 this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to take what I call very affectionately in my classes as the mother of all chord progressions. Now the mother of chord progressions is there in a few songs, you will find it a lot in this Canon song or the wedding song as I like to call it, that sort of song. And then Maroon 5 have copied it in their song Memories. I don't know why they copied it almost down to the nearest note. It's a bit scary how these things are allowed these days. But anyway, so we are going to take the Packable Canon chord progression as I'm calling it. Johan Packable is the original composer. Do check his music out. He's an amazing orchestral composer. So it's a string arrangement and the goal behind this lesson is not to learn the song per se, but to grow as a piano player by learning a very huge chord progression. As I said, it's the mother of all chord progression. So we will learn the chord progression in its entirety. First of all, we will learn the theory of how to build those chords. We will learn how to form chord inversions which are super important for piano players as well as composers, arrangers and so on. And lastly in the lesson, we are going to learn how to play it in an arpeggiated way using a very interesting arpeggio technique which I'd like to call as a melodic arpeggio technique to bring out the melody from the original song or any song which you're going to play in the future and also arpeggiated. So it's going to be arpeggio and melody in one hand. So do stay tuned till the very end. Get your keyboards out and there are also supplementing notes which will carry all the inversions and everything which is presented very neatly for you to follow. Those notations will be available on our Patreon page, patreon.com slash Jason Zach. It also gives you a place to support our channel and help us grow from strength to strength. And if you haven't already, it'll be great if you could hit that subscribe button. Turn on the bell icon for regular notifications and without any further chatter, let's get started. So I'm going to take D major, the original scale for the Packable Canon song and let me guide you through the chords first of all. It's D major, A major, B minor, F sharp minor, G major, D major. Then G major, but what we do in the original is E minor over G. I'll talk about that shortly. And then A major. So again, repeating D major, A major, B minor, F sharp minor, G major, D major, G major or else E minor with a G bass and A major. And let's look at that from a functional harmony perspective. That would be what degree or which scale degree do these chords fall under. So that's your one chord. Remember, just to recap in a major scale, the one, the four and the fives are all going to form major chords, while the two, the three and the sixth degree will form minor chords. And the seventh will be a diminished chord, which I guess we sell the muse, at least the music I've heard in my time. So you go D, which is the one chord, A, which is the five chord, B minor, which is the six minor, also known as the relative minor, and then F sharp minor, which is the three minor G, which is the four, and then the D coming back to D, which is the one. And then G, which is the four again, or you could do E minor, which is the two minor and then A major. I like to play E minor because it adds something or makes this chord progression to be a very good study for practicing chords of a particular key or scale. If you look at this, it's all the one, fours and the fives, the major chords are taken up are all covered rather D, G and A are all used. Then you'll have E minor, F sharp minor and B minor, all the three minor chords are also used. So it's a nice way to practice or gang up all your chords together and put it together into a very beautiful, pleasant, catchy chord progression. That hence I called it the mother of all chord progressions because almost all the other chord progressions, if you take a subset of what we just saw, it's going to be there in almost all the pop songs out there or rock songs or country songs or gospel songs, whichever genre. So if you think about it, D, A, B minor, G, there you have it, you have your famous 1564 progression or D, A, F sharp, A, again very common, right? D, B, G, A, that's 1645 is a subset of the mother progression, D, A, B minor, G, again 1564 very popular, again part of the mother. Okay, D, B, minor, E minor, which is your two A major, these are all subsets, even the 251 is there. So it's well worth learning this progression in its entirety. Okay, so let's recap the chords This is now D major, A major, B minor, F sharp minor, G major, D major, E minor, I'm doing E minor. In the original it's actually E minor over G bass. So that's what we call as a slash chord, a slash chord is a triad played in the upper register or in simple words your right hand and in your left hand you'll be playing a different bass note. That's E minor over G and then A major over A. Okay, now to play this progression really well, what I'm gonna try and do is take one of the parts from the original Canon with and I stress on the term one of the parts because a Canon, a classical Canon when it's composed you'll have many parts just cascading over each other. So this is literally the first melodic part which you'll hear, the easiest melodic part and then the more complicated parts like the tune which Maroon 5 tried to rip off and unfortunately failed to even rip it off well. So let's start with that very basic package of notes. I'll sing it first for you along with the chords. That will be again. Okay, that's your loop. Now each of the notes which I sang right now are part of the triad. So if I sing that is the third note or the middle note or the third the major third of the D major chord. So since it's the soprano part or the catchy part played by the violin player you would want to sneak it up top or project it up top so that the soprano part is heard by the listener so that in order to do that you have to invert your chord. So D major as we probably know has all its inversions and I would encourage you when you're figuring out the inversions, write the triad, write all the available triads by their notes D F sharp A but go one step further, write it in a circle. So by writing it in a circle you have the three shapes available for you right there. All you need to do is write it in a circle and count clockwise so it'll be D F sharp A, F sharp A D, A D F sharp. So you have your root position D F sharp A, F sharp A D which is your first inversion, A D F sharp which is your second inversion. Now which inversion should you play to keep F sharp on the top? You would want to perhaps play your second inversion because the second inversion carries the soprano note which we are targeting on top so F sharp so that's D major in its second inversion. What's the second note I'm singing and what is that note? That's an E and my chord is A major so how do I play A major with E on the top in the root position? So that'll be again and it's also nice on the ear because it provides for some great voice leading and let's journey forward. So the next two notes are so we are sticking D on top and we thus have to invert B minor again in its second inversion in order to play the D up top. So E on top, B minor with a D on top and then C sharp with F sharp minor as the chord. 2 is the root F sharp minor and the C sharp on the top. Okay so the four chords again which are four out of the eight which is a huge progression lot of fun. D major, A major, B minor, F sharp minor again. D major, A major, inverted to get that E on top, inverted to get the D on the top, inverted to get the C sharp on the top. So you can also look at the journey of the melody notes to go down and the bass notes of the chord don't really get affected. It's the bass plays the root or the true roots of the chords. It's only that melody on the top which I'm proposing to play with the inversion of the chord such that the top note of the melody stays its ground and is the soprano or the most catchy sound for the listeners here. That's E on the top, C sharp, now let's journey forward we're going down again so that's B on the top with G major. That's the G major chord with the B on the top. That's a four going to one that itself is a very common cadence we call it the plagal cadence or the armen cadence in church music. So B on the top, A on the top one more time. B on the top, A on the top but the chords are G major, D major, G major, D major okay and now that's E minor with a B on top so it's your root shape. Back to A major but A major is now going to be played in a different inversion not the old inversion which we did earlier in the progression. We want C sharp on the top so invert A major with E, A, C sharp, keeping C sharp on the top. Now all this is written down for you you just you can grab a copy of the notes on Patreon it's just $5 a month for not only this everything we've done in the past and what we are going to do in the future as long as you are part of our channel you'll keep getting the notes for all the lessons which we do on our YouTube page. So a whole thing again the eight chord progression. I'm going to sing the melody note up top and I'm going to play the base roots of the chord in the left hand and my entire right hand has been readjusted or inverted so that the soprano note which I'm singing is on the top register. Let's see how that goes and let's just do each chord as a semi-brieve and count four each time so you get your time to shift between chords and right after this I'm going to tell you the fingering to change better and then we are going to do the arpeggio movement so do stay tuned a few more things to learn but very important stuff so stay tuned making that top note a bit more obvious for you to hear F sharp A with E on top B minor with D on the top F sharp minor with C sharp on the top G major with B on the top D major with A on the top and then E minor with B on the top A major with C sharp on the top okay without me talking too much so that's about the chords that's about the inversions and all the theory now let's take this to town with a couple of arpeggio patterns prior to which I'd like to give you a few of the fingering tips out there general fingering tips to play chords and some of my own so if you just study your fingers the general guideline would be your ring finger should be allocated to a black note if the last note is black doesn't matter if the previous notes are black it's just if the last note is black I would recommend the ring because it's a taller finger the pinky finger being smaller you can save the guy for the white notes so in this case it's a great opportunity to play your ring finger and you save your middle finger to play the next chord now here's the challenge how do I flip over so you could actually just flip over and then flip over but you're going to lose the sustain you're gonna have to lift this and then shift right so a lot of ways to overcome that one is obviously with the pedal but with the pedal if you don't lift it it's gonna sound bad all the sounds collide with each other so it's good to start without pedal and get the fingering absolutely right so a trick technique would be it looks well some might argue that it doesn't look conventional or it looks a bit unorthodox or ugly but doesn't matter because people are gonna listen to what you do they're not gonna judge you by seeing you right or at least your fingers so now I want to get into this position where so I could do ring or ring with the middle and then save the index there and then flip over so when I am flipping over I can flip even before I shift to the next chord but I don't want to lose the hold of the chord see I can kind of flip my fingers out get a nice legato sound even though my fingers are swapping themselves out with other fingers but the sustain is still there right so it works for me so that allows me to bring my index finger to F sharp and play B minor like this again remember what I told you assign your ring finger for the black note if it's up top just drop this guy down for F sharp minor there we go now for G major I can just bring back the ring finger here and use the index finger here and the thumb comes down and then these two fingers slide down or the middle finger gets added then you climb up and and then ring finger now here's the challenge you need to go all the way back up top so again you may want to adopt a little bit of fingers flipping or finger swapping to take you back up as you can see I'm very flexible with my fingering especially when it comes to chords I call this the church organ technique of piano fingering or rather maybe you should call it organ fingering because on an organ the notes will sustain very long so the organ player needs to get that legato going otherwise the organ doesn't sound so good to begin with and this is not taught very often in conventional keyboard players you know repertoire or training but flipping it as you can hear gives you a very smooth sound and it's very easy on my brain I don't have to think which finger should I use it's just what happens it's my instincts taking over right survival instinct so to speak there we go and important tip as you're also observing whether you adopt the swapping technique or not I'm always planning ahead for the next chord so even if there's a small jerk motion or a jump between the chords 1 2 3 4 2 3 4 you see at the 4 or just before the next chord I get into shape 1 2 3 lift you could even that do that 2 3 lift that also works for then you're consistently giving a rest at the 4 that I think it's completely cool 3 4 and 2 3 4 as you can see my instincts are doing this finger swapping thing it works for me 3 4 keeping the fingers engaged and ready to play the next event so now that the fingering is done the next thing before we conclude is to play all this stuff with an arpeggio pattern which brings that violin melody into the forefront which is but not compromising on the cause you don't want to do it's now boring so let's develop an arpeggio pattern I'm going to show you the pattern on D major then we'll explore the remaining cause so the pattern is high note low note middle note low note also what we could say HLML high low middle low HLML and if possible try to sustain the high note not if possible I would recommend you to work on it should also improve your finger independence capabilities do not do doesn't sound so nice so there we go that I think works well okay of course you have the pedal which adds some resonance but use the pedal primarily just to give you that resonance which you need and maybe just before shifting because it's an arpeggio your fingering will be a lot more easy to shift because you're not playing it all together so you have all that time to jump your fingers but do it well ahead of time so as you can hear whatever whatever the soprano violins were doing you're able to execute with the top most finger so in a sense you're dividing your piano normally people think that the piano is divided into two the bass clef and the treble clef in this case we are kind of dividing it into three which I think is really cool you have the soprano violin you have the other backing instruments played as a arpeggio and you still have your bass so slowly and that's serving the soprano violin sustained part I can't do the vibrato like a violin can do or like my voice can do but you get the idea the piano has its limitations so we work within that of course which is why every instrument deserves its respect you know including a triangle perhaps even a triangle is a good instrument all instruments are powerful in their own way so the piano will not be better than every instrument so in how in other words it can't do vibrato it can't do you know bending of notes or long notes and all of the other things which a violin a trumpet a flute or the human voice can do so hold on to the top note and in my music I'm playing eighth note so I would like to count it as one and two and three and four and one and two observe how I crossed over to the third chord and even before I press the chord I've crossed also using the pedal for additional resonance but I'm lifting it before each chord so if you're not sure of lifting don't use the pedal I'm trying to play octaves in my left hand which I think makes it a much more richer cello like sound and the soprano looks like we are doing justice to both speed this up 16th notes and you just repeat each chord twice the only challenge I see to this you're repeating the top soprano twice which is not the original isn't it it's not what's going on in the song so what we do that out so I'm adding I'm copying the top high note adding it as a lower note which is the down octave of the high in the same pattern high low middle low high low middle it's still the high note but you're playing it in the lower octave let's see how that work change and as best as I possibly can I'm clinging on to that high note for dear life because it's the soprano violin we have to respect that tune we can't change it so this will be nice when you're playing semi quavers speeding it up a few years in the left hand maybe a topic for our next video maybe a big cup of tea to handle at the moment but just to give you an idea the future let us know in the comments if you how how you'd like to take this forward and also how you're faring with this existing lesson okay so the left hand can also do some fancy stuff rather than the rather than the cello part which is a bit simple okay so let's just recap what we've done we've taken the cannon progression the packable cannon progression which I call as the mother of all chord progressions primarily because all the other pop chord progressions pop song progressions for years and years and years have are just a subset of the mother so the chords again why we call it such an influential chord progression is because all the three major chords are well there all the three minor chords are there the three major chords are 145 the three minor chords are 236 then we learned it with the correct inversions because we are trying to serve the soprano violin in the top end then after we did inversions with the base roots in the left hand we then up a gated it and brought some energy into the performance we did quaver arpeggios and semi quaver arpeggios so that's about it guys hope you found the lesson useful the notes are waiting for you on patreon that would also help support our channel and if you'd like to learn music with our school in a very structured manner you can always consider joining us we have virtual courses so you can learn from your house or wherever you're located at you can also come to one of our centers if you're based in Bengaluru you can also well if the time zones just don't match or if your schedules are a bit erratic and you still want a structured approach to learning the piano we have a bunch of videos waiting for you at Nathaniel school dot com under our video courses catalog so you could look at you things like the everything for life bundle which will give you a lot of modules to learn including books for each of the modules so hope you have fun learning music with us in the near future and do let us know what you thought about this lesson do consider 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