 Hi guys, this is Jason here from Nathaniel and in this lesson, we are going to learn how you can embellish a simple major or a minor chord in your left hand. Most of the techniques we look at for chord playing end up being in the right hand for even intermediate players but I think you need to work on how you can make your left hand sort of work in an autopilot mode so that the right hand can just take over the fancy stuff like melodies and embellishments and improvisation and so on and so forth. So in the left hand, the technique which I have developed works around something you have probably already done at some point before as a piano player if you've played melody and harmony before. What we generally do in the left hand will be an accompaniment using the root, the fifth and the octave of a respective chord. In this case, the G major chord is played like this, G, D, G. Now why we tend to choose fifth harmony in the bass is primarily because triads don't really work. It sounds very muddy and starts colliding with what the other musicians in our ensemble do. Also, it messes with the production if we are trying to do a bunch of tracks in a recording software. So what we tend to do in the left hand will be this sort of clean root, fifth octave harmony and this will work really well over any piece of music. If I am playing a song using the G major chord and the C major chord, you can go something like this with a D as well. This sounds quite interesting. The only problem is we are losing out the harmonic color because in theory the fifth interval which is D with respect to G and the octave which is the same G doesn't really add any motion and that's what chords are all about at the end of the day. Chords are there to add that flavor and to add the color and to tell stories and that's what's not happening right now on the left because you are playing an interval which is a very vanilla or a plain interval and stacking it with another obviously plain interval, the octave. So it sounds functionally good because you are playing the roots of the chords but it doesn't work harmonically with respect to the color aspect. So what we then need to do or the technique which I have developed for this lesson will be to just focus on what your thumb is doing. Now the thumb in my opinion can float around because it doesn't have to always adhere to the G because you are already playing the G here or the tonic or the root of the chord. So why not try out a few other notes. In this case you have the ninth which is A or the second played one octave higher. You have the tenth which is a beautiful sound that's already giving you a G major chord isn't it. Played up top so it doesn't sound very muddy. I love that. That's the major seventh F sharp. That's the major sixth E. And all these notes are diatonic within the G major realm isn't it. It's all part of the scale so why would it not sound good. So you have the default vanilla chord if you will that's your octave. You have the ninth which is A you can feel that color right. You can feel that warmth of the major sound, the colorness of the ninth, the vanillaness of the octave, more color and little bit of tension with the seventh. You have a very grand and epic kind of sound with the major sixth. So everything gives you a different flavor because they are different intervals. So what if you could develop a pattern around all of these intervals while the rest of your band let's say the guitar player is just holding a normal G major chord. They don't need to change their role. The vocalist doesn't need to change the melody. So let's see what you can do and also this technique is intending to put a stamp on your chord rhythm or your chord pattern. The listeners who hear our song will kind of remember the song not only for the lyrics or the vocal line also the way you're playing your chord. For example very inspired by that police song right every breath you take right. You immediately know when the guitarist is playing it like that wow it's that song happening. So that's the intention. So you could build a pattern starting from the fifth chord because now I'm copying every breath you take but you can also make it very very unique. There we go one and two and three and four and so what did I do there one and two and three and four and okay so it would also inspire a vocal melody. What did I do there that's B major third so how do I do that with a nice arpeggio vibe of course. So it's a great way to kind of dynamically play a G major chord even though time is moving if you play a G major like this A there's no color because you don't have the third but if you play with the third yes there is a lot of color we can make it even more dynamic by perhaps playing maybe you could try out this pattern which I've developed now. Like I said it can really inspire your vocal melody change the chord is just a great way to kind of add some very unique elements to what you're doing in a song that you're working on or composing or doing a cover off right and again this really frees up your right hand to just sort of stick with the melody line so if I just keep something really simple going on in the right hand you know like just a single G also like if you know your octave playing in your right hand you could just exclusively take your right hand to play octaves throughout you know 100% because your left hand is doing so many things it's holding the chords it's handling the rhythm it's also handling the color you know so there's so much the left hand is able to do now and if you can work on templating the left hand if you will you can use this for so many songs which you compose and you can also pretty much play a ton of melodies and a lot of your compositions probably with these templated left hand patterns generally when you learn left hand patterns you'd want to bank them you'd want to program them into your subconscious mind so that you can use them for pretty much any piece of music barring spanning a lot of genres right so I hope you guys have found this lesson useful again this is Jason here from Nathaniel don't forget to like the video subscribe to our channel turn on that bell icon for regular notifications whenever we release a new lesson it'll be great to hear from you as well so cheers and catch you in the next one