 Hi everyone this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson I'm going to walk you through pretty much all the stuff we do on the piano and the goal is to try and encapsulate all of that into one lesson and all the things we work on on the piano involve well some things in common like chord playing, hand independence where you try to get a pattern in the left along with something in the melody and you try to move your hand you try to work out different combinations, different beats, different sub beats and so on and so forth. So for that I have just come up with a simple motif of just four notes and the four notes throughout this lesson are going to be that's it right. So just to inform you it's not too tough this lesson it's a lot easier than some of the other stuff on our channel but anyway so these are your four notes which you're going to play melodically in the right hand in a couple of ways that is F, G, Ab, C. So you might argue that we are in the key of F minor F minor is derived from the Ab major scale and the chords which will go around this the first thing you can try and do is play this in a sequence okay and I'm going to talk about a few mechanical things to improve as you go along and yeah let's do it step by step and I encourage you to get your keyboards out get a notebook out and stuff like that to kind of play and learn along with me as the lesson moves forward and before we get really cracking it'll be great if you can consider getting yourself a copy of our notes on Patreon link in the description and if you haven't subscribed to our channel please consider hitting that subscribe button and the bell button for regular notifications whenever we drop a video it'll be available and known to you and we do release lessons and videos and riffs which you have on our channel on a daily basis so do consider doing all those things give the video a like leave us a comment so on and so forth and now let's start hope you got your pianos ready if not also it's fine you can still watch the piano will help okay so first play this in your right and you want a nice circular motion I I like a nice circular motion with my wrist which can move like this you don't have to overdo it in in other words don't move your elbow while you create your circles I highly I don't like moving the elbow and if you start a circular path what happens is it just kind of keeps going right now you could even do this with a pedal on and off if you have a pedal this is with the pedal on with the pedal off no problem but try to get a nice legato out of your performance you don't want to go very forceful staccato and also while you do this try to do a couple of things one is try to stay in time so if you consider these as 16th notes which is dividing the pulse by four then I would encourage your head to move once and these four notes would just go with the head movement two e and a three e and a four e right one e and a two e and a three and a four e and so four notes in the right hand for every head movement stay in time then try to build on your dynamics try to play a bit louder softer and gradually get louder softer we've done a lot of videos on dynamics just type the word dynamics on our channel and you'll get a nice set of videos how to use the pedal how to control this volume and so on and so forth okay that's pretty much the melody and I have like a variation of the melody like a more intermediate or advanced way of playing it where I've added some rests in between which will go you might want to check out the notation if you want to count a lot of the ease and the earth so that's your variation now to practice both of these melodies I would encourage us to first start off with a single f following our head movement as a pulse so just a simple f going with the head one two three four one two slower slightly slower let's do the uh the advanced melody more interest because the notes have their own space different gap between the notes right with a lot of rest so your a is actually the start of the bar not really it's still at the off beat before the one but there we go try to see the notation one two three four or go back to the simple one and if you're getting bored with f you can say okay I'm in the key of f minor what are the notes I'm playing one two three flat and the pinky is playing the five so you can then go to c do the same thing on c maybe maybe on d you have different scales maybe g and b I'm just going to come back to f for now anyway so how can we grow this obviously some chords would be nice so the chords which I've nominated for this lesson again I've written that down in the notes you can go f minor for the first bar or however long you prefer maybe a whole bar one e changing e flat major d flat major d flat or you could change every two beats which I think will be nicer two three four one two stay on b flat for two extra beats assuming each chord is for two counts and two change for d flat two three four one two three the second bar I'm doing f minor a flat b flat major third bar same as the first bar third cycle same as the cycle one and now the last one b flat minor c minor d flat major e flat major come back to f minor so again let's revise the chords and how I'm planning it is line one you play basically pianissimo which is super soft here we go I'm not a very soft touch player so it's good for me as well when I practice and at the end of the bar a challenge for you at the d flat do a little crescendo but don't go insanely loud because the first bar will be pp or pianissimo second cycle will be p or piano softly third cycle will be mf or mezzo forte which is moderately loud and the last cycle is going to be fortissimo or forte however loud you want to play let's do that again super soft going to soft super soft e flat d flat little crescendo and now we go to the next volume level which is soft slightly louder crescendoing to mf mezzo forte opening out the piano even more louder forte and still forte fortissimo if you back to pianissimo and I'd encourage you to do this with a metronome or do it by moving your head so you don't lose timing or you can do it with a drum backing track or something you know softly whenever you have to do and whenever you have to build so what we tend to do is when we play loudly we tend to you know go faster at least most of us do and whenever we go soft we are we tend to go slower so that's a weird human problem I guess so this this should hopefully help you work on on these things so like I said at the beginning of the lesson it's tough to put a name for this lesson it's basically an all-in-one all the things you need to work on on the piano I've tried to put into one tutorial okay so let's do that again f minor super soft e flat major d flat major slight crescendo to soft f minor a flat major plate lower if you wish slight crescendo back to f minor going to mezzo forte building forte forte cmo basically super loud very soft almost like you're whispering on the piano there we and you try it with the other tune as well super soft soft maintain the pulse in your left hand don't forget mezzo going to loud super loud I guess be careful don't break your piano or something and now if you're having a problem doing I'm at least I am having a problem playing that and talking to you in the lesson but you don't have to do that obviously so try to work on the advanced one if you're not getting it don't worry come back to it still gives you a great great workout okay there we go great so now that that particular activity is done I'd like to combine the roots of the chords with the chord in the left hand and try to introduce a simple striding technique if possible but before we do the stride apart from being able to play the chords you need to also be able to play the chord roots as octave so maybe I should have done that first and the chord second but you'll get the idea nevertheless so F E flat D flat stay on D flat and play the pulse A flat D flat second second cycle and F E flat D flat on the pulse remember pulse is the human head movement D flat other men now remember what we learned earlier we learned the chords and what did we learn now the root and the octave right chord what if we combine it we can do something like this will train your use of your pedal because you have to to hold the pedal stride your left hand into the triad and make sure you're doing this very very slowly so now you could even do right you can take your time to jump whenever you're in place play the chord bass chord and slowly get a bit faster at the process and then the other chords call this striding actually it's called striding and in some cases when you stride up after having played the root in the left hand you could also access some inversions comfortably to play the chord see I prefer to play D flat like this instead of that way it's a bit congested that way right so E flat D flat remember pedal and lift pedal lift pedal lift pedal stay on B flat pedal E flat D flat B flat B flat minor C minor D flat major D flat major and close fine so we've you basically use the roots of the chord and we've used the actual chord which you could also play in an inversion then we've combined it together using this amazing striding technique now the striding technique well you can now see what other options you can do with your chords what are the other chord techniques you might have under under your belt so to speak on the piano but before we do chords it's nice to just activate the pinky and the thumb to just do root and octave combos so let me now in this segment of our lesson let's do a few of the commonly used root octave combos and I've introduced them in order of increasing difficulty if you will so first off we have the toggle pulse so what I do with the toggle pulse is root octave root octave almost like you're moving your head sideways at least I get that feeling so pinky thumb pinky that's the toggle pulse you could even do do it very later little quicker with the chord roots of course okay that's your toggle pulse then we can look at something called which I like to call we will rock you because it's named after the song so okay so you may want to just slow that down feel the we will rock you so we started with toggle pulse to do just with one note for a start and then do the others right or rock you coming up then another pattern for you would be the thresio very sals so one and two and four and one and two and three or one and and depending on how you're counting it so one and two and three and four and one and one and two okay so you can also modify the thresio by doing like one bar of normal thresio so normal thresio you can also do another really nice salsa rhythm called the song clave I'm sure I'm gonna I'm gonna be doing an entire series on Latin and salsa rhythms so stay tuned to the channel a lot of you have requested it is coming I'm just working on something interesting so to speak so the song clave will be it's notated for you very groovy right thresio only modified and song clave and of course the challenge is also going to be to do it with that other tune I mean the other rhythmically modified tune with res the same notes toggle pulse rock you thresio right so you can do all these things to challenge yourself which even I'm doing right now you know so it's a good workout to just practice single root and octave with the pinky and the thumb and then what you can do is you can convert these rhythms into chords you can try and use them as cause for example if you want to we will rock you instead of that way you can do break up your chord and do we will rock you on the broken chord right it's still rock you thresio you see where this can go root and octave can so quickly become a chord right guys so that's pretty much it for the lesson what I had to share but you could go on you know you could see what other patterns you are familiar with in your left hand and try to play the same chords over those chord patterns otherwise I can go on and on with chord patterns of which there are quite a few already discussed on our youtube channel so for now let's recap we have a set of four notes F G A flat C then we have our chords there's an entire nice chord progression which is laid out for you we played it with roots then we did it with blocks remember there's a modified tune as well and so on and so forth so we had to tune modified tune chords single root and octave then we can combine it in a striding technique then we looked at a variety of left hand rhythm patterns toggling the pulse rock you thresio modified thresio all this with the melody now just to conclude I wanted to mention that you could head over to our website nathanielschool.com and we have a section laid out called free tutorials it's free you don't even have to make an account it's just there nathanielschool.com click on free tutorials what we've ended up doing is all of our youtube content we have patiently or diligently cataloged it something which youtube can't do so we took it up on ourselves to do it on our website so you'll find all of our lessons archived very well for easy learning you have stuff for beginners you have you can filter things like hand independence left hand base arpeggios which is a common topic on our channel certain genres like blues and jazz and whatnot so I encourage you to head over there and if you want something more you know sort of regular or structured step by step lesson by lesson as a lot of you have been asking you might want to consider our video courses plan on the nathaniel school website wherein it's a one-time payment and you will get access to a variety of videos which we keep putting out and it's an ever-growing library and you have that for life you have an entire subscription you get my books you get three of my books and if none of these are your cups of tea you can then you can otherwise consider a normal in-person live virtual course with me or the rest of our nathaniel faculty you just have to fill up a form a course advisor will reach you plan it over a probably a zoom call or something and then figure out a module which serves you best right guys thanks for watching the video hope you found the lesson useful hope it improves your playing do let me know what you think about it in the comments give the video a like hit that subscribe without fail if you haven't already hit the bell icon for notifications get yourself a copy of our notes on patreon and i will see you in the next video cheers and stay cool