 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel's School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to basically look at how to develop a solo piano arrangement. Now we have done a few other lessons on the same subject, but this is more from the point of view of you have an existing melody or two melodies. I'm going to teach you two short melodies over an A section and a B section. And what are all the usual suspects, if you will, the usual rhythm patterns which you would find most professional pianists play in their left hand and use that to complement the melody in the right hand. Because once you play the melody in the right hand, you can't really add anything more. Yes, you can add a few flourishes, a few harmonic embellishments, but for the most part, for most players, the right hand will just focus on the melody. So that means your left hand has to take care of the chord progression the way you play the chord, the voicing or the voice leading is very important, and also the rhythm, the groove, how you want your audience to move to your music. So all of this stuff, we are going to learn with two melodies, what we could call a verse or the chorus or an A section or a B section. And a lot of you have been asking me on the channel to break down some of my riffs. I will plan that, but this is similar to what I would do in a composition, I would create an A melody, I would create a B melody and then try and put it together. For this purpose, I tried to compose something specifically for this lesson in order to make the education more streamlined and more structured. So as I am teaching, you will be good if you get out a keyboard or a digital piano or a real piano, whatever you have in your home and play along with me. And we need to see this through till the very end. And after the video is over, you can also kind of keep it going and keep experimenting and improvise and come up with your own stuff as well, because these are just approaches which can work with a lot of stuff. So let's get cracking before we do. It'll be great if you could hit that subscribe button if you haven't already hit the bell icon for regular notifications and do consider being a Patreon member for about $5 a month. You're going to get access to all of my handwritten notes as well as staff notation for song tutorials whenever we do them. And there'll be backing tracks, a lot of other supplementary material for our YouTube videos. So do head over to patreon.com slash Jason Zack and you'll have a lot of tires as well to choose from, right? So let's learn the melodies first. Melody one or melody A would be something like this. Rather simple melody. Let's get the fingering right. It's on the key of G minor. So whole story again. So you can start with your ring finger. I usually use my ring for a black note if it's the last black note B flat. If you read music, you can read the sheets which we have. That's the first bar two and three and four and then eight notes. Let's figure out the crossing. It can get a bit tricky. I would prefer to bring my pinky there, I guess. And now bring your thumb there or you could do that. But then if you have to loop it, it'll be very tricky, right? So pinky there, bring your thumb so that your pinky can come back to the octave and then repeat. And when your pinky comes back, you could either use your pinky or your ring or you could kind of use your pinky and slide like this sometimes. You don't have to be very specific. Ring. No, even if you do your pinky there, just make sure your middle finger goes down to A. So again, that's bad because I started on the middle. I should start with the ring and on the thumb ring. I think ring is working for me. Ring. Maybe pinky here. Ring. Starting the tune up. Okay. You can also embellish it a bit. Stuff like that. These are paugia tours, turns and then and so on. You could embellish it with a few variations of your own. Anyway, coming to the B section or along with the A, let me finish the chords. That'll be nice. That's G minor, F and E flat. Now if you see the melodies are clashing with the harmony here, so you could play lower, but then the problem of solo piano is when you play block triads here, sounds very muddy. You want to play block triads around middle C. So you need to readjust the chords if you want to come here. So we'll do that later. For the time being, we can just push the entire melody up and octave. F major, E flat major. So I move the whole tune up. So four G minors. You can do a pulse. So this could be your very first rhythm pattern. Come to think of it. Crotchets, quarter notes on the pulse, one count as your head moves. One chord hit for every head movement. There we go. Sometimes I like playing an F sus4, but you could also play an F major or an F sus4. Anyway, you can even try some octaves. So that's G minor twice or a whole bar. F, half bar, E flat, half bar. Let's do the B melody now. The second part which is some tied notes in there and a lot of the and hit. So let's do it slowly. One and two and three and four and one and two. Hold it. Finger ring. Let's try and figure it out. Start with your thumb. There we go. You could just use these three fingers or bring in the ring if you feel more comfortable with more fingers. No need of the pinky with the second melody. There we go. And the chords for that section will be C minor. So I'm doing C minor, B flat over D. So like an inversion where you play D in the bottom of the B flat chords. C minor, B flat over D. F and C. B flat over D and jump jump. And that's the B line last time. You can even do like F sus, F major like we did for the A melody, but you have time on the F. So you could do F sus4, F major. Anyway, so whole thing again. A and B. Playing it higher. Try to sing it as you play. Those most solo piano arrangements come from the vocal line. So now let's look at some patterns in the left hand which can serve this stuff really well and hopefully also serve other melodies which you learn this way other film scores, soundtracks or pop songs, rock songs, whatever songs you're looking to cover on the keyboard. So the first thing we can look at is arpeggios because this melody is a bit more I guess soothing and ballad like. So this is a nice pattern for you. So every chord you play instead of whacking it head on with all the three notes you go L H M H low I middle high low high low note of the chord high note of the chord middle note of the chord high note. So keep that going. Now that's a nice left hand arpeggio pattern to start off. Not just to start off. This could work for the final song I guess. I quite like it. Keep the pattern going. So if you're doing flourishes or embellishments in the right hand don't lose the left hand. You need to bank this left hand pattern. Okay another similar arpeggio would be to kind of speed up the arpeggio by going 16th notes instead of eighth notes. So what I'm doing is L H M H L A but since it's fast it needs some variety. So to provide that I'm doing L H M H L H M H L. So this low note in the second half goes above the octave. So can you compare in contrast with that in the slow version. Fast slow arpeggio. Fast have some fun once you've got a bank in your left hand. Keep the pulse. I'm also getting a bit carried away by the pattern but you get the idea. Now we've looked at blocks we've looked at arpeggios. Now we can try and break up the chords not arpeggiated fully but something like this provides some nice rhythmic motion. So if the arpeggios are tricky you can also consider this sort of a pattern. So what we call is broken chords. So instead of playing G minor like that or fully broken you go root or the low note and the top two notes. Now there are two ways to break it. You can go a faster one which I like to do with broken chords would be the outer two notes and then the inside notes in eighth notes. So this is an eighth note broken pattern and this is a quarter note broken pattern or on on the pulse. Slow so versus that's the broken with the outer inner outer inner. I think works well for eighth notes. So we've done fully blocked chords arpeggios broken and just to conclude to give you as many left hand patterns at least over a four four piece of music you can start spreading out the range of your left hand and there are two ways you can spread out the range. One way would be to take the same triads and don't play them as one three five start really low. You will very quickly realize that one three five doesn't sound so good when you play it down below. So instead you go one five three we also call it a minor tenth because it's played on the top or the octave. So whole thing and by the way you can now bring the melody lower if you wish you can bring it an octave lower because the left hand has gone a lot more deeper right. So G minor in spread is G D B flat then F F C A E flat B flat G and then so the pattern I have for you is just simple eight notes with a quarter there one and two I do this a lot one and two and so that end of the two is kind of giving you some time to move to the next chord which I kind of like and also hold the pedal while doing this that is very important because if you don't hold the pedal you're going to lose the sound of this the pinky finger so with the pedal it all washes whole story B I love that C minor down below it's like the second last C of the piano you can do a B flat over D like this D B flat F it's a spread inversion even played lower back to the A there we go so that's your spread chords and one more thing to kind of cap off the lesson this is slightly more advanced even spread is a bit more advanced you don't have to do it but follow through eventually you could and I'm sure you will so the stride pattern is the next thing so think of it like a broken chord but you play the first note super low and then come all the way top with your pedal held and then play the black toggle between the root of the chord and the chord G minor F and now the tune combine that with the spread option A and B will sound really epic and really intense right so you could either play root octave and then the chord or you can just do a single note which I like to do sometimes a lot easier on the hand and it sounds full enough or more epic with the octave also in the right hand when you bring your hand to the chord you don't want to do you don't want to play the triad too low play always target middle C where you want to whack your chords as a block system together okay so let's just recap what we've done guys and conclude the lesson we've basically done an A section and a B section of a solo piano arrangement that's your A that's your B yeah the notation is there by the way you could check it out you would have been seeing it through the lecture but if you want to like practice it take your time with it it's available on our patreon page along with a lot of resources even there for a lot of other videos which we've been doing in the past and which we will continue to do in the very near future so the first thing we looked at is blocks and we looked at the arpeggio then we looked at quick arpeggio with the octave broken quicker broken without in then spread and lastly stride and so on right guys so that was a fair amount of left hand patterns I guess if you'd like to learn a lot more on the left hand pattern front there are a lot of youtube videos you can access it a lot better by using the keywords which we've sort of um manually provided on our website nathanielschool.com you could go there and access our free tutorials where you can kind of break it down based on what you want to work on hand independence left hand patterns solo piano arrangements and whatnot songs where I've taught a lot of songs in addition to that you could consider a more structured form of learning under our video courses section so with our video courses you can kind of filter or not really filter you can have an array of things you can learn and the content keeps growing so do consider video courses or our free tutorials which are youtube videos classified very well on nathanielschool.com can also do a full on structured course with us with me as your teacher you just have to fill up a form right guys thanks again for watching apologies for my sore throat but this is something I really wanted to convey with you so it couldn't wait and thanks for supporting our channel means a lot and if you enjoy the lesson do consider hitting the subscribe and hit the bell for regular notifications you'll get updates whenever we release new content cheers see you in the next one