 Hi everyone this is Jason from Nathaniel. In this lesson I'm going to focus on a topic which I'm very very passionate about folk arpeggios. Arpeggios used for a variety of folk music and I've composed like a standard melody which will go with this entire left hand saga of events and there will be something for everyone. If you're a beginner you can follow along you can do a lot of work and if you're an advanced player you can definitely gain a lot of things to develop your hand independence and all of these arpeggios I've kind of developed organically you could say along the way like folk music in general by playing with a lot of artists and even in a place like India there's so many different kinds of folk music which is there which I have the opportunity to play and also outside India I'm very influenced by genres like bluegrass, irish folk music, Bulgarian dance folk music so I just like a lot of the folk elements in music for some reason and it just sounds that's sort of what has built me as a piano player and as a musician in general so I always like to go back to folk so this lesson could also be a way to get some of these folk techniques to any melody this is actually melody independent so you may be playing twinkle twinkle little star or a heavy metal song for all I care and still play it in a folk style if you ever want to make a youtube performance video on how to on playing a song in a folk version or a folk style you definitely want to watch this lesson okay and if you're a beginner or an advanced player there's something for everyone the notation for all of my variations this is going to be a two-part series so the variations for all of them are available in a nice neat pdf file along with midi and mu score files which you can open in any platform or software convenient for you it's all waiting in a folder on our patreon page you just have to go there there'll be a post and not only this lesson a lot of things past present and future will be there on patreon before we get cracking it'll be awesome if you could hit that bell hit the subscribe if you are a new person or if for some reason you forgot to subscribe please don't forget subscribe right now I'm telling you to do it please do it right now and then leave us a like leave us a comment with what you thought thought about the lesson and let's get cracking so I'm going to introduce you first to the melody and I'm going to play the melody with a simple bass pulse so that you learn the melody very well there is notation if you need to look at the notation if you don't read don't worry you can still follow along no problem at all so I'll play you the melody with a simple a pulse and by the way this song is on the a major scale three sharps c sharp f sharp g sharp okay let's roll the melody and then I'm going to first teach you the melody so you need to know the melody really well throughout the lesson it'll be the same tune and the first first part we are going to do the melody with an arpeggio pattern which I'm sure you'll be able to crack then we'll embellish the melody we'll try and ornament it and make it sound really tasty and then in part two we go all out we just dive into all sorts of techniques okay so melody okay notice my left hand is just playing like a single root octave thing that's the root of the chords I'm trying to play so in and that's D major come back to a major f sharp minor or that's an e over g sharp again one more time get my fingers as well try and do it with singing sing and play very important so so again last time that was half of the tune okay so then moving forward second half so both the first and second halves of the melody seem to start after beat one that's what I kind of liked while composing two and three and four again again with the pulse in the left hand would always be helpful because eventually you have to bring in that left hand with stuff with arpeggios and chord patterns sing along you see slowly but surely I'm trying to get my piano to copy my voice so I can do you see I get all those chops easily with with the voice so you just try to emulate that pretty much on the piano that's why I always encourage singing while you compose the stuff so and get all that and now the second half and do that stuff as well we leave this for the latter segment of the lesson where I talk about some embellishments for now let's nail the melody and let's get it with the bass let me try and walk you through what the left hand is doing a d remember that f sharp wax before the d hits because the d is at the on beat and f sharp is at the off beat and four and one and two and mmf sharp e over g sharp so you could play any g sharp bass or e bass up to you again please okay get that going very important to start like this always sing and move your head that's generally recommended that's what I keep saying I sound definitely like a broken record but that really helps to to play the instrument or any instrument even if you're a guitar player or a bass player moving the head and singing are the most important ways to get better at that instrument okay now let's dive into our arpeggios so the left hand arpeggio pattern which I have for you the first one is going to be very very playable let's go through the chords first of all a major d major so sometimes I play d major with an a bass so it becomes easy to shift and becomes more like a plagal cadence of four going to one so they lot a lot of them play it like that so with the same a d over a so so and now we go to f sharp minor could probably try the melody with these triads in version f sharp minor now here I'm doing e over g sharp I like that climb f sharp minor pa pa pa pa e over g sharp a again please okay now that chord roots are done blocks are done arpeggio time so the first chord for pretty much every chord I'm trying to make my arpeggio a bit more than what a triad gives me a triad gives me three notes but the arpeggio can you can add so I do root third fifth so that's covered and then I copy whatever note is played by the pinky or the lowest note to the top end a c sharp e a so this is the basis of the left hand arpeggio a c sharp e a this gives you a lot more options lot more flexibility lot more rhythmic choices so that one pattern number one will just be just that so this is what I could call as the normal or the basic pattern so I'll sing along so I always like to isolate my right hand so don't forget the right hand sing sing what the right hand is eventually going to do now that your focus is on this guy so what did I do for d okay if you read the notation check it out as well you can pause the video and get a we download the pdf so that's the decod then I come back to it now with the when I end with a I like to kind of glide to f sharp via this g sharp so a c sharp e g sharp f now back to the f sharp minor now g g sharp or e over g sharp meaning you'll be playing g sharp with the pinky and inverting this is how I'm playing e over g sharp just get used to that shape back to a major a lot of a majors in there so d changing to a major pump pump pump pump that's helping me go to f sharp minor you can ignore that pump pump pump pump you can just play and I just thought I'll sneak in that g sharp passes well to f sharp the relative minor again please don't bring in the right hand until the left hand is confident let's bring in the melody now one more time slower that's the base structure already sounds full to me I think but there's gonna be more not so fast that's fine played a speed you enjoy whatever you think the music resonates well with played that speed I like this speed simple okay great so melodies sorted chords are sorted arpeggios are sorted so at the last part of this particular video which is part one of a two part series I'm going to look at some melodic embellishments and we'll try and look at it in a very informal way I have done a lot of other videos on melodic ornamentation but for this I thought I don't want to leave you with just the bare bone melody let's try and dress it up with some ornamentation and most of this ornamentation I can go on and on about how I was influenced by it I could say that singer influenced me to play a melody this way or that genre gets me to play that way or maybe I'm inspired by the guitar or by the violin or the flute or the cello or any instrument so as a piano this we are a pretty much a chameleon kind of a instrument or a personality playing this instrument so when I say chameleon I mean you need to be inspired by everything around you the genres the players the atmosphere and all instruments so the piano gains energy from other instruments you can't say that with a lot of the other instruments out there which is why the piano has a very very diverse way of even learning the piano there are so many ways to learn it and every teacher will have their own way and that's how this instrument has evolved it's an incredible instrument and it relies more on the coordination between the two hands so when it comes to melody we struggle a bit because there's one problem with the piano which you may already know I can't go in between A and a B I cannot glide like a violin player can glide a singer can do all sorts of things with their voice there are a lot of limitations so that is why we try to get inspired by proper melody instruments like violin flute the human voice great singers from great genres and learn from them and that's exactly what's going to happen now okay let's dive into some ornamentations I'm first going to have some fun with the melody and then I'm going to show you what I'm doing you see while doing all this I think or I think my left hand still held the fort you know you know supported the right hand really well so that's the other challenge of playing the piano you're not just singing there you're singing and playing another instrument here so it requires a lot of practice so when you practice this stuff don't do it and expect the result to happen immediately it didn't happen for me it took me about two weeks to make this exercise and then another week to practice it myself it was not easy even for me at least the other variation so it takes time so as long as you enjoy the process it should be cool fine so what did I do there to ornament first off so let's let's figure that out so so that's a very like a guitar hammer-on pull off hammer-on technique so it's pretty much ripped off from the guitar but on the piano it sounds like a piano so there we go let's try that you know the whole melody I'm not going to talk like I'll just do it in fragments so you can understand it as it moves forward now where the piano can go interesting would be you can stack a note you can add a note which even a guitar can do check that out so I'm I'm uh this is what we call as a double stop on the piano where you can add in an A or even an E why A and E A and E are the root and the fifth of the scale so they will pretty much go with anything so stack it up so there we go okay now since you're already whacking E as the melody play A at the higher but don't overdo it right or like that so play with the high A okay now now you can do like a a carrom flick like playing carrom board so so that that's a glide from the middle to the ring finger well if you want to practice this technique well you'll have to do a carrom glide from pretty much all all your fingers yeah at least it's not all your toes as well so you should figure out that technique with all your finger combinations for here right it's middle to ring and I'm adding the pinky if you can to play that A that's the that's the expression there and do it however you find tasteful or make it more subtle like a slide you can make it more quicker now it becomes more like a flam thra or subtle so whole story again you can do the same hammer-on thing right so very violent thing as well you can also go a little bit on the genres if you take this in a gospel environment a lot of the gospel organ players will tend to play something like this there's also a very vocal thing you do that thing obviously I'm not a vocalist who can do that so well but I hope you got the idea by what I meant so to get that to our advantage the pinky finger is the weak one right so anyway you won't play that ghost note you won't play that hard so it's a good thing in a way that the biology of our hand the way our hands have evolved over time the fact that your pinky is weak is actually a good thing you know and the fact that even your ring finger is sometimes locked so it's really good if you think about a lot of positives with the the constraints of our hand if you think about it a piano player has to think of each finger so each finger kind of has a personality so let's put that together so that was the gospel thing so you don't want to mess up your left hand though be careful if you like that that's a passing pentatonic run which I just came up now I guess now the problem is I'm low here so to finish the piece I could finish it off by playing octaves and close the job there because now the the person's ear was around here so if I play octaves after that run you just make the second part of the melody how do I put it maybe a lot warmer in in terms of the texture or a lot thicker depending on how you think about it so let's put that together again octave one more time slowly and while you do these ornamentations remember that there's whatever you do with your face is a bit out of your control so try to let loose when you play facial expressions are very important as a player as a singer as any musician but if you think about what your facial expression should do becomes very structured and scientific so I really don't care what I do with my face and I think over time that helps me play better so I don't know how to teach you this this comes with each person playing but let yourself loose what will the emotion definitely will come from your face because even when you talk to a person and you want to convey an emotion really strong to that person your facial expressions matter so obviously you need that while playing your instrument so whatever your facial expressions may be in real life I guess throw that away and bring the musical expressions when you play the piano right you don't need to ever know what you do but remember that you should let loose okay guys so that's it for part one moving on to part two what we are going to do is I'm going to just quickly take you through a bunch of left hand arpeggio variations which will make this folk melody with folk arpeggios even more you know upbeat and even more vibrant and more representative of a folk music culture so stay tuned head over to part two if you don't find the video don't forget to subscribe turn on that bell whenever we release a new lesson it'll be there don't forget to give the video a like that'll help the youtube algorithm do something cool with our video hopefully and download a copy of the notation it's all there on patreon along with my notes and other stuff the midi is also there cheers