 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, I'm just going to help you move your fingers up and down on the piano harmonically rather than melodically, which we normally end up doing. Melodically we do drills like that, or we do maybe arpeggio chords. In this exercise, I'm trying to move your harmony, move stacks of notes together up and down. I'm going to share this video on C major scale. However, I would recommend that you transpose it to other scales as well. We have done a few videos on how to transpose. It will be there in the description. You can check that out. Very important to transpose. Now, I'm going to first teach you the chord movement. It's a fair amount of chords, but all quite easy to play. Everything will have three notes. Some are not traditional, you could say. Then we look at different ways of expressing it and just see how far we can go in this lesson. Bring your pianos out. You need to play along with me. If you read sheet music or if you'd like the MIDI or anything to supplement the lesson, including my handwritten notes, you can head over to Patreon and get yourselves a copy. That would be awesome. Let's get cracking. The first chord is C major. So, I'm just going to call it out as from the bottom to the top. So, low, middle, high. So, E, G, C. And I like to play it a little on the lower side. So, first chord E, G, C. Second chord D, G, B. Third chord F, G, D. Fourth chord E, G, C. Now, you jump your hand. G, C. F, C, D. Then A, C, F. G, C, E. And then higher. B, C, G. G, C, F. Then F, C, D. G, C, E. Then E, G, C. F, G, D. D, G, B. E, G, C. So, what I was singing was the top most note of each chord. Again, I would recommend you to check the notes. It will be easier to follow along. So... You can challenge yourself with different speeds. Maybe you want to go start with semi-brieves or whole notes. Two, three, four. You may be arguing what should the left hand do. Well, pretty much anything in the C major scale. There are a lot of these chords where... Pretty much a lot of the bass notes seem to sound quite nice. So, feel free to explore your left hand. Any of the white notes or the C major scale would be nice. Or else, just keep it simple or safe and stick with C. Okay, so you have different rates of shifting. First, you can practice. Semi-brieve shifting would be... Two, three, four. One, two, three, four. You need to do minimum shifting. One, two, three, four. Two, three, four. Then you can do on-the-pulse shifting. That's every beat. That will be rather tricky. Four, one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten, ten. It's fun to practice this. So, the first variation I have for you now that we've learnt it as a pulse... is you can break up this sound. You can break up the chords by doing something like this. This is how I like to break my chords. And first of all, the speed will become a bit more faster. This is what we call as quavers or eighth notes. So, those are broken chords. So, how am I counting this? Outside, inside. You can remember it like that. Outside, inside, outside. It's the same chord, but you break it. Outer two, inside one. Those are your broken chords. One more time. So, that's your broken vibe. The arpeggio now you completely break the chord by doing something like this. The way I'm doing the arpeggio pattern is high note, middle note, low note and then middle again. And I like to hold my pinky or the up topmost note so that it breathes out the melody. Highest note. Hold it. You can use the pedal as your jumping that can ensure it's smooth. Or you can just quickly jump your hand. And another thing I like to do is to combine broken and arpeggios. Basically, you start with broken and then follow it up with arpeggio. Instead of doing only broken, arpeggio, combo, you start with two notes. You can see the notation. Let me play through the whole thing with combo pattern. So, a few variations, even more variations. Now that we know the block system, the broken chords in the arpeggios, why not fool around and play them in as many time signatures as we possibly can? So, if we do this over, let's say a 4-4. Well, that's over. Why don't we do this over a 3-4? So, there's three. What about something like broken on 3? Two, three, and two. Just make sure it's three. One, two, and three, and one, and two, and three, and one, and two, and three, and one, and two, and one. Two, three, one, and two, and three, and one, and two, and three. And you can do the arpeggio one also. You can even think of 3-4 as 6-8, if you think about it, or different phrasing. You can also do it in fives. Yeah, seven, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. So, with seven, since it's a bigger number, you can break down your accents into one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three. Something like... So you can use the combo when you're hitting two notes together as the accent point. So you can build this, try building it in different time signatures. That would be a nice exercise. And another thing I like to do is just look at C on your left hand, and look at the chord, of course, in the right hand, and develop some drumming patterns. Like, let's say you wanted to come up with... So if I vocalize that, it would be left, right, right, left, right, left, right, right. I think so, right? Left, right, right, left, right, left, right, right. So I'm going to now figure out a way to replicate that on the piano with all these chords. So the left is just your C for now. Or change it. Left, right, right, left, right, left, right, right. On a 4-4. Right? So we've done it in odd time signatures. We've done our syncopations, where the two hands come together. And last but not least, you can play the entire right hand system in your left hand and see how it goes. Now you may be arguing, why am I doing this in the left hand? You must be thinking, what should the right hand do? Well, the right hand can just play a melody. Maybe play the higher notes of the chord. Okay, and I put a little note in the notation, calling it as G anchor for the first bar. So that'll be first two bars actually. You see what's happening there? G is like the same note throughout. That's what makes it a bit tricky if you ask me from a fingering perspective. Now you shift, C is your anchor and other notes move around it. Now C will continue to be your anchor and now G becomes the anchor. Okay, so in a nutshell, this is our chord drill. Which you can start off by playing in your right hand. Just use it to improve your chord movement. Like I said at the beginning of the lesson, you're trying to improve your skill of going up and down the keyboard in blocks with many multiple notes played together. So I hope this exercise will be a good start if you haven't done such a thing before. Or for those of you who have been doing that in the past with some other books or other exercises or lessons, this will add to that party. So practice the chords well. After that, remember there are, you can play them as a pulse. You can do broken arpeggios or the combo thing. Then we played them in multiple time signatures. We use some syncopation and we moved it all to the left hand and we played some melody lines in the right hand. The notation is waiting for you on our Patreon. Do consider picking it up and also stuff we've done in the past and stuff which we are going to do in the future. That becomes the portal for all supplementary material from our YouTube channel. Right guys, thanks a ton for watching. Again, this is Jason Zak from Nathaniel School of Music. Cheers.