 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson, I basically want to talk about what I call as the bottom up approach for piano practice. And I suggest this method for learners having taught for a lot of years, primarily because whenever we play the piano, we just focus on all the cool stuff, the melody, the flurry arpeggios, the groovy, you know, comping patterns of the right hand and so on and so forth. And inevitably, especially for newer students, the left hand just takes a backseat and in some cases no seat. And you have these keyboards, you know, especially some Yamaha's and Casio keyboards, which just promote the non-functionality of the human left hand to just kind of hit a few fairly useless buttons, trying to be like a wannabe DJ or something. And you hit the button and some fancy music comes out and you think you're playing it when clearly you have nothing to do with that music. It's already been prerecorded. Some of you may know what I'm talking about. I don't have a keyboard to demonstrate that neither do I want to. So just know that the bottom up technique focuses on all the foundational stuff and all the stuff which you can do along with anything. And by anything, I mean melody, I mean chords, chord patterns, I mean arpeggios, I mean improvisation, I mean exercises, I mean scale practice. Yeah, as I literally said, anything. So you need to look at a practice routine, which you can create for yourself where you tell yourself what is the most foundational thing which I'm gaining from the practice. And a foundational thing in my opinion is always the thing which has the most scalability in the sense you can use it for a variety of things. So for this lesson, I just wanted to introduce you to just three very foundational things. And inevitably, this lesson is going to involve them in the left hand because inevitably, you'll always play your melody in the right hand. That's how it is. That's how the pitch is defined on our instrument. And then unfortunately, the left hand sometimes takes a back seat. So a common problem I think we face is, you know, if you have an exercise to do, you know, or you'll do your scales and then, you know, you'll do it all over the place, you'll fly around the keyboard, but then where's the left hand, you'll probably just forget about the left hand sometimes. Or what I've also found with some of my students and me, of course, I have the same problem would be we focus on our right hand for a good amount of time, we invest a lot of effort into it. And then we start obviously getting fatigued. And then when you get fatigued, you say to yourself, oh, man, I haven't done the left hand. What do I do? And by that time, your brain's already fried. So that's not the right way to go. So always do the foundational thing or maybe start with the easier thing, or the less catchy thing, even though it's not the best thing. Initially, when you start playing the keyboard, because you always want to do the cool riff or the flashy part of the song first, you know, you always want to do that. And we are all the same. But what I am suggesting here is to grow, you should grow with both your hands. So why not we work on getting the left hand to be like an engine, you know, which can just always be trusted always work sometimes it's tough to know is my left hand even playing correctly or not when the right hand is going crazy. So the whole objective is work on the left hand sort of like an engine like a like a machine or a motor. And then, you know, your freer or your more confident to drive your car or drive your right hand or drive the vehicle forward comfortably with a lot of trust that, you know, your left hand will not fail. So for this exercise, I'm just considering three basic things which I would like you to try. Take any note on the piano, let's say you want to take E plate in the pulse of the song. So choose a tempo, let's say, whatever the tempo may be, maybe this speed. Yeah, slightly slow. Something like this would work. You can play the pulse in both ways. You can either play the two roots and the octave together or one by one. One by one is nice because it replicates a bass player or a drummer kick. It's nice. Now do whatever you have to do in the right hand. Let's say you have your life's mission is to play, do it, but do it with the pulse. And maybe this song had some chords, maybe a B major there, E major there. You don't have to play the entire chord in the left hand because anyway, sounds muddy, right? Doesn't sound so great. So playing a root and an octave is actually good. It's not some, you know, thing you do as a complete beginner. It's very, very applied. Lot of us professional pianists also just are very happy playing just the root and your octave. So get used to your pulse. Right? So you see what I did there? I embellished the melody wherever you're improvising. Maybe you're improvising on the blues, working on some trills, or maybe working on a chord pattern. See that left hand is just going on and on. Like I used the word earlier, if I remember, I said engine, right? So you should not be thinking of this. And right now I'm actually giving you an exercise. Play your left hand and you should be able to like, like even chat with someone, you know, have a conversation. You could read the newspaper. You could read like a Wikipedia article to just talk to someone or you can tell someone about your day, you know, anything. You could have some coffee and so on. You see, when I said coffee, I lost my left hand. I just love coffee. So you need to keep that really going. You need to keep the pulse really strong. And like I said, earlier we did some kind of a melody, embellished it, improvised some blues, do a chord pattern. The left hand is just moving on the pulse, right? And for some genres, that's actually what you need. You know, modern day dance music just pretty much has a kick. It's just the pulse which is anyways needed. Apeggios also get the idea. So I've done everything. Even if you have a finger drill, you know, maybe your teacher or you watched another YouTube lesson and you have an exercise which is like ridiculously straightforward, like just that. Do it with the pulse. Feel the music. Toggle. That's root octave. And then do like melodies. So the next rhythm pattern is derived from a, you know, an epic rock song. You've all heard it, right? We will, we will rock you. That pattern. Do that with a root, root octave. So a little bit more complexity, I guess. Do it with whichever melody you're trying to play. We'll rock you going with some chords, practice, even back to a simple finger drill. Always change your left hand to other roots. Fine. The pulse with we will rock you something I like to do much in the left hand. As you've seen in this lesson, I've just been playing roots and octaves. That's all you're, I didn't even add a third or a fifth. It was just from what I remember, root and octave. Okay. So I'm going to leave you with one more pattern, which is slightly tricky. I've done a lot of videos on this pattern. It's called the Thresio. You can search for it on our YouTube channel, or there's a, there's a playlist which we've put out called rhythm chops that come, that pretty much contains all of our rhythm lessons, things focusing on, you know, independence, triplets, advanced concepts like poly rhythms and so on. So check out the playlist called rhythm chops, which is in the description. Now coming back to Thresio, it sounds something like okay. Root, octave, root, octave, double octave. So automatically you get a very, very dancey vibe, right? So we've done pulse. We will rock you. And now Thresio, which is also considered a Latin rhythm or an Afro Cuban rhythm originated there. So same story in the bass. Could even sing a melody. Try to be able to do whatever you need to do or whatever you're practicing with that Thresio. So go back to our favorite song, boring exercise. Find your most boring exercise of them all, which could probably be make it very groovy. Another very important thing when you practice this stuff is practice it with different dynamics. Play it very soft. So what you want to do is really express yourself freely in your right hand and let your left hand be the foundation. It's, it's like moving into a house for the first time. You want the foundation to be sorted. You want the earthing to be ready. You want the infrastructure or the architecture to be very well done before you can actually move in and start existing there, you know. So that's exactly what we're trying to do. So one analogy was the left hand is trying to be the foundation of the house or the structure. And the other analogy I gave you earlier was the left hand should be like this endless engine with unlimited fuel. It just goes on and on. You don't even think it's there. You just have the, the trust that it's going to work. And that is one of the best feelings to have on our instrument because our instrument requires two hands to, to function. You cannot just play a melody in the right hand and think, oh, wow, I'm doing a, an awesome thing. Impossible. The flute player, the violin player, the Vina player, the singer, they'll all defeat you. You cannot, you cannot go hand to, you cannot fight side to side with a melody instrument. The piano will never win because the flute is amazing. You know what it can do, the violin, man, they can do all these articulations. So on a piano, your setup is to play with two hands. So one hand needs to be the engine. And that's what I tried to talk about at the very beginning. In fact, in the lesson, I said, we are looking at a bottom up strategy. So when you have a job to do, when you have an exercise to do, when you have a song to learn, when you have some arpeggio thing to work on, forget that. First tell yourself, what should I do in the left hand? Is it the pulse? Is it a very, very, very basic pulse? Is it maybe something like we will rock you? Is the thresio? Your timing will be rock solid. If you can ensure that you have a few of these bankable rhythm patterns in your left hand, you know, bankable, meaning it's always there. You can bring it out whenever you need. And whatever you want to do in the right hand, you should be able to do at least with those bankable rhythms. And over time, over your journey on the instrument, you'll have more things in your bank, you'll be able to store more things very, very safely in your, in your subconscious mind. Okay, so that's what this whole lesson has been about. The other way of generally practicing the piano with sometimes I also am a culprit, you know, to do sometimes is the top down approach where start with the melody, play all the fancy stuff, then the melody gets a bit tricky. Then your mind starts getting fatigued, brain gets fried, and then you're like, okay, enough for the day. At least I've got my melody. Let's now have a good night's sleep. And then you forget the left hand. The left hand is never being given that much of importance. So bottom up starts with the left starts with the, the fundamental foundational stuff. And then you bring in the right, do whatever you want in the right, you have the ability to get anything in the right with the foundational things of the left hand. So top down doesn't really work that well for a pianist, especially when you want to work on your hand independence, hand coordination, and just existing with both hands. It's sort of like, you know, well, you can't have a tree with just the flowers and the fruits. I mean, it grows, it has to come from somewhere. So always start with the foundation, start with the engine, start with the motor, develop these bankable options for yourself on the left hand, more commonly on the left hand, and then see where the right hand goes or rather do whatever you need to do with the right hand, but do it with some left hand. Okay. And another word of advice is if you're a piano player who does a lot of those arrangement buttons which have, you know, various drum loops, various samples and whatnot. I mean, if your focus is piano, you may want all of that to take a distant backseat because it's not going to help you be a piano player. You're just going to be stuck. You'll be playing something which you're told to play and you're not really playing piano. You're holding down, you're programming something for that to play. So that's not a great piano training approach. Right, guys. Again, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. Hope you found the lesson useful. Do support our channel by subscribing, of course, turning on that bell. You can also follow us on Patreon for all our regular notes for all the lessons, including this one and everything we'll probably ever do. And that's pretty much it. Have a good one. Cheers.