 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel, compliments of the Christmas season and in this special Christmas lesson we are going to look at one of the greatest Christmas tunes we will have, Joy to the World and I am going to give you a very interesting solo piano arrangement which sounds more like a folk music arrangement with a very interesting rhythm pattern which I think you can use for not only this song but a lot of other songs as well be it Christmas songs or anything else. So the main intention in the lesson is to show you the melody of the song which I am sure you may already know but I will anyways revise that with you and also give you the pattern. It is going to be a very very sort of iconic rhythm pattern which I am going to be teaching you which can be used for ballad music, for folk music, for pop music and a lot of things and obviously for Joy to the World which we are going to learn in this lesson. So I am taking the scale of D major for our study. We are going to do the entire song on D major and the chords are very very simple for Joy to the World. It is just pretty much D major, G major here and there, A major here and there, occasional B minor that is pretty much it. Actually I added the B minor, I don't think the original has it. But the chords are not so much important for the lesson. What is more important is the pattern, the independence and getting the melody with the pattern in order to maybe not play a rendition which feels like this and then some piano students or some learners would then play chords in the left. But there is no groove, there is no pattern there and that is where I think this lesson will help you. The lesson is supplemented by a downloadable PDF with all the notation for the song and what's also cool which we have for you or in store for you will be midi files. Now while preparing this version, I also figured that there could be a lot of other versions for Joy to the World in this style or in this avatar you know. So I have recorded all of those and for timing otherwise this lesson would be like an hour long possibly. I have recorded those as a midi file for you to go through and you can import into any midi playback software which will play back with the notation with the piano playing as well. And we also will have a video of that in this chapter. So for that you need to head over to patreon.com, support the channel for just a sum of about 5 bucks a month and you will get yourself copies of the notation and this is not just the only Christmas lesson. We'll be talking about a few more over the month. So do stay tuned and let's get started with the tutorial. So let's discuss the melody line of Joy to the World. I'm sure you guys already know it but nevertheless super easy. Let's do it. First line well it's just the descending scale Joy to the World the Lord has come. So you just go Joy to the World the Lord has come. So you just go down and however you're taught D major descending it's just five fingers cross over your middle finger in the Joy to the World iconic rhythm that the rhythm is a very important part of the melody. Melody is just not the notes it's the way the notes are timed that's what I keep saying in all my videos. So you go okay one more time. Joy to the World the Lord has come and now let earth you're gonna end at king here let earth receive her king you'll be ending here with your pinky in order to do that you don't want to cross your ring and pinky it would be very difficult and you may wish you had more fingers which clearly you're not going to get. So you go cross the index finger there let earth receive her king two lines and now index middle ring you could also keep this D ringing which I tend to do very often because the root of this the song it'll sound good with pretty much everything so you could do that it just works with everything so I tend to do that sometimes okay let's do the next two lines which is let every heart prepare him room it's quite easy because both the lines are the same melody you need to repeat a couple of those notes so the fingers some notes are repeated okay so far we have next line okay and now now your index finger is already here so you could probably just continue with the index okay at least that's how I remember the tune you could do nature sing or nature sing there are various renditions of it so you could figure that out and then try to cross your in your middle finger there and then pinky to hit the octave let's do the last night let's do the whole melody again try to follow along look at the notation as well that could also be very helpful if you read otherwise just follow along and go with your year that should be more than enough so that's the melody hope you have fun with that but on the piano you're not going to get away with playing the melody if someone comes home for Christmas and tells you play joy to the world and if you're a flottist or a violinist or a trumpet player people are going to say wow this guy is awesome how beautiful sounding is that but on a piano you cannot survive with the melody in one hand so that's where the next part of the lesson is with the left hand production okay now I'm going to build the left hand in in two stages first off I will give you the rhythm pattern which is the root and the fifth if you're a beginner you can perhaps look at the melody with just that pattern throughout the piece and it could work quite well for you so that would go let me play it and then show you so it's one five five one five five one five five okay and one and two and so it's come the fifth with my thumb is coming in at the and beats one and two and one and okay and you could even hold on your pedal sounds quite nice or without the pedal also sounds quite nice you get a nice staccato flavor so this needs to first be practiced with the melody do the whole song it's a folk song so it works well so that's the rhythm try to keep that rhythm to kind of become like almost involuntary it's just kind of happens see another way to practice it is chat with a few folks at home or read a book or something or cook some food for that you have to take the piano to the kitchen which may be an interesting thing to do so basically practice getting a hold or a grip of this rhythm quite subconsciously talk to someone about your day or whatever you want if you can do that if you can isolate your brain your conscious brain from this rhythm then you can do anything so this is the base so now i'm just gonna color up this in this entire lesson and that's all you have to learn and you can apply how many ever colors they were discussed in this tutorial for your production but to be honest i think it doesn't sound too bad with just the root and the fifth as we say in india sa and the pa but the the challenge is to line up this rhythm with the melody and the joy to the world melody is a folk melody it's it's not a very classically composed melody where the beats are very fixed there's a lot of 16th notes there's a lot of dotted dotted notes as we call them in in investor notation so it'll be quite a hurdle or quite a challenge quite an interesting job to try and get that melody with the baseline now coming to coloring it up first of all i have a nice intro for you you go okay you could go d a a d a d i'm opening up the harmony like a g major d gb kind of climb there to an a major with the e on the base so it's going to take us to the melody and now we start begins now there are little things i do like in the first line to the world the lord so i'm trying to imagine like a like a tenor voice in a choir to try and do that and i'm trying to line that up in the same rhythm pretty much but instead of doing a that's not a very creative tenor the tenor would go the lord has come so just get a little bit of that essence in your left hand thumb i know it's a bit unconventional it's not a choral way of playing it but you still get the same harmony which i think is is fine let's do the whole thing again the tenor b a g f sharp a d i'm still holding on to those off beats so that the groove is still maintained again okay let's proceed now what did i do there i i wanted i think the chords in general are okay that's a very nice cadence it's like a four going to five going to one very powerful classical cadence so that's a four going to five going to one so how did i play that now if you'd like if you still like that tenor the soprano is doing you could actually do two notes on the piano i've kind of freed up your hand to do two notes because that the next note is kind of covered here in the bass so g a back let's do the that line if you can't do the tenor in the right no problem just sounds a bit more harmonically rich shall we move on okay so first two lines now it's like a more groovy tenor which goes a little bit differently in the shape compared to the soprano let's do that slowly a little bit of independence here which i think is fun this is let every heart only let every heart now for the same melody repeats for prepare him room let every heart i just thought we can elevate it there with some new chords what i do there b minor with just a single b with a nice octave it even stack up the soprano there with more more flavor with the root and the five come back let's do that both those two lines okay also stay tuned till the end i'll play you the entire version slowly another reminder that there is this entire notation waiting for you on our patreon do head over there and you will get yourself a copy and not just for this lesson pretty much any lesson we will ever do is on patreon waiting for you there okay so that part so now normally you would have played it like this right the chords are different though so we go i quite like that i'm following my soprano head man nature sing right head man nature sing it's like a bass part or a lower alto you could say and have nature sing and you always come back to that rhythm okay on the piano it's a very piano rhythm it's something which very few people on other instruments do so as a piano arrangement it's very essential to give us that piano rhythm that unique piano color right otherwise you could play it in a choral way sounds very grand but this is what a piano player could perhaps do you know over the track and then you could have people singing over it as well because you are covering up the harmony so let's do that again and have nature sing now the other end heaven and nature sing and have first one that's a i'm taking a major there i'm climbing my bass so that's like a g over b and an a over c sharp slash chords make things very uplifting if you ask me so nature sing and heaven okay last line now folks so i'm giving like a nice dyad there so just to do something different which we didn't yet do heaven heaven so play g over b and f sharp with a together okay get that off beat a as well nature sing the very end there's a little bit of a stretch if you're a younger player or if you have smaller fingers you could replace g with b i kind of like g there so nature sing i like that ending tenor so heaven and nature sing and you could repeat now if you're in intermediate player i'm going to leave some midi files where you can exactly see what i'm doing there'll be a video also for that and it'll be a little bit easier for you to just watch me play rather than me try to talk about everything because an intermediate advanced version may have a lot of ingredients rhythmically and harmonically so all that is waiting for you on the patreon apart from the notation lot of things are there regarding this song so head over to patreon if possible let me now conclude the lesson guys by playing the entire thing slowly try to follow along if you can and if you are finding it difficult in the initial stages just learn it as it is i've talked to you about the simplified version and just give it a couple of days right and hopefully it's not going to be too late for christmas because i would encourage you to perform this for your friends family share it on your social media as well before christmas so the time is ticking or the clock is ticking so work at it work hard but relax and play do it at a skill level which you can do i hope i've conveyed this for a at least a few skill levels in this rendition so let me conclude the lesson by playing joy to the world solo piano arrangement slowly and it'll be great if you haven't already to hit the subscribe button hit the bell icon for regular notifications follow us on instagram or facebook you can also visit our website for a lot of lessons courses which are catalogued really efficiently well now with tags and so on you could also well you could also do a course a full-on course a four-month full-length course at whichever level be it foundation or intermediate or advanced for all the instruments we cover at our music school including vocals by the way so let's get cracking with a slow version and thanks a ton for watching the lesson