 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, I'm going to help you to take a solo piano arrangement, something really simple which I composed, something like this. Start with something simple to accompany the melody with some smooth sounding chords and then get it to sound really epic with something like this. So what's happening is there are arpeggios, there are chord voicings and there's a melody. There's pretty much a one-man or a one-person show on the piano which is going on now. And in this lesson, we are going to cover that. So we'll start off by learning the melody, all the relevant theory, then we'll incrementally build up a couple of patterns one by one and basically harmonic embellishments. So we won't look at it as saying let's just play E minor chord in the left hand and some melody in the right hand. That's generally how melodic movement and accompaniment is covered. You just play the melody in the right hand and you play the chords in the left hand. Here what we are going to do is make it a bit more interesting, a bit more unique and a lot more tasteful I think. And it'll sound very pro as you go along. So remember to watch the video till the very end because at the very end we are going to make it sound rhythmically catchy by bringing in a lot of arpeggios and so on. Right guys, before we get started it'll be great if you could hit that subscribe button, turn on the bell icon for regular notifications if you haven't already and consider following us on Patreon wherein you are going to get all our hand written notes for this lesson, the lessons of the past and the lessons of the future. In this case everything has been notated for you and it's waiting for you on Patreon.com. Cheers, let's get cracking. The melody first and we are on the E minor scale. So E minor is the relative minor as you may know of the G major scale. So it goes something like this. One sharp namely F sharp basically very similar to G major starting on E of course. So I've composed this melody I'll play it for you first in the right hand and just to give you some context I'll play you a pulse in the left hand just with a single E. The pulse, the way I also call it is I call it the head pulse. So that's pretty much how the audience's head will move or body will move when they listen to you play or as they feel you playing. So if I play this tune. So my head is not, at least the audience's head doesn't want to move like that. That's going to be really tricky for people to even do. So naturally they would want to find a pulse. So as a musician you need to provide that and also you need to feel that. If you don't feel the pulse yourself the audience is arguably or probably not going to respond to your music as you want them to. So you have to feel it from within. So great ways to get that going with the left hand. Okay, so let's break down the melody and keep this left hand pulse running. B E D D C B A B C B A. First line I'm ending on the A B E D D C B A B C B A. And the first three bars, if you read sheet music is well, you'll notice that it's very similar. That's also what we call it the tri-cio pattern with a salsa phrase. So you go. Okay, regarding my finger crossing and so on. Cross your middle finger over your thumb there. Okay, continuing. Bring back the thumb or any fingering you wish actually. You could even start with the index finger and then not cross. Anyway, so that's the melody. Now coming to the left hand, so I'm going to first introduce you to the chords which I've composed and then look at how we can approach it as a newcomer to this melody. We've not done this before. So how do you get started? Now first off the chords, I'm going to just show you the chords and explain them for the first note, E minor, next bar C major, D major, third chord, E minor, same as the first chord and then the second line, I'm changing it around just to make it more interesting that will go C major, G major, A minor. What I'm doing at the end there is a dominant chord which is the five of the one that's called as the B chord, the B major chord. Now normally people will just play a B major or maybe even a B seventh. What I have for you is a suspended chord. So you can do the second line, A minor, so that's B, E, F sharp, that's B, sus, okay whole story again, line one, E minor, C major, D major, E minor, C major, G major, A minor, B, sus, B major, now if you're not so sure of the suspended chord you can just play a B major, just that. Now for most people who are starting off on the piano it might be a bit tricky to get the whole chord in your left hand while you get through the melody in the right hand especially playing the pulse and so on. So what I would encourage you or advise you to do is just play the chord roots in the left hand first. So for E minor, all you need to do is just play a single E, so just play E there. Now we're going to C major, there are four chords in each line. So E minor, C major, D major, E minor, so every chord I'm playing for two counts or two crotchets or two quarter notes or two pulses, so that's E minor, C major, D major, E minor and C major, G major, A minor, now you could decide whether you want to go to the lower version or the higher version of these chord roots. Let's do that again, E, C, D, E, C, G, A, B, so that's I think the first thing you need to work on, just play the chord roots in the left hand work on shifting. Now moving forward, you can now add a fifth in the left hand of each chord. A great way to remember your fifths would be the circle of fifths which will illustrate all the fifths which are perfect fifths in a clockwise movement. So if you count the circle in a clockwise order, you'll find that E, its fifth is the B. So you could now play each of these stacked with fifths and that's a great way to start and it sounds harmonically rich already. So let's give that a go. So E minor will have a B, C major will have a G, D major will have an A and E minor again has a B and then C major with a G, G with a B, A with an E, B with an F sharp, be a bit careful of that, B with an F sharp which is a black key. Now another advantage of fifths, not only for a beginner, this is for anyone, even if you've played the piano for a few years, you may be wondering why you're giving a simplified way of playing the chord, right? So the fifths, what it can do is it can allow you to play your chords deep down below the piano. So the way I generally look at the left hand register is when you're in and around middle C, you can play the whole triad in all its glory. If you go lower, you cannot do that. You cannot, it sounds really muddy. So then you'd be playing just the fifth, root and fifth and if you're really low, the only thing which can work is the octave. Now we've done a video on that, we've done a lot of videos on left hand tips and left hand accompaniment. So do head over to the description or our YouTube channel page and you'll find a lot more and on our website, NathanielSchool.com, what you can do is we have categories and filters under our free tutorials. You can just go there and pretty much hit what you want to hit. In this case, left hand. So there's a thing called left hand. You can hit left hand. You'll get all my left hand videos filtered neatly for you. You can also see the description. Anyway, so coming to that, let's get this done with the fifth chords and I think it's going to sound a lot more richer. Don't forget the pulse of all these fifth chords. Repeating. It's always nice to sing the treble clef or the right hand. Once you're familiar, of course, and once you've got some kind of a coordination. And if you're not able to get the melody singing with piano, don't do the piano only take a step back, remove your right hand and then start singing and then let the left hand continue. So something like this. Again. Don't stop singing. Okay. So that was with fifths and another nice interesting thing to do again. I've mentioned this in another YouTube video on this left hand accompaniment technique. We leave that in the description would be to now toggle your fifths. So instead of just going like that, I'm going to incrementally make it a lot more interesting. So instead of doing EB like this, it's nice. It's holding the pulse, but it's not as groovy as what I'm going to tell you. So it'll be, this is the pattern. What I like about this pattern is we are accessing all the off beats or all the ands and the subdivisions and so on. So you have EB earlier. It was just one, two, three, four, one. Now we're adding that rhythmic element, bringing in all those subdivisions, which is one and and and and and and and so the B is playing us all the ends. So. This is the next level of this melody. If you're not confident with all the chords, just come back to E minor and just keep doing this. Go back to singing. Sounds quite cool with just one chord, actually. Get back to the piano, right? And I need to also say this with this to sound really cool or really big and thick if you want to call it that I'm holding down my sustain pedal. So it's it's just something you can hold down while you play the whole melody, something like this. You want to lift it before the chords as you keep shifting, right? I've done a detailed lesson on how to use the sustain pedal. You can check it out in the description, a lot of videos in the description, actually, because we have done a lot of videos. So you go with the pedal on. OK, now I'm doing it with the chord changes. C major, D major, E minor, C major, G minor last time. Let's slow that down a little bit for you. You can take a step back and just sing. Let your left hand become like one engine like system, you know, try to play some other stuff randomly, you know, that also takes a break from the job at hand. Like the whole idea is to make your left hand an engine. You just turn it on and you can drive anywhere. And the driving is actually the melody, the steering wheel. For me, if you have this whole car analogy, the melody is like your steering wheel, which is in the right hand and your engine hand, which you need to trust, right? Like we trust the engine of a car will be the left hand. So that's how you play the piano in general. And that's how you play even the drums. If you think about it, you cannot use your conscious brain to think of everything. You have to leave something to trust. You have to trust that you have practiced hard. And one of the two hands is going to be in autopilot mode. OK, so anyway, so that was the toggling fifth. So now it's going to be mostly about the right hand to stack up notes, which can make it sound a lot more harmonically tasteful. And when we stack up notes, we're actually going to bring in chords, but we are going to bring it through another concept. It's not going to be like I'm like you have to play E minor or you have to play C major. It's going to be something simple. So if you take for every chord change in the left hand, you could stack one note in your right hand, which can complement that. So if you take E minor in the right hand, what is the only note missing of E minor? As you'll see, there's no G. So why not play a G in the right hand like this? Check that out. I'm trying to hold on to that G till the next chord comes. And this, I think, is a good way to represent E minor. It's voiced beautifully. Well, it's not cluttered. It'll allow you to play even deeper if you want. So you can even play the whole thing lower. You can't play it really low. As a block. So you go check that out. So this is what I want you to try. Play the first hit or the strong beat with a G. Why G again? G is part of the E minor chord. And it's just adding to the harmony. It's making it a full on E minor chord. So what's next now? Now you have two choices when you play the C major chord. You could either stack up a G or you could stack up an E. So E minor will be again. I kind of like that E because it's making it new. It's adding a new note. You don't have E anywhere else. But if your fingers don't support it at the moment, it's going to sound great to even play a G over the C major chord because G is part of the C major chord. So one more time. Also, I like the fact that G is there in the old chord also. So it's easy. The same finger can whack that. So one more time. So I hope you're observing that the melody, everything, the whole music is sounding a lot more professional, a lot more fuller by doing this. The left hand is continuing to do its rhythmic thing with the toggling fifths. The right hand slowly but surely stacking. So if you see the notes I've written, what all you can stack with and given you my suggestions. But it's pretty much any chord tone, which you've written down. So write down the notes of the chord and stack it up with one of those notes, which is missing from the left hand. And that could help the right hand sounding a lot more fuller. So let's see how it goes. E minor I'm adding G. C major also adding G for convenience. For D major I'm adding this beautiful F sharp, which complements the D major well. Back to my G, which I did earlier. And now coming to C major, which is the next chord. What's a note of C major, which I can add E. And now coming to G. Now you can do, you can also do an F sharp for some reason over the G major chord. I will explain that very shortly. So you go, so that's C major. It actually forms a C major seventh with that melody note B. So I've already gone into that extension world, which I thought I'll present for you in the second line of this song. To show you that you can add these fancy chord extensions without even knowing too much theory. You can just stack notes and figure out simple fifths here, melody with the fifth, and then add one more note and just sound sophisticated. So there we go. That's actually collectively, they all form a C major seventh chord. There we go. I could do the same thing and play a G major seventh there. By adding this F sharp. But if you don't like that, you can do, but that's too close. So then you can add a G, but G sounds very vanilla to me. If you get my drift with the flavor, so you go, that's a bit more interesting. It's like something has gone into the vanilla ice cream now. So you go, OK. So that's what I'm going with for this tutorial. B with E, D with F sharp, trying to imply a G major seventh chord. And then that's an A minor with a C at the right hand. That's something I love doing whenever I play music. I do that suspended chord at the end of the progression or at the end of a line or a phrase. That's the five chord, five sus four, going back to five major. So how did I do that? So a little bit of finger independence there because you don't want your melody to go. You don't want to do, right? So you want to go, just ring the B with your pinky and then drift your thumb down from E to D sharp. So I'm also itching to play something else, which I'll tell you now. You can do that like a little counter melody. You need two fingers, the thumb and the index. So whole thing, again, with stacking of one note in the right hand along with the whole fifth chord toggling or even a simple fifth chord will do. But I'm going to show it with toggling. Let's see how it works. Come on. Second line, E minor, C, D major, back to E minor, C major seventh, G major seventh, A minor, B sus, resolving to B major. Again, I encourage you to sing it. Of course, now at this stage, I think you should be comfortable playing that melody with the fifth toggle. And if you don't get the toggle, don't worry. Go back to fifth blocks. If you don't get the chord changes, don't worry. Play E. Remember, this tutorial is an approach which could guide you through about a couple of weeks of practice, or maybe even more. So don't think that, oh, you're not getting it just by watching this video. You can always pause the video, do one of these variations, come back. But trust me, if you learn this motif, this melody, you're going to gain a lot more confidence for the future. Fine. So we've talked about stacking of one note in the right hand. Now what comes after one? Two, isn't it? So let's start stacking two notes along with the melody, giving full respect to the melody. We don't want to make a change there. Tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum. That's a tune. So we shall now stack. Now here's where you just have to stack the remaining notes of the chord. So if it's E minor, just figure out a way to play E minor so that the melody is respected. What I mean by that is you don't want to play the melody somewhere else. You don't want to play the melody in the lower register. Melody generally will always want to be played at the higher frequency. So play E minor like this. I'm stacking E plus G. Now for C major, you could just pretty much play the same thing. E G. Now D major, full on D major, D F sharp A. Back to normal E minor. And then C major 7th, you can get away by playing E minor in the right hand only because you're going to play C and G in the bass. So without that, it's E minor. With that, it's C major 7th. So for G major 7th, I'm choosing this. I think it sounds really colorful. That's F sharp B D minor in its first inversion because A is at the top. That's my favorite suspended chord there. But I'm adding an F sharp, make it more richer. The whole thing with stacking of two notes instead of one what we did earlier, let's get that cracking. E G, D F sharp, E G. That's E G for C major 7th, F sharp B for G major 7th, C E, B sus, E with F sharp, resolving. Let's go that little slow D F sharp. You can do a just drift that to F sharp. Then next line, C major 7th, G, A minor, B sus, resolving to major. So that's pretty much stacking. You're stacking one note. Then we looked at stacking two. But I thought I'll add one more concept, which we do in choral harmony or when you write music for an orchestra. It's what we call as voicing. So with voicing, you could stack a third below the melody or you could do a third above the melody but played an octave lower. In other words, the alto and the tenor of a choir or an orchestra. So if I take, that's a great way to show off the alto part. So instead of doing, you could write down the G major scale or the E natural minor scale. They're almost the same. And under that, you could write down their thirds. And every time you'd play a B, you see its third being G. So what was once can now become, so you're not really caring about what the chord is. You're caring about the melody and you're harmonizing the melody. Earlier you were just thickening the chord by stacking a chord tone. Now you're just adding a third from the melody. So that was the alto. Let's see how that goes with the same thing in the left hand. Let's roll that alto again. With the same thing in the left, toggling the fifth. You can also do the tenor, which is the upper third but coming down. So a great example could be at the end of that. Instead of doing, find the third of A and B and C. The upper third is C. The upper third of B is D. The upper third of C is E. It's all written down. You can check that out. Now you don't want to play the third or the tenor higher than the soprano or the main melody. You'd want to play that tenor down below. So not like this. That looks weird on the piano. Rather, play your higher fingers, pinky or ring. And stack the third, which used to be there, down below here. So... And the tenor goes... That usual sus thing. So let's play this with a combo of tenor and alto parts so we can put it as a nice package. So it goes... That's the alto. Tenor. Or alto and tenor again. Line one, I'll do alto. Line two, I'll do tenor. Tenor coming up. Tenor. Alto again. Let me try singing the alto once. And now the tenor. Okay. So that's three. That's four ways to stack and create harmony without even really thinking of playing block chords and chord shapes and chord inversions and whatnot. Okay. There were four stacking techniques, if you remember. First, we just stacked one note, which is ideally the missing note of that chord. Or if you want an extension, then you're gonna sneak in a seventh here and there. Then you're stacking two notes and now it becomes a very, very vibrant sound. So your right hand takes the responsibility of playing chord plus melody with some inversion. Now the other thing I've talked about very recently now was the voicing or the orchestral harmony where we have the alto part, which is the lower third from the soprano. Example, B's alto would end up being G. P-A-G, while B's tenor would be the higher third. But we don't play that tenor upper third, otherwise it will dominate the soprano. So we played lower. At least that's how we do it on the piano. Other instruments work differently. So that's pretty much what I have for you in the lesson, but I had one more thing to make this all rhythmically more exciting, something like this. Now that you have all the harmonic weapons under your belt, you can now make it more rhythmically interesting. Something like this. So I have one rhythm pattern which I'll share with you. That one. So the secret here is you try to keep that fifth going anyway in your left hand. But you don't, instead of playing an independent left hand pattern, you're just creating a groove with these fingers. The left hand's index and thumb and the right hand's index and thumb. And the right hand's index and thumb because they will inevitably be free or at least the thumb of the right hand. So you, or both the thumbs, the right and the left hand thumb. So you can play any rhythm pattern you want really. You can do something like just toggle your thumbs. It sounds nice. The pattern I have for you is a good way to start off the pattern would just be ring your top finger of the right and whatever notes you're playing in both your hands are dependent on the chord and depending on how you're stacking in the right and depending on the chord's fifth of the left. Same chords but that ring. Let's slow that down. Ta-ka-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang-tang. Okay bring that with the melody now. Slower. Next. Okay, so you don't have to do this but I thought it's nice to package into the whole equation because I'm not trying to teach you only harmony in this lesson and we haven't really talked much about chords and chord inversions or formation in this lesson as I normally talk about in most of our lessons on YouTube but this is just a way to build harmony you may think it's unconventional but a lot of people do this so this is where you kind of throw away the theory you're just saying there's a note there that's the chord root there is its fifth it makes it a lot more spicier and then the right hand to make it even more spicier you stack notes you either stack notes with respect to the chord you want to eventually form or you stack notes to make the melody a lot thicker that's pretty much the lesson guys hope you have fun with the melody and if you'd like you could also record yourself playing it and send it to me a great way to connect would be on Instagram that's where I can hear you people playing stuff you can follow us on either the Jason Zach handle or the Nathaniel school handle and you could tag us you could send a recording and I'll be happy to listen to it and we'll be happy to share it as well for sure so it'll be great again if you'd like to consider downloading our notes for the entire lesson that'll help you it'll be a good supplementary learning resource in addition to that don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already hit that bell icon for regular notifications and as always keep following our channel for a lot more regular content cheers this is Jason