 Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to look at what you could call as a combo piano exercise for developing two different skills at the same time. Sort of like, you know, a gym workout where you do upper body and the lower body together or some such thing or some crazy stuff which these gym people do. So, what you could do is think of one challenge, not just for this lesson. We are going to bring out more lessons on different activities in each hand. This is hopefully the start of many more. So, what you should ask yourself, even if you want to try something on your own, is what can I do in the right hand which is challenging me? Maybe it's scales, maybe it's some exercise, some pattern. While doing that, can the left hand do something different? So, the right hand is focusing on something melodic. Maybe the left hand can do something rhythmic or harmonic in nature. So, I hope to guide you in the right direction in terms of practicing this and you may want to get a book or a pen and paper out because we are going to choose a scale which is not in our comfort zone, C major. As always, when this channel started till now in 2024, we've maintained one consistent thing. Our videos have gotten better and better. A few other things with respect to audio has gotten better and better. Maybe the way I teach has hopefully gotten better and better. But one thing has not changed, C major is illegal. So, in your books, we are going to write down, usually we do this stuff with major scale. So, I thought in today's lesson to make it more interesting, we'll take a minor scale and we'll do the C root but C minor. So, you will find that C minor is very different than C major. A good way to remember the minor scale in comparison with the major would be minor will have a flat 3. See, this is your normal 3. E minor will have a flat 3. That's your major 6th. If you flatten that, you get a minor 6th. And then major 7 becomes a minor 7. So, this is what you could call as the natural minor scale or you could also say that C is a relative minor with respect to what major? Well, the answer to that question is E flat major because E flat major 6th, major 6th interval will form C minor. So, C minor will have the same notes as E flat major. So, before we get started with our planning, writing everything down, what the right hand and left hand should do, it will be awesome if you could consider hitting that subscribe button and turn on the bell icon for regular notifications. Also, the notation from this lesson will be given to you as a PDF on our Patreon page along with my handwritten notes which will definitely help supplement this learning. Let's get cracking. So, let's first look at writing C minor scale. I've already told you the notes. What you'd want to do as a student of the piano is to write it in two ways. The first way is to write the scale in a neat round circle. Don't write the scale in a line. Lines are not helpful when you want to do chords, when you want to form intervals, when you want to form connections between notes. Writing these scales like how you know, if you Google what are the notes of C minor, it's going to tell you in a line or a row of notes. I think that's highly uninspiring and sometimes counterproductive. So, don't write scales in lines. Write them in a circle and as piano students, I would encourage you to also draw the shapes, what I call as piano worms. So, that will be the white keys, going up to the black keys whenever needed, coming back to white and then the black. So, you get this very unique C minor shape. You know? C D E flat F white note G white note A flat black B flat C okay. So, any decision can be made. You know, I want to go up a sixth to visualize the notes. You know, it's A flat B flat because you have the shape in your head. So, write it in a circle, very important. It's not only for this lesson, pretty much in general, if you're watching my videos, you'll realize that we tend to write scales a lot in the circular form. So, let me first introduce you to the left hand and then the right hand. I'm assuming that your skill level might be beginner or you might even be a more advanced or an intermediate player. So, I hope this lesson will have something for everyone. In the left hand, what I want you to do, if you're a beginner or otherwise, if you'd like to go in a flow, follow along with me. Get your keyboards out. That'll be helpful for this lesson. You would play each of the notes of the C natural minor scale one by one like this. Using octaves would be helpful. But if you cannot stretch, if your hands are too small, then what you could do is just play single finger notes. And if you're doing single finger notes, get used to the piano fingering. So, you do in the left hand, one, two, three, four, five. Five fingers cross your middle finger, A flat, B flat, C. Let's do that again. We have to practice ascending and descending. C, D, E flat, F, G. A flat would be with your thumb, with your middle finger. C, D, E flat, F, G, middle. Then the whole hand crosses over. So, that's your ascending, descending the same way as you went up. You come down. C, B flat, A flat, cross thumb. G, F, E flat, D, C. Again, if you're doing single finger movement, this is what I want you to practice in the left hand. If you're doing octaves, then you just go pinky and thumb with the octaves. Descending. Now, why I requested you to bring out a book with a pencil or pen would be to map out the chords. So, the fact that we've written C minor in a neat round circle means that you can get the triads easily. Or if not the triads, at least the thirds or at least the fifths, you can get so many things in that circular form. So, C minor, if you want to do triads, or just thirds, look at the circle. C, skip one, play one. C, skipping to the D, skipping the D rather and playing the E flat. So, you have your thirds. So, you can climb your natural minor in thirds. Don't worry too much about fingering. Just make sure you can kind of survive it. Thirds. Write that down as well. You can see my notes to check your answer. Along with thirds, it's also nice to populate your fifth interval. So, again, the circle will help you. And most of the fifths in the natural minor as well as the major scale are perfect fifths, all but one. So, in the major scale, the seventh degree will form a diminished fifth interval. That one. You'll get a diminished fifth. In the natural minor scale, the second degree. So, C will be perfect fifth. D will form a diminished fifth or a tritone interval. So, just remember that. In the natural minor, the second will form a tritone. Perfect fifth. Tritone. Perfect fifth. Perfect fifth. Perfect fifth. Still perfect fifth. Perfect fifth. A lot of perfect fifths except for that second one. So, now if you start building triads. So, we've looked at the scale. We've looked at thirds. We've looked at fifths. A triad is nothing but a third as well as the fifth. There we go. And you've just got yourself a C minor triad. So, C minor. The second one would be D with its third and its fifth. A warning to you that the fifth is not A. Perfect fifth. Because that will take it outside the C natural minor domain. It will make it more a Dorian kind of sound. So, the second chord of the C natural minor would be D diminished. So, this is how you could play it. Pinky middle index if you like. It kind of works. Yeah, I think that's the most efficient here. Then, we are moving forward to the third major. E flat major. E flat, G, B flat. Then you go to your four minor which is F minor. Five minor which is G minor. Six flat major which is A flat major. Seven flat major which is B flat major. The naming convention is based on the intervals with respect to the root. So, when I say flat three, I mean that it's a minor third with respect to C. So, you will get one minor. One minor. Small Roman we use for minor. Two diminished or dim or you can even write small two with a degree. That will give you a diminished sound chord. You may think this is the third major but it's good to write it as three flat major. Or just capital three flat with Romans. Small four minor. Small five minor. Capital six flat major because that's six flat with respect to C. Capital seven flat with respect to C major. So, C minor, D diminished, E flat major, F minor. G minor, A flat major, B flat major, C minor. You can descend. E minor, B flat major, A flat major, G minor, F minor, E flat major. D diminished, C minor. So, that's your movement. So, we went from the thirds to fifths. All of these are good practices and now triads which is a third and a fifth. Descending. You can do this in the right hand later. For now I'm demonstrating in the left hand because I have other activities for you in the right hand. Now, if you're a bit more of an advanced player, if you're bored with triads by now, you can probably look at seventh chord. So, how do we build the seventh chords of the natural minor scale? Minor seventh will be at the degree one. Minor seventh flat five or the half diminished chord used with the five sign will be a minor seventh flat five at the degree two. Major seventh at the degree three flat or the third note. Minor seventh at the degree four, F minor seventh. Minor five at the degree five, the G minor seventh. Then at the degree six flat, you'll have a major seventh chord. A flat major seventh. Then at the seventh flat degree, you'll have your lone dominant seventh chord. B flat major with a dominant seventh on top. We just say B flat seventh for short. So, your seventh chord formations, we also call them as chord extensions. You're extending it with a seventh interval. Minor seventh, minor seventh flat five, half diminished. Major seventh, minor seventh, minor seventh. Major seventh at the flat six, dominant seventh at the flat seven, back to tonic. You can even do a descend, which will be another challenge on its own. A sending versus D sending. Different challenge. Again, to overcome these sort of shapes, it's important that, again, you develop some muscle memory around the combo between white and black notes. So, if you take C minor seventh, you can visualize it like this. Can you not? White, black, white, black. You can also then simplify it for your brain by saying, this is very similar in shape. So, if I close my eyes and move to the F, see, I can play the exact same chord. So, C minor seventh and F minor seventh share the same shape, not the same notes, but the same chord shape. It's almost like playing the guitar, if you think about it. You have similar shapes for your chords, which you need to muscle down. D minor seventh flat five, I wouldn't say that this is very similar to anything else. You have to remember that on your own. The major sevenths can be stacked up. E flat major seventh, E flat major seventh. The dominant, try to remember that. Minus seven flat five. Very unique shapes. The dominant is like a boat. B flat, D, F, A flat. If you map that down, it's pretty much a boat, isn't it? And then, yeah, major sevenths, I've told you. Minus sevens, C and F are similar. D is the unique fellow. So the unique chords to remember are D minor seventh flat five, G minor seventh and lastly, the dominant B flat, which is a simple boat shape. So that's pretty much the left hand. You may be thinking, I can do more. I can create a pattern, some arpeggio or something. Let's not bother, because I think this itself will be a good workout. The right hand is going to start doing a melodic pattern. And the melodic pattern will be pretty much from the natural minor scale. Let me play you the pattern and then you'll only kind of get a feel of it. There we go. As you can see, some way to ascend the scale and some way to descend the scale. Okay, so what happened here? If you look at it intervalically, I'm changing my starting point in the pattern. So the pattern is one, two, three, one. I've made it slightly tricky because normally people will do one, two, three, two, three, four like this. But when you come back to the root, I find this tricky even on other instruments, which I play. You go, come back to the one where you started. So sa rega, sa one, two, three flat, one because the three is flat. And now what happens? You do start with a two. Now, the simple rule of piano fingering is don't repeat fingers when they are adjacent to each other. When the notes are adjacent, don't repeat fingers. So you don't want to do, you could, but only at slow speeds. If you want to do it fast, you can't repeat fingers. See, if you want to get it at that speed, you have to use all your five fingers or at least the first four. So what you want to try and do is don't cross your thumb rather index. Now you can bring your thumb back. Start this off with the index finger or you might think, oh, I can just use my middle. But now, now you'll have to do a big stretch here. So you get the idea, you have to figure out a fingering which takes you to the top and don't repeat any fingers. Because at fast semi-quaver and beyond speeds, it'll be unplayable if you repeat fingers. So let's try and figure out an option going up D, E flat, cross the thumb to F. Let's do that together. D, E flat, F, D, E flat, F, D. Now you could do middle, E flat, cross, or you could use your index finger. I think this is working for me. So you need to experiment because each scale is different when it comes to this linear kind of flow of notes. That works for me. And a good way to test it is play it as fast as you can. If at the fast speed it still works, it is the correct fingering. What's the absolute wrong fingering? Trying to play with one finger. You might as well get a stick or play with your nose or something like that. There's no point. You have to use all the five fingers while playing. Or at least the first three and then the ring at times. Pinky, you save here and there. Wherever you have no other option, you can use the pinky for linear movement. So again, test it out at speed. Kind of works. And at that E flat point, you could cross your thumb over. And now it just moves smooth sailing forward. F, G, A flat. You need to bring your thumb there in order to do that B flat movement. Now I understand some of you might have your own fingering and fingering is subjective. All I'm trying to say is don't repeat fingers and figure out the right crossover point. And you know, lastly, if it's a fast speed, then you're really testing the fingering out. So play it at speed and see how you can sustain the timing also. You should be able to keep the pulse with whatever you're doing. Okay. And another kind of a cheat code with some of your some of us use for melodies is we have this button on our keyboards, some of the keyboards. I don't have one, but it's there on some keyboards. This is auto sustain feature where it kind of makes the fingering irrelevant, you know, so you just hold down that button. In my case, I'm holding on the pedal, but so now you're not testing your fingering at all. You can use it sounds smooth even with one finger. So try to avoid, maybe avoid the pedal in the initial stages and more certainly avoid that button, the sustaining button on your keyboard, because otherwise you're not practicing, you're not going to get the right fingering at all. So let's do it together. Let's count one, two, and three and start. One and two and change. Ascending again. This ending is very easy. You start with your middle because I'm already on the C. This is where I would engage my pinky. It's not too difficult. See always testing with speed. Ring will sit very neatly on C. Then bring back your ring pinky ring sits well middle one more time descending. I don't know about you, but I always get this feeling that descending anything on the piano is a lot easier than ascending. Let me know what you think in the comments or if you have any alternate fingering you'd like to share you could write it down and I'll be happy to go through it and it'll also be a good learning experience for everyone to benefit with a fingering style they would like. I find that some of my students like a lot of symmetry in their playing when it comes to fingering. So a student may go, you want to kind of just jump it, but then you won't get speed. So maybe you can consider something a bit less symmetric in order to get your goal done. There we go. Some students don't like to bring the thumb on the black note. Even I used to be one of those back in the day, but I think it's helpful to bring your thumb. You should also think what is more ergonomic for you. So let's now do the exercise with single root single base roots in the end. D, E-flat, F, G, A-flat, B-flat, C. Descending, B-flat, A-flat, B-flat, F, E-flat, D. You could even do octaves if you do your thirds. If you're an Indian style player, you can, or any player who likes trills, you know, you can bring in the trills to your playing if you like, you know, can do. That's a little triplet there. No, you can bring that into the party or you can also do fifths in the left hand. Remember, the second one is a diminished fifth or a tritone. Descending, move on to some triads. And I'm playing the triad based on the first note of the pattern. So the representing chord will be C minor for that block. See for here, E-flat, E-flat is the block. Descending. And last but not least, if you're an intermediate player, you can play this with seventh chords. Sing it if possible. Descending. If you observe, I move the whole exercise up an octave. So I don't have any room. It's very congested, so I moved it up there. That'll be helpful. Dominant, minor. Descending, minor seventh, dominant seventh, major seventh, minor seventh, minor seventh, major seventh, half diminished. So if you're a bit more intermediate, you could do this with seventh chords. So that's a kind of a good combo or a parallel workout. You're training your seventh chords in one hand and you're playing a scale exercise in the right hand and the seventh chords in the left hand. Or if you're not so familiar with the seventh chords, you can simplify to triads, which is also a very important goal to accomplish. If you can't do triads, you can do fifths, you can do thirds or you can just do single scales going up. So if you think about your left hand is doing a scale ascending while your right hand is doing a pattern ascending. You know? Then descending scale, descending pattern as well. So I think it's a nice way to practice piano in general. Figure out what your right hand needs to do, figure out what your left hand needs to do and the end product of all this is hand independence. A lot of people want hand independence exercises. Why not just do two exercises, you know? And it can get pretty interesting. You can follow a drum groove here, you can do chords here, you can do a melody movement here. You can tell yourself, if I have one hour of piano practice, do you want to do half an hour in the right hand, half an hour in the left hand? Or do you want to maximize only the right hand and then you may forget the left hand? In this one hour, you're giving the same amount of importance to both hands, improving your hand independence, having a lot of fun along the way I feel. At least I do when I practice this. And instead of that one hour workout, you're reducing it to half an hour. You can do something else in the remaining half an hour because you're doing two hands in parallel. All you need to do is slow it down, see what works for your level and go for it. We all kind of get annoyed with piano exercises and practicing the piano. We tend to always want to learn songs and improvise and compose and do all those sorts of things. But you need to spend time with the exercises and the workout, so to speak. But I understand it can get boring. So in this way of practicing, the boring stuff is actually getting compressed and you can also do this in parallel or combination with anything you're doing at home. You could be watching TV. You could be chatting with someone in your house. You could just be chilling out and doing this with a piano in front of you. So I tend to do this pretty often and sometimes you start getting bored. Your conscious brain observes what you're playing and it wants to be a bit more creative and strangely enough, the exercise could end up going places. It could help you improvise something or it could help you create a composition at some point. So you should kind of be open to all possibilities and don't have a very fixed process once you've written it down. So the writing gets you in the zone. It gets you to respect your work. But after that, once you've done a few iterations, you need to then just let it go. Let it go freely and I hope you find something useful with this lesson and if you'd like more scale exercises or more chord exercises and anything to help with your fingering, your hand coordination and piano playing in general, do consider checking out some of the playlists and other videos which we leave in our description. You can also head over to our YouTube channel's home page where all of our lessons are categorized very well with playlists and each lesson will have supplementary notes. You can find those supplementary notes as well as notation, MIDI files on our Patreon page for a lot of the lessons we put out on our YouTube channel. Pretty much all of them actually. And if you'd like a more structured approach to learning, you can consider two opportunities at Nathaniel. One is you can do a flagship six-month course called Music Method. You can do that at a foundation level or an intermediate level. If you don't have the time to come into the class and learn a live lesson, if you're traveling or if your time schedules don't match, you can always head over to Nathanielschool.com under our video courses domain and you will find structured lessons from absolute zero. What are the notes of music and piano? All the way to something a lot more creative where you can learn improvising, composing and a lot of departments of music learning. So I will look forward to catching you soon at Nathaniel School of Music. Cheers and catch you in the next one.