 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson I thought of incorporating pretty much all that you would do as a piano student or piano person in general. When you practice let's say for however long Let's say you have half an hour, one hour, two hours or whatever it may be or if you'd want something more routine This will definitely help. Now a few issues with piano practice would be sometimes when you dedicate an hour You're just going to do an hour of sight reading or maybe an hour of Lear training or an hour of maybe theory writing stuff down or whatever be the case and I feel at least for me personally I don't take all of the information inside When it's just one by one I like to give it context and I like to practice everything with a nice rock solid goal So I've developed this exercise or this Approach for a what I'm calling as a music workout if you will which will give you a kind of a full range for your Theory for your years and for your technique to figure out things to be able to play those things Which you figure out to be able to know why why it is what it is and also to be able to change What it is that you took in you know You should be able to control what you have in store and then of course change it and mess with it and move it around So this will be a nice one hour workout Which I feel or even lesser if you don't have that much time and to supplement this what I thought was we do one song or one composition in this class or in this lesson and We won't have time for the other melodies, which I also have prepared for you. So we will prepare more notation and Exercises which will be available for you in a staff notation as well as a Further more set of videos which are available on our patreon page So do consider heading over to patreon either after this one or whenever and try and get yourselves a Subscription a monthly subscription will give you access to not only this stuff But also anything we've done in the past and what we are going to continue doing in the future, right? So I'm calling this the ultimate piano workout. I hope it is the ultimate piano workout. I hope you think so too So let's get cracking in this all-round music theory year training and technique exercise You're first going to be given a melody and we need to hear that melody and transcribe it What does that basically mean? We have to figure out the notes for the melody the rhythm duration of each note and then obviously the Micro and the macro properties of what we heard by micro. I mean the note and the duration by macro I mean the scale the key the the the meter the time signature the time feel how the beats are getting divided Is there a pickup beat and so on then we'll also try and figure out how we can notate it using staff notation And once we finish the sheet music, it's just going to be a melody So then we'll work out the chords how to work out the chords. We need to first debate What is the scale we are committing to are we committing to major minor or maybe even a mode and once we've got a Decent chord progression going we are going to mess with the tune a bit at the end of the video just for fun We are going to transpose it to multiple scales keys and also Meters or time signatures. So we are completely going to change what we started with in the first place So it becomes a very entertaining One hour of piano practice. So let's get started with the melody I'm going to sing it for you. No cheating. So you don't get to see what I'm playing on the keys So here's your melody One more time and just to give you an idea It appears to be two cycles or two phrases which are very similar to each other observe the ending Just the last two notes are different. That's your clue. Let's do it again Okay, you might want to pause the video repeat and now I'm going to tell you the answer Now how I'm approaching it would be First of all, don't look at the whole melody as a package. It doesn't have to be That's too many notes so you could look at Well, if you look at the first note, then the problem is that's going to put pressure on you from a perfect pitch Perspective you'll think oh, I have to know what the first note is and then you will go And then you forget what you're doing in the first place. You're just playing random chromatic notes So my melody again was So take the first four notes And Here's a trick rather than figuring out what those first four notes are Just try and have an a b comparison between all the notes of music with that first package So I'm going to start with C Sounds quite synonymous sounds quite nice with the piece would you think I guess so Now C sharp Oops not so good Nice so when it kind of works For all you know one of the four notes, which I just sang a line with that note on the piano So maybe D is contained in the melody C is also contained in the melody So it's just a trick if you take one note You're gonna put too much of strain on your brain You then you get into the debate of whether you need to have perfect pitch or not which I think you don't You don't need to have it if you're born with it or if you develop it with a lot of music practice And if you communicate a lot in terms of pitches if you say That's a b-flat. That's an f and so on then you automatically develop the skill here and there so to speak D seems to work now Ouch doesn't sound good with e-flat E so C D E seem to work Now this now if you compare this with the other three notes which worked This tends to kind of be a a pillow or a blanket for that entire set of four notes, would you agree? I hope see It's like this is a nice bed on top of which those four notes seem to be sleeping on while Works but It's more of a kind of an agitated state Maybe like your your car is on a bridge or something waiting to cross the signal to eventually go home Still like a bridge movement Very anxious I guess Okay, that seems to work Sounds good, but I'm sure this note sounds very unstable Like that you keep going along And now let's bring in the rest of the tune now if we just now think okay the melody may have C D E Now in your right hand play Na na na na na na na that's not there So these three seem to be there But that fourth note is missing so maybe that you experiment with trial and error There we go, so that's a CD Okay, so you have a piece now, what did I sing after that? Did I not go, now another way to look at this melody is look at it from a Y axis curve perspective. The notes went higher, then they came down, la la la la la la, la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la, so A C D E D C A, tu ru ru ru tu ru ru, so the notes were no different, it's just the order of the notes, so this is what I call as melodic curves where you take the tune and you kind of graph it also, this is probably the first thing you need to do before even the piano work which we saw, you can just graph out the melody in a very crude Y axis representation, to put a point at every note, then tu going higher, ta na going higher, ta na na coming down and then it continues. So let's just do that, ta na na na na na, and this should also give us more perspective to what the root is, so now is the root C, maybe the F seems to sound more cushion like or more bed like, what about D, it also sounds very nice, but you see the perspective of the music changing, see if I play, sounds a bit unstable, sounds very homely while D sounds very brave like you're taking up a challenge, so the root we still don't know, we have to kind of assume the root because in this exercise I haven't told you anything yet, so we are just going to kind of debate and look at our options and most of those would be subjective, so you have to see what are the facts about what you're taking in and what after having got those facts which facts are things you cannot change, how can you be subjective around those facts, how can you have your own decisions open to your own opinion so to speak, so so far we have and I think it's some kind of F, maybe F major, F something let's see, aha could also be an A because the first note was A, let's try a few more, the root is probably not F sharp but F sharp sounds beautiful with that melody, that also sounds beautiful the B flat, but it doesn't sound root like in nature it's not the note you'd kind of play throughout the song you know and just to digress a bit if you take a melody like happy birthday you know you go don't think that the scale of the song is the first note you heard even though in the happy birthday context the first note is repeated twice, so if you begin happy birthday from C most people even books strangely enough which I've seen some children's books will say to simplify it for children which I think is a ridiculous thing you say happy birthday is on C but then the child is not playing the C in the left hand then the child is itself going to say man that sucks that's not C so you dive deeper there we go you realize happy birthday if you start on C or starting on the fifth interval it's not C major it's F major where C is the fifth anyway coming back to our melody so the let's just say for now our melody is on the key of F major or maybe or C major or D something F something C something or D something at least over the duration of me singing la la la la la la la la which is ACD EDCA then what happens la la la la la that's your next cluster counter notes that may also help that's five notes you have to figure out la la la la la so if you look at the the melody shape la la la la la la now what happened there you have a note la came down the scale la la went back to the same thing la went up and very down right so we figured out la la la la la la la la la so if you get that la which is G you can try la la la la la la la la la just tell yourself la la la la la la la la it's very low so it cannot be la la la la no la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la La C. So you probably got that by trial and error la la la la la so whole melody is pretty much done and dusted. Okay, but the second time I kind of jumbled it that's a bigger jump coming back to that first note now if at any point you committed to the scale let's say you felt that it has to be F major then you don't need a B you're not going to even test B a B would not be in your radar at all neither will C sharp neither will E flat for instance but it's always good to keep an open mind because we haven't figured out the scale yet or even the key right now right the key is the root and the scale is the type of the scale is it major is it minor is it a mode is it Dorian Phrygian Aeolian whatever so I hope the melody is done and dusted we also have it now notated for you rhythmically before we get to the rhythm I want you to count it before we put the notation in front of you it is we figured out the pitches we figured out the pitch now we need to figure out the duration of the notes what is music notation pitch meets duration that is staff notation isn't it so you have those weird looking oval symbols right oval oval with line and as the oval adds more to it the notes get shorter and shorter and where you place the oval is your pitch so that's pretty much staff notation in a nutshell and then you have some Italian stuff going on to remember things like play loud play soft and whatnot so coming to the rhythm of the melody or the note duration of the melody if you observe it in a pack as a cluster it's it didn't go like that it went now the best way I would think you should figure out the rhythm from a transcription perspective would be don't just listen to it and count and clap note by note rather feel it from a kind of a global perspective where you imagine or where you move or where you move your body to the pulse of the song so if I go relax your body and get this going so this will allow you to feel the melody with respect to the pulse it will also tell you to figure out okay which notes are shorter which notes are longer and is it consistently short is it very machine gun like or is it very random if it's random there may be rest there may be dotted notes and so on so the first four if you observe it's four notes going in time of two beats or two head movements two pulse movements or two hand claps so what's what's that going to be in the world of notation quavers quavers divide the beat into two units so you'll have four of them over two beats so then what happened there whenever it's groovy I always like to superimpose a drum groove or something percussive along with that melody so don't do you won't feel that rather so especially when there are those irregular gaps in this case it's a dotted quaver going into a sixteenth note then a quaver rest and then a quaver so if that's a bit weird it's okay if you don't know notation it's okay but at least figure out the hit points one e and a two e and a three e and a four e and a so the hit points between the beats three and four were three e and a four e and a it's also what we call as a thresio in salsa music one two three one two three one two one two three one two three one two okay let's take a break after that always package it into small chunks keep the pulse get the drumming so when the drumming comes into perspective you also get an idea of the time feel how the time beats or how the beats are being divided are they divided into triplets or do you not do you do semi quavers or do you not even need sixteenth notes or semi quavers and you will be well well off with just quavers or eighth notes or from a macro perspective is it swinging I don't think it's swinging it's straight and every beat is divided evenly so so maybe have this rhythm even if you can't bring it out of your body with your voice you can kind of keep it inside sort of like a ghost drummer is jamming with you and that will help you to figure out that it's four quavers a c d e d c a and that's a thresio which is an irregular kind of assortment of three beats or three notes that would be a dotted quaver going into a sixteenth note then a rest if you want to put a rest and then another quaver and then let's finish it off what's that now it clearly ended with two rather long notes and the last one was very long that last one was two even in the variant of the melody that last one is a minimum so once you get that you realize that you just have to kind of bring in those other four notes as a cluster together so tada tada first of all you realize that tada tada doesn't come at the beat it's not tada tada tada tada it's tada tada tada tada tada tada tada tada tada tada tada tada tada tada so oney and a two e oney and a two e oney if you're counting 16s you break it up as a oney and a two e and a two e and a two e and a two e but again you have that groove going on always so that's lasting a bit longer so oney and a two e and a so e and a would be a dotted quaver and then the rest before them would be a cluster of three quavers and then you end with a a minimum of nice and long two counted minimum so that would be your rhythm check out the notation it'll be there and it's always nice to to do this by hand a lot of you may already be familiar with notation tools like sibelius or mu score or stuff for the ipad but it's always nice to handwrite it before you even uh graph it out or put it out in a software application and it's always nice if you think about it i'm sure a lot of you read music a lot of you do read music because you you know get our notation on patreon and all those other things reading is great but what if you were to make the notation on your own that's a powerful skill if you ask me the most powerful skill for a musician is to be able to transcribe doing pretty much this hear it and you know exactly what it is you write it down and you even know why they did that and then the inevitable outcome is you play the thing okay guys now we have to move into harmony we've got the entire melody down and when we get the melody down we need to get the pitch which is sorted we need to get the rhythm which is also sorted now there are a few subjective things about the pitch and the rhythm which i'd like to debate about with you but unfortunately i can't hear you so maybe you can leave your suggestion or your thought in the comments which we'll go through of course so a few debatable things would be the key the scale and a few things about rhythm the simplest thing about rhythm we already kind of figured out was the meter right now the meter is how you're counting how your body wants to cycle through the music i think that is more a factual thing some musicians might argue it's subjective time signature is subjective a lot of drummers will say weird things like everything you give me is four four you know like Carter Buford you know he's actually said that where every one of us mortals will be struggling counting in 13s or 17s and the drummer just says hey i'm feeling it as four four there are really skilled musicians who think that way now for the most of us mortals the melody we just heard would be four by four but what is going to be the starting beat should the starting beat which is should that be on the one or can it be you know it doesn't have to actually start on the beat so maybe the a could be and the c could be on the on the one one so it's very tough to now reconstruct this because we've already spent time transcribing it and notating it so i wanted to make this video as detailed as possible because you never know the melody which i gave you doesn't need to have the first note at the one neither does it need to have the first note as the root of the scale you're trying to frame or form that's one thing to keep in mind but for the purpose of this lesson we'll assume that the first note is on the downbeat or at the beat one the other thing which is going to be subjective is the key the scale and perhaps the mode so i have a few tricks up my sleeve which i'm going to share with you now if you look at the entire melody you write down all of the notes you have heard and if you gamble with f major you write f g a b flat b flat is not there right so how will it be f major then but then it could also be c major so let's think if it is f major it would be f g a b flat question mark we don't know because the melody doesn't have a b flat c d e so now the debate is is it f major or is it c major simple because c major has a b f major has a b flat what differentiates the two scales the b's right similarly it could have also been g major maybe you thought it was c major but then you may also want to recheck could it be g but g major has an f sharp so does this melody have an f sharp no does it replace f sharp with a namesake note yes it replaces it with f there's an f so if you play a g major g root it sounds good but it doesn't sound very g major like because there is no f sharp so it could also be treated as g mixolydian which we'll get into later I don't want to confuse you with modes but it could be a g something but definitely not a g major so the debate now is between c major and f major that's the battle which is happening now now a good way to kind of resolve that debate is to play a tonic chord for the melody throughout the melody so if you believe it's c major you play the c major chord in your left hand if you believe it's f major play the tonic chord f major in your left hand what sounded better I'd leave you to be the judge of that right you clearly heard that I mean it sounds like a nice connecting chord the c major but it's clearly not the root chord so the tonic chord is a very important way to not only check the scale but also further find the chord progressions now that you figured out that it's and that f major chord works you haven't figured out that it's f major scale yet you know that f major sounds good once you got two major once it is f major you then need to debate could it not be the minor as well what if it's the relative minor what is f major's relative minor theory tells you that the relative minor is d minor so you go that's f major what about d minor d minor sounds absolutely fine now what do you choose well the answer in this case would start to be subjective because you know that it's in the key signature of f one flat b flat seems to work and just try that b flat chord just for fun see even though the melody doesn't have b flat b flat works there another chord maybe in the f major scale or even in the d minor scale which has b flat in it g minor g minor works perfectly so does f major so there's a very subjective decision you now have to take your there is no right and wrong here the right or the fact rather is that it is f major which has one flat namely b flat that's the key signature now you can move forward from there you can now say it is f major it is in the key signature of f major but then there are seven possible modes of f major namely f major which is also Ionian as we call it G Dorian a Phrygian with that flat two b flat Lydian with that unique sharp four mix a Lydian with that unique flat seven then our minor which we already tested then we have a Locrian which goes very well with a minor seven flat five chord and f major which we've already tested major in minor so you could literally do the entire melody with these modal tonic chords or even a modal chord progression and just do an ab comparison and then you take the call as to what the scale is because once you know the scale and the mode and the key you can start working your magic with chords right so let's see for f major we'll come back to f major but look at Dorian G Dorian will work really well with the minor chord what I like to do add a minor sixth then it gives you that Dorian sixth major sixth and now play the tune you can also play a Dorian chord progression a tiny chord progression which could be G minor going to C major that's your one minor going to see C major which is very common Dorian you know those sort of songs so you could do Dorian you could also do Phrygian kind of works you could do Lydian b flat with that Lydian sharp four you can mix so remember I told you earlier C major chord doesn't work for it to be C major scale but it now works to be a Mixolydian scale so if I take a C7 C Mixolydian works and of course we have a minor and finally we have even the Locrian works really well so before you figure out chords it's important to subjectively make the decision on which mode or which actual scale you're going to choose and thus which key you're going to navigate to however you stay within the family or the key signature of those seven possible or potential notes which you might use so in a nutshell if you're given any melody you need to first figure out if it's the major or the minor scale if it's major then you have to decide is it actually major or could it be Lydian which is a sharp four it kind of goes well with the major chord or is it Mixolydian which has a flat seven chord now if you feel ha no it's not major it has to be minor that vibes with me better then you ask one more question in this flow chart you say is it similar to major if it's similar you've chosen the natural minor for sure because a natural minor in the major are cousins they have the same note but if it is not similar to major and you heard something to be minor just for a comprehensive study you would then need to see whether it's the harmonic minor the melodic minor or maybe the Dorian minor because those notes are very different than the natural minor so this would probably give you a more holistic way to figure out any scale of any melody where the melody is just given to you and you have to figure it out so moving forward to the last part of our harmonic analysis before we go absolutely crazy for just a few couple of minutes and shut down the lesson do stay tuned watch till the very end there's going to be a lot of things coming at you so chords so a great way to start with chords would be you just look at the melody and see which notes are long in duration so you have you know the first four are even so maybe you could have one chord if you're banking on it to be D minor or G minor if you like that or maybe you like an F major so I'm going to go with an F major maybe you could harmonize D with a B flat I quite like that that's F major B flat and when you come back to that long A so it's essentially the long notes which are harmonizing back to A maybe do a dominant chord there or five so that's simple enough one four five chords but if you assumed or if you thought that the scale is a minor scale then you probably want to fill it up with more of the minor chords maybe D minor for a start or A minor I like I like that G minor that's a nice ninth minor ninth flavor maybe it feels very minor now because you've added even more minor chords than the tonic minor which the tonic being D could also make it more braver by playing what happens when you do one sad thing followed by two or three happy things or positive things I guess it sounds brave like you've gone into some battle and defeated everyone or something so that was minor D minor B flat and then F major so that's one way to tackle the chords the other way to kind of tackle the chords is just see which cadences work well if you've banked on the major scale then for all you know the usual suspects the five to one will work the four to one legal cadence would also work the deceptive will work if you want so you can experiment with cadences you can also look at a two five one harmonization which tends to work no matter what as you see with a lot of the jazz songs out there so you can do two G minor C seventh F let's see if that works kind of works now what if you assumed that this was on a minor scale D minor then do two five one minor which will be E minor seven flat five A seven maybe with a flat nine and a D minor let's see how that works on the key of D minor which is the relative the minor two five one works beautifully well and you can experiment these with any melody it doesn't have to be this one and that's about your harmonic analysis so remember this is a piano workout at the end of the day you probably now have about five more minutes left in the workout so you could probably do one of the following things you now have this mapped on to let's say F major and you graph it out you just say okay let's say you only do that and you're you're like this is the three five six seven six five three of the F major scale let's say you don't have the time to do the whole rather just the first half just only so much now you take another key maybe the key which you discarded which is C major and you superimpose the intervals and you try to play along try to reshape your chords quite like it on C for some reason even though I'm not a C major fan let's take E flat so you're transposing and here's the other fun about transposing you don't have to just transpose to the new key and keep the same scale maybe you can go to the new key and change the scale maybe I'm doing it to the Dorian E flat Dorian so you can go all out you I just did E flat minor it's a bit tricky so you have to work out your fingering and hence a good piano workout because you have to write this down you have to train your ear and you have to play you have to be able to play you have to be able to physically move around all your piano scales are like different you know football or tennis or cricket pitches it's each scale feels very different different climatic conditions different widths different surfaces and whatnot so you have to practice on different keys that's a very important part of your I guess the last stages of this practice and if you want if you're a bit more advanced the last thing I'll leave you in this lesson would be now mess with the meter or mess with the time signature or mess with the time feel maybe you'd like to change the time signature first let's try and do it over a seven by eight or something like that and you to count it on seven eight you could do something like keep a seven eight groove going on in your brain one two three four five six seven one two three four one two three two three four five six eight so you're changing the melody you're kind of giving it a different quote or a different rhythmic perspective but it's still the same melody so if you're a songwriter this will be a good tool because sometimes when we write a song we always commit to what we did at the very first instance of making that lick or that riff or that idea but if we hear that particular phrase the next morning and just look at it from a third party listeners perspective and say how can we mess with this would it sound worse than the original idea which I came up with naturally yesterday or will it are these options better rhythmically you should always be aware you can even swing the melody sounds quite nice even in a swung rendition right guys so we've done quite a bit in this ultimate piano workout if you want to call it that first of all we heard a tune which I had for you we broke it down melodically into two departments the duration of the notes before that however we did the pitch of the notes we looked at various ways to look at pitch from a macro and a micro perspective we also looked at rhythm from both perspectives and then we realized that a lot of things are subjective and a few things are also factual so you need to figure out what are the facts and what are the things which are subjective and we looked at the fact that it is a family of F major which has one flat B flat major but then you could fool around and compose this or structure this in ultimately all the seven modes and chord progressions were also dealt with from two perspectives where we looked at the melody and then where we looked at traditional cadences and last but not least we try to make it a bit more challenging for ourselves by changing the melody into different scales different keys and different time signatures and what is waiting for you on our patreon page would be five more melodies which you could work on and we will do it in the same way you'll have me singing it you'll have the notation and you can figure out the chords and you can try and dive in and see what you thought and being a patreon member you can communicate with me you can always ask me questions so that might be a great resource to be part of and if you feel you want something more structured you can always join Nathaniel's school of music for a six month music semester which will include the technique of an instrument be it piano guitar or vocals you could also be doing you will also be doing theory your training rhythm notation and a bunch of other things so do stay tuned to our channel for more if you haven't already don't forget to hit that subscribe and hit the bell icon we release regular music lessons and thanks a ton for watching the lesson cheers catch you in the next one