it's not too far away you just flatten the third, the sixth and maybe even the seventh in the natural or you leave the seventh alone for the harmonic minor. So you go sounds minor, sounds major. So I would encourage you to practice it on different scales and on different keys of these different scales right because then it'll be refreshing your skills it'll continue to improve your technique otherwise you'll just be doing it for the sake of doing it because you think the melody is cool or something like that. So coming back to the tune so I'm going to play it for you very slowly we are on the key of F, F major again so the first line will be repeated almost carbon copied so let's deal with that system first that's my line one so you think of it as four sets of four semi quavers four fours are 16 so 16 semi quavers adds up to a bar of four so something like this that's your line one try it with me let's slow it down F C F A G C G B flat A C A C A lower C and A higher C B flat A G A B flat A G A one more time and you want to count semi quavers which are 16 notes so that'll be one E and a two E and a three E and a four E you can go slightly slower in the initial stages okay the second line is very similar to the first line but I at the very end I do B flat A G F in the first line I did B flat A G A I went to the A the first line and second line put together now okay in terms of scale degrees it's also nice to mention and make a note off you'll find that in our notes which you can download in the link and you you go one five one three it's good to know it in scale numbers so then you can do it wherever one five one three if you're familiar with swaras or soul fetch you could do something like you could kind of scientifically write it down in the paper what are these numbers of whatever notes and then you can transpose it to pretty much whichever key or scale you're trying to work on so one five one three two five two four three back to the lower five three higher five okay so that's common for the first two lines and now versus second line one more time and over time try to put in some speed if you can yeah you can try you don't have to go that fast but you can try just try and push yourself out of your comfort zone and exercise is not an exercise if it doesn't you know if it doesn't torture you in simple words it has to push you to get better it has to feel like a workout it has to be tough you're not going to get better if you just play it you know you have to play it out of your comfort zone and in some cases you can go way out of your comfort zone because then when you have to deal with actual material like improvising with musicians jamming and stuff like that things get a lot easier okay so in the left hand what do we do in the left hand i'm taking these chords with these inversions i'm playing f major with second inversion so you go c f a now i could have played f ac but then the c is clashing here so instead of that i go here okay for the first beat i play now for the second beat i hope you're hearing that right chords are in in this exercise the chords are going to change every beat not every bar which is conventional so what happened there i went to a c major there which is the five come back to the tonic which is f now i'm playing the subdominant or the predominant chord which is b flat major played as d f b flat so one more time now you could do the five or the four for that middle chord both sound good but i'm going with one five which is c major one four one five one four one one so you can do is put in some punch i like that staccato for the first three kind of opens up you like you're opening closing something so uh yeah you could also work on your rhythm for example you saw that so the second chord one e and a two e second chord is coming in at the e where i did the strange uh movement which i can't really control that's just a natural thing so you go try to always sing along as you play mumble something which works for you i i guess right so that's your first two lines which are pretty much a carbon copy of each other moving forward we go to this melody let me play it for you and then break the thing down guys so you go okay so that goes now for f major we tend to always need to cross over our ring finger because of that b flat there it'll be tricky otherwise so it goes don't want the middle there it's recommended to do the ring so so i'm doing middle on d thumb again on f cross the ring what did i do there so let's break that down do that one e and a two e that's eight notes so da da da da da da da da da da d f d f e d c b flat get that first so so get that cross going don't move your elbow too much i know it's difficult to avoid moving the elbow but don't move it too much you don't want to move it so that you lose balance on while playing the line so moving forward so what did i do the a g a b flat c a f c lower c you see the amount i've covered now i've covered more almost an octave and a half i guess let me play you the line again okay and then you need to jump again to play the next line which is again almost a carbon copy except the end i kind of chill out by playing quavers not semi quavers quavers are eighth notes semi quavers are sixteenth notes for those of you are a bit confused so and then so instead of doing i did the second time very slowly and also while we're at it let's think of some chords what did i do there i did b flat major which is the predominant c major which is the dominant you may want to stick in this region the same inversions as we learned for the first melody right so same story so you do b flat major c major so b flat major c major and f repeat the f major tata so get that get those two lines let's do it together okay now the third line and fourth line well third line is ditto of the first line you kind of set that up by third line of the second section and lastly what did i do there those are sixteenth not triplets in action so sixteenth not triplet would divide a beat into six units that's what i'm trying to incorporate at the end so you go third time last so let's just go through the fingering of that triplet lick at the end now you have to cross it back because i would want you to recycle the melody so the one i taught you at the beginning so try to end on your ring finger okay so the the idea behind the exercise is you do the first two lines which is a different melody now in the next section repeat repeat repeat the end with the triplet flourish so when you do this exercise we need to keep a few things in mind one is don't forget your chords if you're struggling with the chords and the chord changes you can at least hold on like a single f but don't forget to keep the pulse i find some of my students sometimes just obsessed with the right hand melody that they forget about the left hand all together and that's not a good thing you want both your hands to always play this instrument together if you play with one hand it's not the right thing people like me will find you okay so in this case if you're not able to play the chords you just do single notes roots of the scale on the pulse of course it doesn't sound harmonically cool so then you could play the roots of the chords you could play the roots of the chords um you could also well just play the one chord f major and then graduate towards the chords then b flat c f b flat c f b flat c f triplet okay guys so so what i want you to do is go through our notes the notes will definitely help you out with the scale it'll also help you out with the fingering however uh by the before i go to g major and a few other variations i'm going to just slow this whole thing down without me talking so that you can watch everything which is going on and a few tips about fingering is plan ahead of time you always want to think what is the next thing i'm going to play don't think about what is convenient at the current point if you think of that then you'll ignore your ring and your pinky because the ring and the pinky are the weaker fingers right the ring is sort of tied up to the other fingers it doesn't have a mind of its own and the pinky we feel is generally weak it's not really weak it's it's a really really powerful finger you should check it out so when you play you need to use the correct fingering and also where you start is important so you want to think about that you know so you this is the ideal starting point is what i prefer so index index ring on the b flat middle on the a is what will really help you so i'm playing it quite effortlessly you don't want to overthink it with your pinky and rather overplay it with your pinky it'll be impossible so index ring middle and then you're set up with the pinky playing the c okay let me play the whole thing slowly watch my right hand and left hand and the fingering is also very important then let's move on right guys i hope this exercise is going to really help you really develop those muscles develop the minds of each finger to try and do its own thing let me just demonstrate it very quickly on g major g major is already notated for you you can check it out and uh encourage you to obviously do it on other scales as well so g will be almost the same fingering at least for the first half it's quite convenient i think slowly let's do it slowly the chords will change obviously in the left you'll be doing g major d major g c g okay then moving forward let's do it slowly unlike f you cross down your middle finger there again you can also flip out some fingers see by miss by chance if you play the pinky here it's very difficult to go back to the g with the pinky so check that out let's say by mistake or by chance you've played the pinky here can flip that out with the middle or the ring or whatever else so slow the process down my general recommendation is to play the ring finger on a black note cross the middle yeah so in this case i can only cross my pinky right i can't cross my middle finger so so use the pinky flip out with the middle so whole thing again back there we go guys so i've demonstrated it on g yes fingering is something you need to also play around with sometimes you can flip out fingers but don't commit to three fingers and then expect to get great results you need to commit to all your five and use all of them figure out how to use all of them while you play the piano chords are written down you have g major c major d major the tonic sub dominant and dominant now before i leave you with this lesson i would highly encourage you to practice this on the minor keys on the parallel minors they sound absolutely beautiful if i played on f f minor and then yeah it sounds really cool on minor so practice that so you shouldn't take the harmonic minor for granted because there's a gap between the sixth and the seven so that might confuse your fingers a bit compared to what you did with the major so definitely try to practice this exercise on the minor harmonic natural whichever you prefer and yeah that's the exercise guys so in a nutshell it's a good exercise to help you with the pivoting of notes it's a good exercise to help you with chord changes which happen at a fairly rapid rate i understand it's not for the absolute beginner yes you should have played for a while at least a few months and with some hand coordination you know you will be able to play this exercise thanks again for watching guys this is jason here from nathaniel don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already hit that bell icon for notifications consider getting yourself a copy of these lesson notes and not only this lesson pretty much all the other lessons for just $5 a month i will see you in the next one or you will see me in the next one cheers