 Hi guys, this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson we are going to look at how to build our left hand and also to have some kind of a left hand awareness where to play and what to play in that particular register. The registers are basically, you know somewhere around middle C, somewhere below middle C and then really low. So you need to figure out what to do in each register. So what I've done is I've created a melody, a simple tune which goes something like over some simple chords. I'm going to teach you that first and then what we are going to do is we are going to study the role of each register of the left hand, if that makes sense to you. What I mean by register is the pitch range, whether it's the first E or the next E or this C or this E, right? So that's pretty much what we are trying to do in this lesson. So first let's learn the melody. Then we learn the chords for the melody. Then I'm going to tell you what to play in each, in the left hand in each register and then a few patterns along the way. And I think this could serve pretty much every skill level. If you're a beginner just learning how to play melodies here with harmony here, this could definitely help you. If you're someone who's advanced, who's proficient with the sustain pedal, this could also help you greatly. So stay tuned till the very end of the lesson. There will be something to learn at each level. And even if you're not able to figure it out right now in this lesson, you could probably write things down and work on it over the weeks and the coming months. Let's get cracking. And before we do, it'll be great if you can hit that subscribe button, hit the bell icon for regular notifications, which we will give you, not we, YouTube will give you whenever we release a new video. And the notes on Patreon will help supplement the learning. There will be notes for each of these lessons, their future lessons and whatever we've done in the past as well. Okay, guys, let's get cracking. So first let's learn the melody. Melody. So I've chosen this on the key of E minor. E natural minor, which is basically E F sharp G A B C D E, E D C B A G F sharp E. E natural minor is developed from the G major key or the one sharp key coming to the tune. The tune is can follow along with me. It'll also be notated for your reference. So first thing is let's just try if we can play it with either an E minor chord. And that's one thing I'd like to talk about with respect to the left hand. The left hand, when you play around middle C, it's okay to play triad. So in this case, E minor played as E G B, how we learn it normally. But you don't want to play too low. You don't want to play it so low. As you even though it's a beautiful chord, E minor, it just sounds really annoying. Low because the frequencies of each of the notes are too close to each other to make a lot of sense. Sort of like color, very tough to tell the difference between two really, really dark colors like red and green, really dark. You may not even tell the difference, isn't it? Unless you're a skilled person. So if you go lower, then what you'd want to do is play just simple octaves or fifths. So the same melody first here, then the same melody here. You need to just play it with fifths. And if you want to go super low, you can only survive with octaves and octaves sound huge. So whenever you're playing octaves, try to consider playing it in the lower region of the piano keyboard around here and not Now it kind of intrudes the melody and it doesn't sound as heavy or as epic as it should have, you know, so let's just develop that. So line one in this region around middle C, then lower. You can now do a fifth chord, E, B and E, or you could go super low and play like a thick octave. Okay, now I must also say this, if you don't have a piano, which has so many keys, when you're, if you're just starting off and you have a smaller keyboard, I think 61 key would be like the bare minimum. Don't get anything smaller than that. It'll be very difficult for you to navigate with your hands, unless of course you're buying something for travel purposes or something where you assemble blocks of keys together and play them. So 61 key becomes a bare minimum. So you could use a transpose button and go minus 12 to take the whole keyboard down an octave, primarily because it's rare that you're going to play really high elements. You're not going to play so unless you really want to, of course, in which case you would need an 88 key piano. So I would suggest if you have a 61 key, just turn the octave down by about an octave, either minus 12 or an octave minus one. If you have an 88 key, then it's quite easy to visualize. You have this is where you play your block chords or the entire chord E, G, B and this is where you play the fifth chord and this is where you play the big octave. Okay, now the melody that was the first half. I'm just going to add another variation to the second part of the melody. First part again, so first line, second line, just a variation. Maybe you want to see my fingers once crossing my hand here coming to the chords. It's boring to just play an E minor, right? So the chords are there, which are that's a D major. Second chord, which you could consider as the seven flat major. That's a D major. Now you go C major. Now, if you know C major seventh, you could add a B there and then you could go B minor at the very end. Or B minus seventh, which is B D F sharp A. Now, all these chords work when you play them as blocks because they are in and around middle C. So let's go by that once more. D major C B minor again. D major C major seventh, played with some emotion, which is essentially dynamics and make some notes stand out to keep the rhythm going by. I try to actually imagine a drummer playing with you and feel some kind of a ghost percussion or a drummer, musician, just playing along with you. And that really helps to build more left hand options. So you go variations there. Another thing I like to do in my right hand, because what's going to tend to happen is as you go lower and lower in the left hand to make it more and more deeper and more epic. The more deeper it goes, the more epic, the more braver, the more vibrant it can tend to sound, you know, and more impactful for the overall listening experience. So you want to go low, but then when you go low, you can't play the nice sounding E minor which you used to play there. So you should also figure out a way to squeeze in that chord in your right hand as you go lower. So I'm going to do the same melody. First it was now with chords, you see, I'm not even using my left hand right now, which is quite cool, isn't it? So you go, what's happening here? I'm just adding other notes of the chord. That's E minor. I could even hold my pedal down, which is happening right now. Now I need to cross, right? Now you do the other inversion of E minor, which has the B up top. You could do like a tada sus four going to major, which is all possible in the right hand with that lower voice again. And now next. So this kind of works really well when you pick out the chords of your song and then play the melody with the chords. But then you need to invert the chord so that the melody line stands out at the top. Now you may be arguing what happens if the melody is not contained in the chord or the chord notes are not contained in the melody. Well, that's a bit rare. If you ask me, most of the conventional melodies which happen will be either the root, the third or the fifth stressed or accented. So why do we need that? Because when we go lower, this is the voicing which I tend to employ. So we finish this voicing. Now you could play this in another way, in an arpeggiated way. There's a lot of movement. I'm not going to talk so much about arpeggios in this lesson because there are a ton of videos on YouTube, literally a ton of videos where we deal with a lot of these arpeggios, especially the left handed arpeggios, which will serve this lesson very well. So do check out some of our other tutorials on specifically arpeggios and let me know in the comments if you have any doubts regarding that. So anyway, so you could play it as blocks or you could play it as arpeggios. There we go. But now I want to take it low. I want to take it deep to this low E and see what I can strategize from there. So the first opportunity you have is the fifth chord. So you can play EBE, which takes off the third, namely the G. So play a nice rhythm. And then. So you could go. This is your rhythm. Any rhythm really just using the root, the fifth and the octave, I will write down a few rhythms. So do check that out in the notes. So you go. B minor. Sounds quite big, right? Just by going lower in the keyboard, what you could do in the right hand, you could try and slam these chords with the harmony, which I told you earlier. So so that's your left hand and slightly thickened right hand because the right hand is trying to now do what the left hand used to do. And it can't do that by playing the third since it's lower. Now you may also argue, why can't I play the third? Why do I have to take away the third and play a fifth chord? Well, you could voice the chord slightly differently. You could do what we call as a spread voicing technique in the left hand, which goes one, five, ten. The ten is also the upper third. There's a huge, huge playlist, detailed videos on this on our YouTube channel. Just search for spread voicing. You'll find a lot of these things. I've even done songs using these wider arpeggio techniques. So with that, well, you could go with fifths or root five, ten. So now you're playing all the notes of the chord in a spread voicing. So this one, of course, trying to do it with two hands. So you need an arpeggiated kind of arpeggiated because it's very tough to hold it together with one hand. You'll have to arpeggiate the hand, right? And the last part of the video or the last part of this discussion would be how do you make it even more epic? Remember what I said earlier? The lower you go, the more incredible it's going to sound or the huger it's going to sound. So if you just actually throw away the chords and just play the roots of the chords and go to the lowest possible E, check that out. Just hold that. It's more than enough. And again, could sort of slam it more aggressively if you like. This is not too difficult to play, actually. We've actually come to like a very, very basic version, but super epic. It's like the most epic. If you compare it with even though this is a bit trickier to play with all the chords here, it's just single roots and octaves slamming. Check that out. You're just using the property of this amazing instrument, the piano to just give you that sound. It's not really a human thing. It's more awareness of where to play, especially the left hand. Okay, now you can couple this octave technique by going something like. So what I did there, I played the root of the chord. And then what did I do? I climbed all the way up and continue to play the triad, which I played at the very beginning, just a little delayed. So this is the normal one with the epic bass. There we go. So we have the best of both worlds. We have the really epic bass here and we have the entire chord. And then I'm going to literally the, I guess the last note of the piano, which is this B or one of the last notes. And then it's also needs to be said that the sustain pedal is providing an active part of this shifting process without the pedal. See, you can't really do, you can't go, your hand will jump very tough without the pedal. So make use of that tool. Most pianos come with the pedal, even digital pianos. If not, try to figure out a pedal which will help you play in this style. So let's just recap everything, guys. Again, try to move the video back and forth to just see if you've missed out anything. I hope that you achieve all of the points which I tried to convey in this lesson. The first and foremost, the melody. Let's revise everything now. The tune with the chords. You can just do blocks in and around middle C. Where do blocks work again? Middle C. Okay. Then we did the fifth option. And how do fifth sound even more epic or even more cooler by adding the 10th instead of the octave? There we go. And the last mission was to play the super low E or the roots very low and then combine that if you can with the pedal, with a higher triad. But the triad has to be played in and around middle C. Let's do that once. Low, high, that's pretty much it. So I hope I've conveyed the general role of each register of your left hand or base region or base clef of the piano. Very important to be aware of what you can do and what you thus should do. Because what you can do is governed by the laws of physics and just created by mother nature. So you can't really change that. Can you? You can only use it and see the beauty with each area of the piano. That is a very important part of this lesson which I wanted to convey. And I hope you can make sense of this in your own music or any cover or any song which you're trying to learn. Because this was just a small example or a small glimpse with a really simple melody. And it's always good to start with a small motif like this and then see where it goes from there. And I hope you enjoy your left hand even more after this lesson. As always, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. Do consider subscribing if you haven't already to the channel. Hit that bell icon for regular notifications. We are on Patreon where you'll have all my notes. And if you would like to consider learning music in depth at our school in person with us via virtual conferencing, you could go to our website, Nathanielschool.com, fill up a couple of forms and we will hear from you. Cheers, catch you in the next one.