 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from the Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, I basically want to share an approach or rather a lot of approaches. We are looking at five approaches in this lesson wherein you take the simplest of melodies which you can possibly play. And I would imagine that this melody is quite easy. That's it. So you could say one and two and three and four and you're essentially waiting there. So you have a nice gap to gather your senses. That's just three notes on the D major scale. So if you look at it, D, E, F sharp, D, that's it. Or you can say, Saregasa. The whole lesson is going to be based on just that melody. And we've looked at a lot of left hand options. We've looked at a lot of chord options. We've looked at a lot of hand independence options and so on. So after numerous requests from all of our followers, which is you guys, a lot of you have asked how do you embellish a melody or how do you add more things harmonically to the melody. But what I thought of doing is we are going to do two really simple things in this lesson. One is the melody is super easy. And the second thing will be no chords. We're not going to use any chord. There's no triad or seventh chord. So we're not going to embellish it with chords. We're not going to do well, no chords and very simple melody. I'm not going to change that tune. Okay, don't get bored as well because it's going to go on for a while. So let's just get cracking with this melody and with this framework of simplicity, there's just absolutely minimal information happening. It's just as long as you're on time. So let the melody inspire you and don't bother changing it or spicing it up too much. But there are other things you can do. And there are a lot of things which can be done at a very, very beginner level. And there will be a few of these ideas which will even suit those of you who've been playing the piano for many years. So before we get started guys, it'll be great if you can subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you haven't already hit the bell for notifications, we've done a lot of lessons. So you may be missing some of them, especially the older stuff due to the YouTube fancy algorithm. So try to hit the bell whenever we release new stuff. And that's about it. Let's get cracking. So the melody, point number one or suggestion number one. Yes, piano has to be played with both hands. So what should the left hand do? You just ask yourself that question. Now a common observation I found with students is they start putting in chords. Now a lot of the issues start cropping up. For one, do you, are you okay enough to play chords? Are you okay with shifting the chords, which is a challenge, or maybe playing chords so deep down on the piano with such a muddy sound may actually just ruin the whole process in any case. So the first thing I'd like you to start doing in your left hand is identify a way to sell the melody better or to market the melody better. And that is with different bass movements. That's what allows your music to tell a story and move dynamically. Because if I were to play, well, it appears as though there is motion, but then if I keep repeating it, you don't enjoy the loop, right? You want different things to happen, right? Even in day to day life, you don't want to just go around the park every day. You want to meet people, you want to probably have some momos or whatever you enjoy eating. So even though you're moving through the same activity, you want different perspectives. So the first and most easiest way I would imagine is to look at the left hand, just to do simple stuff and start with your scale, write it down. And if you write it down, you know that D major has seven notes. D E F sharp G A B C sharp D. And don't play all of them in the left hand and don't overdo it in the left hand. Play one note and see how nice it sounds throughout the melody. For example, D. It's definitely giving perspective to the melody because you're playing the home note or the root note or the tonic note. If you can, you can play it as octaves. But now it's sort of like you're still in your house. You haven't left the building so to speak. So identify some other notes of the D major scale. So you can the pop notes or as they say the money making notes will be the one, the six, the four, and the five. So that'll be D, B, the six, four, G, five, the A, sadha, ma, pa. Those are your intervals using swaras. So now I would want you to change those notes at your convenience over the same melody. So let's see how that goes. There we have it. I'm doing one, six, four. Okay. And if you'd like a little bit of a rhythm, go for it. You can do maybe two strikes per bar. By the time the melody will end, it's a one bar melody. So you do two chord hits per bar. Hit, hit, change to G. And now right now we are diatonic to the key of D major. What that means in simple words is we're using all the notes of the D major scale or a few of them. But with the bass, we don't change it so fast. You don't want to do that kind of sounds nice. You don't want to change the bass so often because the bass is more like a foundation for the melody. So as the melody goes through the journey, the bass will support it well. And that's exactly what it does. That's its role in the first place. Now, can you explore other notes of the D major scale? Well, of course, but my advice to you for instantly pleasant sounding music would be stick with a four note progression and loop it, recycle it and enjoy that loop. Don't just keep going random notes. So pick four and then kind of loop it. For example, maybe go to the four from the one, go to the six and then I just jumble the notes. So you can reorder your one, five, six, fours or else you can even try that's your two. And now let's go to the three. Beautiful. The three for me is the uplifting note. The two is like a it's a note which asks the question what comes next, you know, and that pulls that's like a magnet that's your five pulls back to the tonic. So you need to feel the vibe of what these bass notes are doing for the melody. And did the melody change so far? I guess you're realizing so far that the melody has not changed and it is not going to change in this entire lesson. So that is one approach which is very important for you to consider. And before I move on to the next approach, it's also important to note that the left hand could also do non diatonic stuff. For example, you can do a C, right? It's a very Mr. Big Sound. Maybe a B flat. It's a very like theatric kind of sound, you know, and and then maybe G sharp is quite cool. Well, some notes may not work, you know, to your liking, but in theory, because you're not committing to a triad, you're not playing three, you know, thick notes in the left hand, you're not committing to a chord. So in theory, you can play any note out of the set of 12. So start with the pop progression, which is 1564, some assortment of that, then check out other notes in the scale to three and seven and the missing ones, and then try chromatic options like player note, which is not part of the D major scale. So approach number one to take and transform a simple melody into something very professional sounding would be to move the bass. Let's now move on to the next stage, right? So the next thing is very simple. I'm not going to spend too much time on it. It's basically the landing note, whatever note you think is the land. So in this case, that's the landing one. A landing note is, well, the last note of the cycle, or the note which just lasts very long in the midst of everything. So that's the one, not the first D, the second D. That's the land. So for the listener, even for you playing it, you are also a listener, you will be like that, that landing note is not so, I mean, it's getting a bit obvious, it's getting a bit monotonous. So maybe change the landing note, something like this. Quite like that. C sharp. Completely fine because we are part of the D scale. C sharp is the seventh. You could also sing it before you play it. Then it comes directly from you, you know, not the piano's own technicality. Or go higher. Higher to the A. You'll have to realign your fingers a bit. What we discussed earlier was navigate through your left hand as well and see how they pair up. Could also work. Then do the middle one. Right. So that's the melody just with one note. I know I promise that I won't be changing the melody, but well, we've just changed one note. That is not a big deal, I think for all of you watching this video. So that was step number two to transform a ridiculously simple melody. Let's now move to step three. So the third approach to transform a melody would just be to observe the intervals of the existing melody. So this would be that's going up by three, coming back to the one, right? It's quite plain and simple. You don't need theory for that. You can literally see it. It's like going up the ladder three steps and then coming back to the bottom. It's tough to do on an actual ladder, but you get the idea. Okay, now you play around with this. So instead of going up, down, flip it around, down, up. And what happens there? New melody versus maybe do two of the earlier one and do two of the new one, which could be so on. The left hand, of course, adds what it has always been adding in this entire lesson so far. So flip the melody, can just say flip it, or you can even create a moving pattern out of these notes. You're doing one, two, three, one. So if you go to the next step and then you do here, well, it's the same tune almost, but starting on another scale degree, which is the E. So if you think about it, one option has now become, well, 14 options, if you think about it, right? Why? Because the scale has seven notes. You can change your melody or move your melody to any of these degrees. That's seven options. And then why into two? Because you can flip each of those options. So I went to the five and decided to drop it down. So down, up versus up, down, if that makes sense. Or maybe just go up for a while. You don't want to make it like a rather boring drill, which is a nice drill, but it doesn't make you a song. So you want to think of it from a composing and a music making perspective always. So that's the whole point we are trying to make in this third approach to transform a melody. What do we do? Observe it and just look at the movement. Just look at the shape it's giving you. It's going up by three, going down and a little skip there. So transform it by flipping the tune around that axis or move it on different scale degrees. So start on E, do it on a new, well, it's almost the same melody. It's just gotten moved by a scale degree, you could say. So let's move on. So another thing which will transform the melody and remember what I told you, we are not going to use chords. We'll just use one note. What you could start off by doing is just add the A, which is the fifth of the scale. The fifth or the tonic or the root tend to sound the best and tend to always sound consonant with the music you're trying to create. So if you do D, rather this melody, D, E, F sharp, D, you could align it such that you have a finger free, which in this case is the thumb. So you don't want to do. Now you don't have the thumb. So the thumb is a very powerful finger for the piano. You can stretch it all over the place as you can clearly see. And it's a short finger, so it doesn't invade anything and you can cross stuff over it. So you can't cross the other fingers, but the thumb you can do pretty much anything with it. It's a very powerful finger. So you should use it like a different finger altogether. Some people try to practice exercises for all five fingers. Well, you should do that too. But you should also see the role of each finger in terms of the music which it can do because each finger can give you different music or serve a different role for whatever you're trying to create. So you go free the thumb up. As you can see, it gives you a huge stretch, can go all over the keyboard well. That's a good enough amount, almost a foot you could say. So you go. Now stack up a note just to add some harmonic flavor. So you could try A. Don't over hit A. You don't want to do. May sound a bit too much. So try and hold the A down if you can or use the pedal. Can use the pedal. Now you're like, okay, I've stacked up one note, the most obvious note. Well, even that could move around because it's the thumb. The thumb is the most flexible finger. So move that around. Maybe B. Maybe. Oh, that's lovely. B flat, even though it's not part of D because I have not committed to a chord. So I can play anything I want. I'm just literally enjoying the beauty of every interval right now. I've even kind of left the scale to think about it. A, B flat, A. Let's try a few more. G sharp, maybe G. F sharp maybe too much of a stretch. So just stay in this zone. Some strange reason even C sharp sounds good. Not alone, but with the tune. Maybe. Well, it all works. And the tip here is whatever note you're stacking, make sure it's below the main melody or what we call also in orchestra and choir as the soprano. This is the higher voice. So then the one below it, which you could perhaps call as the alto voice under the soprano has its own space, has its own territory to kind of do its thing. So maybe you could even make the alto a bit fancy like. So you could do two alto notes along the lines or while the soprano has finished its purpose. So you can really get fancy once you have a grip over that alto and once you have the relevant finger independence you may need because your conscious brain needs to start focusing on the other voice or the other part. Your subconscious mind should now treat this as you know, I'll play that no matter what the storm hits me no matter what I'll still be able to play that melody, which I think by now any all of you watching this could easily do because we've been doing pretty much the same tune. So right guys, so that was my fourth suggestion to really embellish a melody make it sound a lot more professional, a lot more intense, a lot more emotional without using any chord yet. So let's now move on to the last suggestion which I have for you. This is basically playing the melody but thinking of a rhythmic structure. We haven't talked about rhythm so far but if I were to play this rhythm and think of a groove or think of anything which could support this particular goal, right now what you're hearing there is no rhythm like there's no like a drummer has not joined the party yet but if you think of a groove like maybe now you can't possibly play all of that on the piano because the piano is already doing the melody it's already doing the bass also doing a little bit of harmony but if you were to somehow get that vibe into your performance it could sound good. So you're kind of looking at the piano as a percussion instrument trying to get a little bit of that into your piano playing but never compromising on the melody and at the same time never compromising on the bass. So melody, bass stacking up the alto or whatever as an embellishment needs to be first and then after all that we add the spice so we add the well the reason why people would move to this melody physically move is because of rhythm so you can't expect people to move or dance you know if you don't add the rhythm so if you do something like bring in the rhythm you can do your alto switching as well this doesn't affect the other concepts which have been flowing throughout the lesson of you don't if you're finding the interaction between two hands a bit tricky you could look at the left hand exclusively to do rhythm for example we will rock you as we call it so keep that going of course you can move it as well because that's what you plan to do in the first place or maybe other groovy rhythm thresio pretty much everything is everything we've discussed so far the main goal is to help the melody which you yourself constructed and from a comp compositional perspective whenever you compose something with a very simplistic approach just a small tune for about a bar that is exactly how music is made if you think about it now most compositions of mine may not even happen on a piano it could just be a thought you could have an idea you could have a groove how long can you remember an idea generally an a bar or two at the very max or maybe four bars so you can't remember things for that long prior to playing it on the piano so when you've caught a tune or when you've composed a melody let's say in the shower or while strolling in the park with your with your dog or you know something like that you get this idea immediately you may want to capture it somehow using technology get it recorded on to an app on a phone but then what do you do with that you need to come to the piano and these are five approaches which i think will serve that melody so even from a composing point of view some of the best timeless catchy melodies would have probably been made by the composer just mumbling something or humming something or just drumming something and so on right so from a composing perspective it's great from a piano perspective to practice i think this is a great set of tools for you to use ultimately we are not using chords we're using a super simple melody we're embellishing it in as many ways as possible and that's about it so we've looked at five ways to really spice up a melody right and i hope you found the lesson useful again this is jason from nathaniel school of music if you're interested in my courses if you feel you want something structured you could look at our foundation program on youtube there are a list of videos you can even get a download of all of them by just writing into our school email id right we also have courses various different levels of these courses so again you could write to us there will be a form in the description which you could consider filling up and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already you watched this video for so long now you have to hit subscribe otherwise i will find you okay and turn on the bell icon for regular notifications thanks for watching cheers