 Hi everyone this is Jason here from Nathaniel and in this lesson let's learn how to accompany ourselves on the piano to play the great church hymn Amazing Grace. We are going to use the F major scale to play the song. The chords are really simple so I will walk you through the chords as I play but the main objective of this lesson is to show you how you can create a great rich dense accompaniment pattern in your left hand which can serve as a very rigid and strong foundation for anything you do in the right hand. Any kind of improvisation or embellishment to the melody so the lesson is not so much about the melody because the assumption is that you know the melody right. I will go through the melody once just to recap but the assumption is yeah you kind of know how to play Amazing Grace but maybe you've played it with just simple chord blocks if you will in the left hand or maybe in a choral manner with the soprano alto tenor bass lines which which is great I mean there are so many ways of playing it but the main intention of this lesson is to show you a technique or to rely on your left hand to pretty much cover your entire harmony base and rhythm department and allow your right hand to just do whatever your head wants it to do you know. So let's get right into the video and if you haven't already it'll be awesome if you could subscribe to our channel and hit that bell icon for notifications you'll get a reminder of all the new lessons coming your way. So let's get started let me just show you the entire melody first with simple chord blocks and I'll try and call out the chords and hum the tune at the same time so that you get an idea of what we have chosen for this lesson okay amazing grace that's amazing F major saying grace there we need an F dominant seventh which leads to how sweet B flat the sound let's do that again amazing and it's on a three beat per bar or a waltz field three by fours how it's normally performed I'm going to also stick with that amazing grace F seventh how sweet B flat the sound back to the tonic okay so it's very interesting how the tonic chord F major feels stable and then when you add the dominant element to it it just immediately feels unstable because the dominant chord has the property to resolve to another chord so F dominant will resolve to B flat and B flat comes back to F that's the plagal or the the church cadence if you will amazing grace how sweet B flat the sound F moving on that's saved I'm preferring a D minor seventh there G seventh like me so you go like me C major and then C dominant which takes you back to the F major chord that's saved D minor G dominant like me normal C major going to C dominant seventh okay line three same chords but now that's F F seventh B flat F major was blind but now I see same D minor but now you could do a C major or a C dominant seventh I'm doing a B flat and then F I always like to do the B flat going to F generally even if it's not there if it's a gospel song or a church choral hymn like piece of music primarily because that's a that's a very tried and tested cadence and makes the makes the song also very unique for that genre or that variety of music right my C you could have easily done was blind but now I see that would be sort of vanilla or quite normal but what we can add there was blind D minor in country music or in gospel music we do a lot of the we can glide that B flat effortlessly down to the F major chord right so in this lesson we are trying to look at an accompaniment process in the left hand and free up the right hand to do all sorts of other colorful ways of embellishing the melody I've chosen a voicing in the left hand which allows you to go really deep that serves two uses one use is it allows your melody and your harmony to work separately away from clashing with each other because you'll find like a melody if the right hand invading the left hand chord or vice versa and then you'll have to compensate by playing the left hand really low and then that starts creating a very muddy texture right so a great way to solve this problem is to play your chords really deep in a spread voicing in your left hand starting low and then play your right hand all over the place you have an entire what three to four octaves to enjoy your right hand melody so let's get started and I'm going to call it out chord by chord and show you how I'm voicing each chord okay F major F dominant see how I'm forming the dominant F major was one five upper third or upper tenth higher third okay and then I go to F dominant by replacing the fifth with the dominant seventh so let's do that together amazing grace F dominant how sweet normal B flat the sound you could come back to F major or you could even do how sweet the sound you could play an F major chord with an A bass there's also a very beautiful sound how sweet the sound let's do that again amazing grace F dominant how sweet you could even play B flat how sweet the sound if you want you can even go a lot deeper and on the keyboard but I'm going to choose the normal B flat how sweet the sound come back all the way down or how sweet the sound okay and of course you can do the same melody which I just sung in the right hand let's see how it sounds on the keyboard amazing grace okay I hope you've got line one let's do the next line that saved now here that saved I'm choosing a D minor which you could either play in this form D A F or that you can even add a minor seventh flavoring that saved or that saved each whichever you prefer I'm just going to go with a normal D minor for now that saved now G is is the next chord after D minor you could play it as G major or I like that as well in fact I think I like this better G seventh okay like me the first me will be normal C major which you would also play in this way like me could do a lot of things there because it's C major for a long long time so that saved D minor G seventh like me resolve it like me C major or C dominant or place C major going to C dominant you could even try this voicing which is a bit spread I don't know if you will be able to stretch so much but for that we always have our handy sustain pedal like me so this creates a nice 11th interval like me and then resolve it back to a dominant or major so you have three options for that C major chord event you can go C G E so you have three options for that C major chord event you can go C G E C dominant more flavor with the 11th sound okay and then resolve it okay coming to line three pretty much the same as line one there's your F dominant but now normal B flat M found that same F over A voicing and now the ending was blind D minor but now again there are a lot of options with that C chord but now if you'd like just keep a simple C major now or a C dominant I see with a lot of chords so let's let's try and understand that I see normally you could just do I see B flat major going to back to the tonic but what you could also do to add more embellishments or a more passing chord flavor could be high C what did I do there B flat major F over A bass G minor end on F okay let's try and deal with that line number three and line number four together I once was lost but now B flat and found last line was blind but now I see or was blind but now keep it simple I see B flat going to okay that's the entire song played with the spread voicing technique in the left hand and that frees up your right hand to sort of embellish the melody this is a great melody to practice improvisation if you've listened to this song for years and years in church I would imagine that you this song is sort of like a year worm it's stuck inside you so you can use songs like this to really expand your melodic and harmonic playing so let's just recap everything once and then let's conclude all our chords are played in a spread environment so instead of playing F major like that or F seventh like that you play like that it's clean it's rich it's colorful and it's really low on the piano you're exploiting the lower register of your instrument right which you cannot really do in this way people are going to get very angry with you okay so this is a very orchestral voicing or a choral voicing if you will which we are trying to do in our left hand so this is how I'm playing my chord F major F dominant you just shift the fifth and in a nutshell it's just three notes per chord you're just trying to figure out three notes to play your chords in a nice spread voicing environment so we go amazing grace F seventh how sweet B flat the sound that saved D minor a rich I love that chord G seventh like me okay you could do 11th or seventh or a normal vanilla major chord seventh but now B flat I am found F with A was blind but now I see right so I've not really talked too much about the right hand that was not the intention behind this lesson the idea is I'm sure you know this tune you would have heard this a ton of times it's a very popular song so I hope you've learned something from this lesson and you can use this song hopefully or these techniques to play a few other songs also which you're going to take up at a later stage again this is Jason here from Nathaniel thanks for watching this video do subscribe hit the bell icon for notifications consider subscribing to us on our patreon channel where you will get notation and a lot of other resources to enhance your learning and keep rocking cheers