 Hi everyone this is Jason here from Nathaniel and in this lesson I'm going to show you a technique to build melodies through rhythm. Okay now that sounds a bit weird generally as a statement because melodies are melodies right they are notes which happen on a particular scale with intervals and so on. However we seem to forget that every great melody ever composed has great rhythm behind it. In other words you don't have a melody like this right now there's no gaps between the notes there's no time for the there's no time for the notes to breathe a little right it's just one note after the other and then the faster you go as you divide the beat more and if you play even more notes then you're sort of developing like a machine gun effect on the piano which is like an endless array of notes which I don't want to bore you with right now. So a great approach which I found to develop melody organically what I mean by organically is you don't really need music theory you don't need some prior song or genre to inspire you you can just do it so we all have this innate ability to create rhythmic phrases or rhythm in general because whenever songs are played to us we move we move our body we tap we follow the pattern of the music we all know that we will rock you is right no one even a non-musician can do that right so the whole idea here is we are trying to capitalize on that natural ability which we are all one might argue born with and then we use that rhythm to actually come to the piano take the ingredients of the rhythm and then cook it up into a melody okay so let me just show you what I mean with a with a simple rhythmic example so something like this so I'm sort of now imagining this maybe in any environment maybe while walking my dog or in a shower or while brushing one's teeth or reading the newspaper anything for that matter you know you could be sitting anywhere or moving around and creating something like this so whatever I done again I kind of forgot it let me remember something like and I'm using short syllables like pump pump pump dubba dum or I could even whack some parts of the body like whatever sounds interesting to you right so you could tap it out on your body maybe chest for some lower stuff and your leg for some higher snare drum-ish stuff or you can vocalize it in some rhythmic way like or if you know conical that's a great way to kind of express yourself rhythmically but pretty much anything you could even whack something around you you know so as long as you put any sound into context it will always be music right you could be whacking any piece of furniture around you and if you think about music it will definitely become music so now I've made this pattern it's stuck inside my head so I want to bring it out on the piano now the first thing I need to do is figure out what scale of interest I'm going to work with so I'm going to choose my favorite I guess a major scale which is this three sharps C sharp F sharp G sharp so I'm going to sort of confine myself within those notes I don't want to go out of that for now because I'm trying to also scale across this melody and develop patterns around it which we are going to come to very shortly so one thing you could just do is just noodle around as we call it and just express yourself on the scale keeping that organically created rhythm which was what now okay so something like this or maybe you'd like to just start with one note of course that doesn't make a great melody because it's just one note right so maybe something like you'll mess it up a bit but just start with the notes of the scale start with one note or maybe two notes or just an A major chord or keep your hands very close to each other A B C sharp D E and develop patterns which can really use or use up all the fingers also give you a nice finger exercise so if you don't like the melody it's at least going to become an awesome finger exercise which you're never going to find in any book you've given yourself your own finger exercise okay so I'm going to come up with a tune now confined to just the A B C sharp D E the first five notes of the A major scale something like okay wasn't it still the same rhythm I stuck with the same groove so you see now my rhythm has come to life maybe I had already sung this organically in the shower or wherever or maybe I didn't maybe I just thought of it as a nice cool rhythmic phrase and imagine that it'll come into a great melody at least which I like so now you go and I want you to learn this with me I'm going to slow it down for you try singing that can help articulate it nicely so it creates a nice dynamic and whenever playing music I remember we started this with rhythm what does rhythm need the most it needs people to move so you need to move if you want other people to move so create the pulse somewhere within you so 4 by 4 or 4 beats per bar 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 so what can I do to express the pulse I could just play a single A which is the root of the scale it'll work awesome so just play A or maybe you could go to A is like that just to keep the rhythm and the melody into perspective practice that it's also nice once you've come up with this melody to also kind of put it a bit under the microscope and see how many parts are there in this melody so if I break it down I feel that it has three parts doesn't it part one part two part three so it's sort of like a sentence with punctuation with nice punctuation so you could go you just play that if you like then you could go part two and now finish the puzzle or blend something which has a minimal set of notes which could just be part A and part B of the bigger melody and then put it all together with the with all the three parts something like this that becomes a lot more memorable I guess so you have a lot of ways of scaling up and building the pattern creatively I'm sure you will also come up with things of your own as you go through the journey so let's now move this even forward so I'm quite happy with what I'm doing in the right hand but I think we need to drive it a bit forward and take this melody for a spin right so what we could do in the left hand is just move around your scale and the bass movement is really great because it can also dictate what chord you're going to inevitably play or what someone else is going to play you know in the band context so maybe I'm going to start with the root change it around maybe quite like F sharp it's the relative minor D building up to E and A so I like that I like starting with maybe one four five and six of the scale those are usually the most popular intervals it's used in all the standard chord progressions F sharp four simplified also right so that's how you take the same melody and put it into different perspectives like I like I sometimes say you're just driving the melody which is in a car so to speak you're just driving it around otherwise it's just stuck in the garage or in the neighborhood you're actually moving it forward because of the harmony and because of the bass movement okay so what have we done so far we have a nice pattern which we came up with organically then we sort of chopped it up and created mini patterns and then we looked at the left hand doing some interesting movements maybe the left hand could also do very interesting rhythmic things so we leave a few videos and a playlist in our youtube description so do check that out we have done a lot of work on left hand patterns and left hand rhythm in general using chords and just simple rhythm so you may want to watch a few more of our lessons focusing on the left hand stuff okay so where are we so far now we float the left hand with a consistent right hand melody right so how can we make this even more interesting if this is not already interesting enough we can now look at this created melodic phrase or motif if you will in a very pattern like environment what I mean by that is you can try and restructure it or replay it at different points of the keyboard staying in the same scale so we are trying to still be in A major but we are trying to represent it in different sounding ways so I'm going to show you what I mean by that and then I will explain so the same melody now I can change my hand hold to somewhere here I'm using a five finger handhold so I'm going from A now I'm drifting my hand to D now with A I started with the third note right with D why can't I start with the same third note but need the ring finger to go to G sharp because I'm an A major scale so this one literally copy the finger orders right middle ring pinky like that and then replace it here so it's almost the same rhythm but presented in a very different way right so you have then then right now I moved my hand up to E which is the fifth and played the same pattern from the E shape and then you can go to the F sharp so if you observe with all of these melodies you could also look at an accompanying note so I guess the accompanying note could be the first note of the pattern which you're not playing first but you're you're playing that first but this is the lowest note so you could think of maybe just copying that here and now jumping the pattern to the D which is the four and now jumping it up to the five it even jumped to the sixth come back to the four and now you have a lot more to play with so I like this kind of approach because a phrase was very rhythmic it started by just pure sheer luck I guess because you just gave yourself that chance to organically construct the music but then you held on to that idea you don't want to leave it and just let it go back into the air from where it came from so then we try to go to our piano think of a scale in this case a major try and enjoy it a bit try and see where where it takes you and then we landed up with a tune like somehow that seemed to sound nice and then we really extracted all the juice from that tune by then you know moving our left hand looking at the melody in fragments or in smaller sub melodies and then what we did is we converted the melody itself into a pattern and we started floating the pattern from the root then we went up the fourth just changed our hand hold and this is also very common on guitars and other stringed instruments they just change the they retain the same scale but they just change the shape or where their hand position starts from next okay so this is basically an approach I'm sure there are many approaches and there are many approaches which even I will probably discover in my lifetime as I continue to grow as a musician myself but this is an approach which I thought you would find quite useful because sometimes we overthink a music composition a lot of ideas we come up with interestingly enough don't even come from our primary instrument it may just come by a singing which is why I encourage you to have some idea of singing as a piano player it can really help and also you could just figure out rhythm like I said at the beginning of the lesson rhythm is something which comes to human beings the most naturally again this is Jason here from Nathaniel and there's one more thing which we have waiting for you you just have to click the link in the description and it'll take you to our Patreon page and on that particular page I've put together a set of files which you can download at your convenience and you'll have a lot of patterns which I've come up with okay to get you started like what we did now I've also come up with a few more all on the A major scale you don't have to leave A major for this exercise and I've also come up with a few rhythmic things so I would encourage all of you to to check out the Patreon link and consider also supporting us it'll be awesome for our channel to move forward and if you haven't already do subscribe to our Nathaniel school channel for a lot more lessons like the video hit subscribe turn on that bell thing for notifications and share the lesson with all your fellow musician friends I will see you in the next one cheers