 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music and as you can see by my costume we are going to do a Christmas lesson and in this Christmas lesson it's going to be an array of songs, a lot of songs where you probably know the chord progression, you know a bit of the melody or at least you know how to sing it or you're going to accompany someone else who is going to sing it or maybe a group of friends or a choir or anyone, any ensemble really. So one thing is you need to know the chords for sure and you can watch a lot of our Christmas tutorials in the playlist for detailed chord breakdowns and patterns and whatnot. In this lesson it's primarily an accompaniment lesson so there's not going to be any melody it's just going to be chords and how you play the chords you could call them chord patterns. So I've divided our study into five categories. The first off thing which we are going to learn are ballads, then we'll do three by four or waltz style Christmas songs, then we are going to do six, eight feel, then we are going to do the groovy stuff, all the party holiday songs and of course we are going to do a few interesting things like how do we play it in a bluesy or a rock and roll way. So do stay tuned to all the parts of this video it's going to give you a comprehensive approach to understand Christmas music or any music accompaniment really. It's just that in this lesson we are choosing you know our favorite Christmas songs. So play along, get your keyboards out and all of the patterns will be available on our Patreon page. I've handwritten most of them so you could check it out to get exactly what I'm doing in visually as well. Okay guys before we get started it'll be great if you could consider hitting the subscribe button and turning on that bell for regular notifications. We're going to be releasing a lot of new lessons along the way almost daily so stay tuned. Right so the first pattern I have for you would be playing ballads so any song on a 4-4 which has a more mellow kind of uplifting vibe you could definitely do this. So if you take let's say a song like Hock the Herald. Stuff like this it'll work really well. So a good way to develop this pattern would be take four chords in the right hand or if let's just take the F major chord one chord one two three four so each chord is going to be played as quarter notes on the pulse two three four one two and here's how we develop our left hand so we go one two three four start with just one is to four one two three four one two three now to grow this maybe at the four you could slam an octave at the three wherever you want basically an additional beat could be hit here usually one and three works and to make it even more interesting you could add an eighth note flavor here with the octave. Now if you cannot skip over or if you cannot hit the octave at that offbeat eighth note part also what I call as an eighth note you can choose the fifth instead of the octave because you're anyways playing the chords here and I recommend you to generally play your chords close to each other on the piano. So the eighth note creates that momentum the song needs let me count it for you slowly one and two and three so to start with the ballad feel one two three four one just single notes in the left hand however if your chords change faster okay let's change the song now if you feel that the ballad is sounding too forceful with these power powerful you know four on the floor or quarter note chords you can dilute it by maybe breaking it up further by arpeggiating it now when you arpeggiate it especially for a song like okamali faithful you could go just break up the chord instead of going double it one and two and three you could even keep your depending on what pattern you want you want to do the block chord with the go state note maybe for the second part and back to arpeggio and whenever the chords change you could obviously change the chord but retain the pattern you're playing now another strategy would be to combine block chords with arpeggios and i think this works well let's take another song okamalocami manual i'm playing it on e minor oh come oh come we met you well so what did i do there i'm four one two three four one four one so i'm slamming the chord as a whole at the one i'm even playing a triad in the left hand as well if you want to consider or just play the roots oh come oh come if i just take an e minor chord you can block it or rather you can play a block with this ghost note in the left hand so that ballad thing works really well with the singing right or arpeggiate or block it and then arpeggiate even when you block you could kind of flam it so instead of hitting it as a as all three notes together or all four notes together in this case do a little bit of a guitar esque flam you know i'm getting carried away let me move over to the next thing so that we have a lot to learn in this video the next style of christmas piano which i'm going to give you for accompaniment will be waltz songs okay waltz basically means three by four one two three two three not to be confused with six by eight which we are going to learn later because three by four will be one and two and three and three hard hitting on beats one two and everything you add extra will be subdivisions you could divide it by two one two three or you could divide it by three one and two three and one two or you could divide it by four one and two and three and one two and three okay while this is not necessarily a triplet feel the six eight could be considered as a triplet feel okay so with respect to three by four i think a very commonly used song which we have is silent night right so silent we can kind of divide it between our two hands you could perhaps consider left right right left right so silent night oh holy mollusk is left right right left right right left right left right left right right left right right goes on now if you want to make this more interesting you could do giving you a more country okay so you can also do it for you get the idea right so with three four you can make it a bit sneaky or a bit more groovy also especially in a song like we three kings which could do we three kings of oriental bearing gives we travel off up so um pa pa um pa pa that's how you could say it this three feel will work quite well you could also kind of maybe flamenco it a bit you know um pa um pa um left so this is more like very groovy between the two hands almost like you're playing a tabla or something left right right left right left right right maybe more for we three kings you groovy three four songs may not be for silent night and you could flam that first chord um oh maybe merry merry merry merry christmas and now what about a nice three by four arpeggio i think we need that as well right so if it's a more mellow song like like you know the first novel or silent night you could perhaps play it like this this is a nice three four arpeggio i think one and two and three and one and two and three and this could work well for first no the first no or silent night any pattern will work even this could work this is what i told you for noel turn turn turn first three notes lmh mh octave or silent night or silent night now if you're having a problem playing that the more fancy or arpeggio you can even do one two three one silent night works perfectly keep that going okay guys so this is about walls three by four you can do it you can divide it by how much ever you want but it's essentially one two three one how the bells one two three silent now two three the the of a snow one two three and so on and so forth so the the i guess the close cousin of the three by four would be a six by eight feel and we can do that really well with a great christmas song probably my favorite christmas songs of all time oh holy night so if you want a nice six eight feel this is how you do it let's take a c major chord so nice way to play the six eight is use your wrist kind of almost like you're swaying to the music i've done a lot of six eight accompaniment videos we link that in the description you can also see oh holy night i've done a detailed tutorial of that so i won't spend that much time on it in this lesson check it in our playlist so this is how you do six eight one two three four five six one two so oh holy night the stars are brightly shining it is the night of our dear saviour's birth goes on so any six by eight song like even hallelujah or a wonderful world done done done done done or is man say all those songs this pattern will work really well so we've covered quite a few we've done the ballad we've done the walls we've done our six eight now let's get groovy let's get dancy and see what we can do the at the bare minimum you could just do like a marching pattern which i call as umpa you could do this for pretty much any christmas song which you want to add some groove to like maybe take an e-minor chord and let's try an umpa immediately adds a groove umpa umpa umpa what can this be you could even swing this by adding one extra ghost note in the in whichever hand so that's your umpa it works really well so let me break it down maybe with the jingle bells dashing through the snow so left right left right one and two now to make this pattern a bit more interesting i guess could swing it but it changes the vibe depending on the vibe you're going for maybe a mobila go in kind of vibe you could modify this umpa a lot you know you could change it there you can even do an umpa like this in a more reggae works well for jingle bells everything's gonna be all right there that feel you can pretty much do so umpa reggae we can even do umpa and just squeeze in these off beats and you can even do an umpa without the five you can if you want to keep it simple one and two and three four and one uh can another way to make it more modern dancey if you will would be to add a very caribbean groove called the thresio which is what we commonly call the two ways to build the thresio as in accompaniment style one is you could just play the thresio as left right right left right right now if you want to make it more caribbean or even more salsa um we could do a five one five on the beat one and a two and a three and a four and a one and a while the right hand is gonna go oh and i have a lot of fun with just umpa so at the very bare minimum if you're new to the piano play your chords like this root chord fifth chord root chord it's good to work well and just to cap off our series i thought why not make some christmas songs into two of our most favorite genres blues and rock and roll if you take a standard blues pattern on the piano like maybe you know i'm telling you why i hate santa claus is coming to town you can maintain that pattern make it very bluesy um whenever the line ends you could do a lick on on the blues scale which is like either the major blues or the minor blues you could use for your lick so major blues one two three flat three five six octave minor blues one three flat four five flat five minor seventh octave so let's try that with maybe another one root off and the right hand you could just comp your chords a common way to do it would be and usually with blues music and rock and roll we tend to swing so instead of doing da da da da da da da da da which is kind of rock and roll let's try swinging and you're not you're targeting some of the off beats in the right hand like the at the end of the one and three we also call this charleston na na na and i'm telling you why i sent her clothes is coming to town right guys so those were five i guess five into i don't know how many patterns we've done in this video i've lost count but five general approaches to accompaniment on the piano for a variety of music in this christmas themed lesson we have specifically taken christmas songs but this could give you an insight into even other songs which you're planning to to compile or arrange or even compose songs on your own you could see if any of these patterns appeals to you or inspires you so as a recap we've done our ballad stuff very much four four right very peaceful and then we've done our walls could even do the slower one with arpeggios and we have the six eight for oh holy night and we did the dancey patterns and the rock and roll watch the video see the chapter markers to gain some more insights you could also consider a regular course at nathaniel if you'd like you know in the new year by filling up a form in the description and one of our team will get in touch with you and take your admission forward thanks a ton for watching the video guys wishing you and all your loved ones family members a merry christmas and a great happy musical prosperous new year moving forward cheers see you in the next one