 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel and in this lesson we are going to explore two left hand broken chord patterns which I am going to start off with by talking about some simple approaches and get the foundational aspects going and then we are going to drive it to a couple more variations or actually a lot more variations which could definitely improve your creative playing and your harmonic awareness and growth in your left hand right because the left hand is essentially responsible for harmony, the bass and even the rhythm and if the left hand is good with all the foundational departments the harmony and the rhythm and the bass it's going to allow your right hand to do all sorts of melody and even get some ornamentation going because you have all your five fingers in the right hand free for the melody. So let's get started right away. I am going to take G minor chord for this entire explanation. So G minor chord played like this, G B flat D okay and the two foundational patterns which I am going to teach you let me just play them and then let's break them down okay. The first one you see we are breaking up that chord we are not playing it in this sort of thick way it sounds very muddy at times so we are breaking it up and the second technique where we break up the chords is outside 2 and inside 1 so it sounds like okay first technique again second technique okay so we are going to try and explore this with obviously many chords, many shapes, many bass notes but that's the basic gist of the exercise so the left hand will go G minor the first approach is where you break it up this way so you play the bass note of the chord which is G and then you play the upper two notes which is B flat and D that's the remaining and a nice texture of flavour to play the chord with would be when you are playing the root note in the left or the bass note play that a bit longer legato as we call it and the group of two notes the third and the fifth B flat and D played as a staccato so it creates a nice dynamic umpa umpa in fact it's actually called umpa conventionally so umpa umpa umpa umpa umpa so this is the first technique so this automatically makes a G minor chord or any minor or any chord really groove as opposed to maybe playing it like that this doesn't groove because it feels as though there is just a kick drum kind of a performance or the drummers hitting the kick and the snare together which obviously doesn't sound great if you ask any drummer or if you listen to any drum groove it's always going to be kick and then snare the kick and the snare kind of talk to each other how this can translate to the piano would be your bass note followed by the higher note so this could be a kick and this could be a snare so we've already got that pitch separation going which I think is awesome so as opposed to playing the G minor chord like this it sounds a bit aggressive and there's no pitch separation for the year to understand we break up the pitches we do a low pitch and we do the high pitch and what's even cooler is we add that dynamic right long shot umpa umpa umpa umpa umpa so that's the first thing you need to get and it's slightly tricky because the intention of getting this left hand umpa will be to get the right hand to play a melody like maybe you do right and the right hand's dynamic should not be affected by the left hand right the left hand's always going long shot long shot well the right hand can do whatever it should do for example so I did the last one staccato there but the left hand did not change so it's also a great independence exercise independence is not only matching timing between the left hand and the right hand it's also about controlling your dynamics and dynamics is measured in so many ways volume and in this case staccato legato which is a huge aspect of the piano right so you can improvise in your right hand and play stuff simple stuff which you'd like to play which you can play and try to weave that in with the left hand you could even start with single notes stuff like this get comfortable right maybe you could sing along right so I'm pretty much on the G minor scale because I'm my left hand I'm playing the G minor chord right so when you're trying to sing it really pushes your right hand to adapt and to play things outside the technical comfort zone your technical comfort zone is what your fingers can do but when you sing along a melody it really pushes you and not only that it becomes a lot more musical because when we sing a thought it's always the most organic way or the most natural or unfiltered way to compose a piece of music because it's just from brain to voice which is just our body right and then the piano has to pretty much do the the hard yards to kind of play what we have told it to play in that sense right so coming back to the left hand because this is more of a left hand lesson so now let's drive this technique forward okay so you go umpa normal and now we are going to do a little bit of an interesting umpa with even more bass variation so you go G D and then the same two notes which you used to play in the top end with the G and the D toggling so umpa umpa umpa um right so that's G and just look at my fingers for G for the first chord I'm playing pinky middle and thumb but for the second chord I go to the D and I cannot use my middle finger because it's a bit of a stretch right so instead of that I use my index finger even though it's the same notes because of the hand stretching you need to bring your index finger there so umpa umpa umpa so this is a great variation as it adds that bass boom boom boom like a bass guitar player in a band right can even experiment playing it lower that'll also be quite cool right whether you play it slow or fast I think it just sounds great in either way so right and just keep one chord for now you can change it to C minor same shape right back to G works pretty much for all the chords D major C minor so where did we start there was no movement there right but now we are walking the bass or playing an interesting bass line and most bass lines end up going around the root and the fifth or root and the lower fifth okay so that's one great way to kind of embellish the basic umpa pattern if you will another way is to just move the bass even more and look at it harmonically one great way to do this is to create a bass line cliche as it's called and it's used a lot by artists you know especially the Beatles you listen to a lot of these techniques in Beatles songs so you go I'll just play it and then show you G F sharp which is just below G F E E flat it all sounds good doesn't it very bluesy as well right so uh off the top you could just do G F E flat and D I think these four notes work really well it's a very common chord progression used in hit the road jack and dum-a-roo-dum if you've listened to some Bollywood music so you go right that's the pattern G F E flat D so G F sharp F you can add all the notes pretty much so to recap you basically have the vanilla version of the G minor chord with the umpa right left hand pinky doesn't really change then you did the bass line right similar to a bass player and then we looked at the line cliche which can be done in this conventional manner G F E flat D G F E flat D or you can do it in a sort of chromatic manner G F sharp F E flat D G right so let's just improvise some stuff in the right hand again this lesson is not so much about the right hand it's more about what the left hand sort of sets up and keeps in your bank so you can use this left hand technique for anything you do in the right hand and you don't have to only play melodically in the right hand you can play chords you can play licks you can play tunes you can improvise a solo but at the end of the day whenever we do anything fancy in the right hand on the piano we don't let the left hand sleep right the left hand has to still work and the left hand has to do crazy stuff as well isn't it the left hand is almost like a drummer and a bass player in one right because it's holding the entire foundation of the music which is allowing your right hand to really express itself and add all the articulation and ornamentation the music deserves so let's try and jam along the vanilla technique let's take a scale like g minor or the blues or just chords start with the the same g minor chord there and explore the changes bass line movement then now the cliche chromatic yeah i seem to be a huge fan of this blues scale so i end up using that a lot you could even use the harmonic minor scale you know for the descending line cliche work quite well lot of scales the natural minor the harmonic minor the minor pentatonic even the obviously the minor blues and if you're unfamiliar with playing melodic movements in the right hand just stick to chords you know and maybe sing this is a great technique to bank into your subconscious mind and then go crazy with the right hand so i wanted to sneak in one more technique for the left hand because now that you've learned the normal umpa as we call it then we did the modifications there's also something which i do a lot when the music swings or in general to even compose music in a more thematic way like for a movie score which is a bit more sneaky or a bit more dancy or jumpy in manner so you could take the same chord and instead of doing that which is pinky and then the other two you could take the outer notes which is g and d and then play the middle note in this instance you have b flat so let's see how that goes okay so right now i'm playing it as umpa umpa you can count this as one two three four one two but another technique which you can do which makes this really interesting would be to double it right so this is what you would have heard more conventionally this is what we call as a swing feel right and you could do the cliche movements down so i like playing more thematic lines in the right hand you know while i do this technique in the left hand maybe is the technique right so you need to really engine this in your left hand to a point that it just happens like in an autopilot mode if you will right so this was an additional technique so this whole lesson has basically been about broken chords in the left hand and whenever you do broken chords in this way your groove really kicks in right you can immediately feel a drum groove as a piano player or if there is a drummer in your band well the drummer i'm sure will be quite happy to groove with you there right so the first technique was pinky and then the other two notes what we call as umpa and then the second technique is where you play the extreme notes the the low note and the high note and then you squeeze in the middle and then what were the variations we had first the vanilla versions of both umpa remember with umpa we need the staccato legato combo going right umpa then we varied it by going root fifth akin to a bass player then the cliche chromatic line cliche just the bass descending can even ascend the bass and then the other version the extreme notes and then the middle one sounds nice when you play it as quarter notes or on the pulse but it sounds really good when you swing it please i like it this way so these are some awesome left hand broken chord techniques which you can do or use for any kind of song which requires a sense of movement or groove again this is Jason here from Nathaniel hope you guys found the lesson useful also do check out our description and other videos where a lot of these topics which i have hinted at like swing blues you know the minor scales and this and that we've done quite a few lessons on our youtube channel we've also grouped the videos into neat playlists which serve certain topics or subjects of interest so do go through that as always thanks for watching the lesson if you haven't already don't forget to subscribe to our channel like the video leave us a comment with stuff you'd want to learn in the future and do stay tuned for a lot more videos coming your way cheers