 Hi everyone this is Jason here from the Nathaniel School of Music in this lesson well it's not really an actual piano lesson which you'll see me doing normally where I teach you a concept or a rhythm pattern or a way to develop hand independence or whatever else you see on our channel it's more about me trying to say what are the things I did wrong as a piano player growing up and as all of us do when you learn something you're going to have mistakes you're going to learn there will be a few hurdles which you will face or for no fault of yours maybe it was a annoying teacher or maybe it was a system which was not serving you well or maybe you didn't have the time and so on so how I look at my journey especially with the advent of YouTube which happened around maybe for India just before 2010 in in all seriousness you know prior to that music learning was very random you learn it through peers through friends through well-wishers if you're lucky you get yourself a teacher at least in a place like India and the teaching has been generally limited to grade exams they have exams for learning music like the Trinity College exams the ABRSM or whatever it may be you basically anyone who learned music the only way to really learn it was that way but luckily at a young age I had the opportunity of working with a variety of people a variety of artists musicians theater people also general creative people like for example my dad who who was a very theater and creative person so even if we were to make music he would find a visual use for it you know you would find something which it can transform itself into so music was also looked at in our family as a very artistic thing it's just part of art it's just part of what you have to do so we I was trained to kind of respond and respect all forms of art whether it's theater or whether it's music or painting or whatever it might have been so very lucky in that sense so however there were a lot of mistakes which happened along the way which I can definitely prove to you in this lesson our mistakes because I can show you how it helped me and luckily for me I got into music education and becoming a teacher you know as you see the youtube channel and in our normal classes at the music school which I am part of teaching has been a huge help not only you know to to survive as a as a individual and have a job and all that but teaching is a great way to learn as I found over the years of performing music sometimes doing endless concerts playing the same genre may not be as educational or helpful to your playing as as teaching as a normal music class so I found that teaching has actually helped my technique because I can see so many other individuals like me trying to grow the same way I am trying to grow it's not like when you start teaching you stop learning I just say we just know a bit more than the individual we are teaching and thus I guess that gives us the claim that oh we are a teacher that I can educate you because I know something maybe you don't know so I started teaching maybe in around 29 2009 2010 just when the music school launched its course music method which is a performance based course which gets students on stage provides a certificate and and all that while teaching I realized or just when I started teaching I realized a few things which I can actually improve you know and which I have improved so over a span of about 10 years you kind of see that improvement maybe in a span of one year or a few months or a few classes you're not going to know things real time changes always felt over a few years as I'm sure you know with everything which happens around the universe so the first thing I would like to talk about now getting more from a technical angle what are all the things which I did wrong as a pianist okay I'm focusing only on piano not music in general otherwise this rant will go on and on I don't know maybe for a few hours who knows right so this is just piano and just piano technique and I hope that all these points or words of advice will kind of get you to cut to the chase and kind of understand these mistakes and try to realize okay he didn't he's gone through that so maybe I shouldn't even bother getting into that that that particular issue right so before we get started it'll be great to hit that bell for notifications we do a lot of lessons hit the subscribe if you haven't already follow us or support us on patreon that'll be really cool let's get cracking so the first thing I've observed is with the use of my right hand thumb there was a kind of a misconception years ago where you should not use the thumb for a black note and I realized that there are problems if you think that way so if I just show you with just a D major chord going to A major with a C sharp at the bottom right so no teacher told me this I had to figure this out on my own now if you do a quick change between D major and A major with a C sharp at the bottom also known as first inversion of A major what I find is after a point your hand starts heating up or it starts painting and sometimes you may even miss a finger you know that so I never realized the the fact that I can actually play the thumb on a black note but do it in a way so that it doesn't feel awkward so all I am suggesting you do is when you go inside to play black keys curve your thumb a little bit it has worked for me you can curve it out and back that way you keep your hands straight however you need to move your arm a bit inside slightly inside like that so I've learned this a lot even also realize that this thumb is a very stretchable finger so when you're stretching it out you know you can use it well whether do you want to play black notes or white notes it shouldn't be a kind of hurdle as you can see I'm using the thumb for a lot whenever it goes to the black key it curves out a bit so I don't access or rotate my hand in this direction I just move my arm inside so I find a lot of jazz musicians who play piano they they use their thumb a lot more so perhaps I've learned from them I've also learned from a few students at Nathaniel who I've observed them playing like that and I'm like wow that looks efficient right so that's one thing which I fail to do as a pianist that is using the right hand thumb as often as it should have been used moving on right so here's the thing which I fail to do as a pianist at least for the first 10 to 12 years and that's the sustain pedal I actually thought that I never even knew what the sustain pedal could do perhaps in a it was because of our the piano at home we had an upright piano and the pedal just didn't work and we had I think two pianos and both the pedals of both the pianos didn't work and the guy who used to come and repair it always repaired the strings he repaired the keys but he never even bothered to fix the pedal so all through for years I actually thought that okay the pedal is just something you know which maybe somewhere down the line you learn but I never realized how it can transform my music as a composer first of all the sustain pedal adds additional harmonics to your sound if I hit an A major chord this is without the pedal with the pedal you actually feel a layer you hear like a pad of additional overtones and harmonics which get added to the fundamental so even using simple physics you need the pedal to make your sound richer that's what happens on a real piano and depending on what piano virtual instrument you use I use piano tech by mod art it will give you a better sound so the better sampler or the better VST or the better keyboard you have the better the sound will be or you just have to rely on an actual piano which poses other challenges okay the other advantage of the the pedal apart from its sound is it allows you to do so many technical things which are impossible without it for example just moving your left hand and some students actually I never knew this which actually may be a good thing in disguise some keyboards have a feature where you hit the button and it just automatically sustains so you end up doing it all sustains now this could be counterproductive there could be an issue here because your sounds are kind of getting jumbled and this is only right hand so as long as you are in and around middle C no problem but as it goes lower start sounding annoying almost like something's wrong with it you know something's wrong with the pianist or the playing why is that well again simple laws of physics the frequencies are too close here there's very little hurts you could say between them while here to here there's a lot more range so if I do even if I do A and B flat you can actually hear those notes but if I do them here just sounds like nonsense you know or if I do an A major chord there versus why would you ever want to play that right so the with the pedal comes great responsibility you have to transform your technique you'll have to do a lot more with your technique with the pedal and I'll not talk too much about it because there is a lesson where I've really gone in and out in depth with the use of the sustain pedal I would advise you to watch that at any level you will learn something we'll put the link up for you to to see it so that is one thing I definitely wish I could have done as a younger pianist before I got into a scenario where I was gifted my first keyboard right by my dad again so when that keyboard came to the house on a birthday of mine or whatever I guess it would have been a birthday then I learned that oh yeah this Kurzweil keyboard comes with a pedal you plug it in and it's magical you know it completely transformed my playing then I wanted to fix the old piano but then we learned that that was pretty much busted right so the pedal became a part of my playing it also improved my independence I felt more about how to use the pedal than about how my hands were coordinating so it removed the stress between the two hands it's like now I have this whole all my limbs are sort of being used right and I also ended up going for a couple of music concerts where you have a scenario where you maybe you have a choir a choir does a gig and then you have your choir which is to perform after that and I would always observe the keyboard players or the pianists in those performances where one guy who's before me or the player before me just sounds like light years better than me you know even though I I also play I know my chords blah blah blah I just never sounded as good as the guy before me or after me so I actually felt a bit bad here and there but then I learned yeah it's just the pedal you know pedal just adds that rich overtone flavor and it allows your hands to go all over the place I'm not that much of an arpeggio player as you will see by a lot of my own music I don't do a lot of this flying or shredding as we call it I just stay in one zone but even in one zone the pedal is very helpful and yes that's about the pedal right so another thing which I really wish I had learned as a kid growing up well a lot of my you know contemporaries or people my age also playing piano whenever it came to this left hand of ours there were just two things I would see people do one is you want chords of course in your left hand so what people would do is they'll just play a fifth chord and they'll kind of play a little bit of rhythm around that and that's it now this is not a great sound because the fifth chord is a chord so if the chord is supposed to be major well that's not major that's a fifth chord but the fifth chord ended up being or I guess all around the world as far as all the students I teach go the fifth chord is more like a survival thing you go and maybe the other reason why you choose to play fifth chords here is because you're not so good with triads or you just believe that triads sound annoying in the left hand to begin with which is true as I told you earlier the frequencies are clashing and so on so there was this school of musicians who are navigating through chords in the left hand with the fifth approach there was another school of musicians who would buy these arranger keyboards you know keyboards where you just hit a button hit another button hit a chord and then voila you have all sorts of music being played by the pushing of two buttons which are not piano keys now that music did never fascinated me as a kid growing up because I think my roots were good my family is a very musical family my mom plays she plays the organ her brother my uncle also play my dad's dad is a karnatic or was a karnatic genius on the violin and he's had a huge you know legacy in in the karnatic space and there's this western classical space as well which where there are choirs there's church music there's intense harmony so I was grounded very well so the moment I would see this guy fancy musicians hitting these arranger things I would observe what is this guy actually doing with his left hand well he's just hit a couple of buttons which is not piano buttons and then he's just holding a chord and just music is just flowing but this is a horrible way to play a chord on a piano if you ask me so if your goal is to be a music arranger well some people buy these arranger keyboards but again my argument for that would be if you want to do music arrangement or production or programming seriously you don't need a keyboard you need a DAW or a digital audio workstation like Logic Reaper or Pro Tools so it's it's useless if you ask me that approach of playing chords pushing buttons and it's not it's it's really not the right way to go so having said that I was in the world of playing fifth chords in fact if you see some of my covers on youtube you'll you'll find a cover of the Beatles song yesterday which we'll put up you'll find that I'm actually using fifth chords but now when I teach it after a lot of students have asked me please teach me your version of yesterday I'm like I don't play like that anymore like I don't like that rendition to be honest and the reason being not because of my dynamics not because of my improv mainly because of my left hand because I was still stuck into that right so I was pretty much doing those that voicing so my advice to you is learn learn how to voice chords well don't only you know just use this fifth voicing in your left hand the thing I learned was you can still bring in the third but bring it on top you have it you have Bach's cello suite made using that same technique right and again with the combo of the pedal you need the pedal because you have to lift your hand I can't stretch so much I don't think even you can you need to be like a differently evolved human so you go that way you hold your pedal so this is what I've been learning so I always love the depth of the piano because I'm also a bass player and in in general I'm a bassist at heart so I would always then survive my playing by playing a bit higher where the chords don't sound so muddy but what I've learned actually over the past not too long ago maybe about six seven years was let's play chords like that that way you're a bass player you're not annoying your bassist everyone's happy because it's sounding rich and full right and you don't play too high to compensate the higher you go the more annoyed your singer gets the lower you go the more annoyed your guitarist and your bassist get but if you play low like this now you enter cello territory you entered the electric bass territory this is how they all play their chords in that frequency region right so my advice to you is don't go the arranger root don't do all those pointless chord holes in the left hand very bad for your foundation especially for those of you starting off and look at spread voicing look at spreading the chords again I will leave you a playlist in our description where we talked a lot about spread voicing a lot of detail on that so make sure you head over and check that out let's move on right so a couple more things before I end this discussion or rant if you want to call it that I feel a little bit awkward because I usually teach techniques and positions and whatnot but this is just something lot of people have asked over recent times so I thought let's make a video out of that you know and sort of demystify some of these things which you may be facing or hopefully you don't repeat these mistakes which I ended up doing as a youngster right I'm very happy with some of the mistakes as well because it's part of our evolution you will make mistakes you will do the right thing you will do the wrong thing so you need to you shouldn't feel bad about I'm not at all bad about it I just felt that had I learned this a little bit earlier who knows what would have happened you know so maybe you all now that you have watched this video you could consider these things and see if it works for you right so the other thing which I think we all fail as piano learners in a traditional school of thought or a standard standard system will be we all play chords in the root position so you go D major A major now I found enough and more youtube tutorials enough and more apps enough and more teachers I know this because students start coming to me after having learned from that teacher and then everyone thinks this is how you play D major this is how you play A major well you are not going to play a gig like that no one is going to allow you to play these two chords like that you have to voice your chords better you need to use inversions you have to study chord voicing chord inversions so this is something I was sort of wrongly programmed into believing that D major is way more important in root position than it is in all those other inversions F sharp A D A D F sharp yeah so we were kind of wrongly programmed to play D major only like this sort of like a guitar player always holds a C major chord like that or a D major chord like that or a E major chord like that E seventh with the pinky well there are so many other ways of playing chords so many other beautiful ways of voicing the notes of the chord so that's something I feel had I learned at a little earlier stage you know I did learn chord voicing chord inversions but then over time we would only stick with triads and then the problem is when you start doing chord extensions when you do an E major with a flat seven you're wired to playing that chord only that way and you're like what if I thought of it this way E major is this E seventh is with a flat seven which is the D so what if I can find D around this triad you have a D there and a D there and maybe if I played it like that you have the D there and you you just build your chord in a more knowledgeable way rather than in a visual way and the piano as I keep telling students and in so many of our youtube lessons the piano is a what you see is what you get instrument that means you need to know stuff before you play it you can't rely on shapes and patterns and whatnot inversions also pose so many other important musical goals which you need to know so I have linked up my chord inversion playlist it'll be there for you to see in the description make sure you watch that there are exercises and so many other things on the chord inversion front so that is another thing I wish I had learned with more respect as a kid growing up people would tell me this is D major and you just listen to that you know but that is not D major D major has so many ways to be played spread or you could even play an E major chord with some embellishments like that like that right there's also a playlist where I've actually over the years as I've been composing music I've listed out 10 of my most favorite chords which I love to use in my music in the albums of Jason Zach band which I release so do check out that playlist as well basically my favorite chords of all time so there you'll also learn how these chords are voiced okay let's move on right so the next thing which I have you know initially failed as a pianist but I don't do that failure now is the concept of practicing and doing stuff on multiple scales as young piano players we're always everyone gives us exercises on C major you know they'll do and then they'll tell you okay class is over now you practice on multiple scales and see how that goes now here we've created a bias and we are saying that C major is the main thing or C major is the basic thing you know I've actually seen so many music schools because students come to us with their approach of how they've learned in the past where C major is taught for like three years or two kids you know and I think kids are their mind is very active why do you want to hold them back by just telling them to play the white notes and not even know and be scared of the black notes it almost feels like that so well I have a lot to say about that but the the main thing I wanted to highlight about the advantage of multiple scales is in my own journey when I started off ironically C major was not everything it was E major it was a major because I would play with a lot of my guitar player friends and I was also learning a little bit of guitar at the time I was learning both instruments sort of together and then I kind of moved on to piano that's another story so the the fact that I was playing with a lot of guitar players looked at the more open string scales for them which is G major D major and A major and maybe those scales if you if you look at this logically on a guitar if you're playing on C major you'll have the F chord which is F major now that generally in my knowledge you'll be playing that as a bar chord you'll be putting your entire finger so for beginner level guitarist that's tricky playing F major as a bar so inevitably guitar players have they don't do stuff on C major so I was lucky that way but then things started to get saturated over time okay I was playing rock music rock music metal music basically guitar music throughout but there was a nice light bulb moment which ended up happening once I told myself okay I want to play more genres I don't want to just do prog dream theater and guitar driven stuff so I started working just with singers just guys who are singing or playing at weddings you just play the keyboard for some some singer who's performing now here's where the challenge started the singer would say wow we are prepared for a gig and then I'll be like okay songs on D major I've got it done and dusted then the singer has a bad throat or the singers like Jason can we please move this down a little bit I wanted a bit lower I'm like okay cool but then moving it lower is relearning it on D flat major which is very tricky at least if the gig is like the next next day or something like that so I would always tell the singer I can't do it it's too tough for me but then some cleverer singers would say why don't you use the transpose button you have a transpose button but then I'm like okay I'll do it but then I've had a lot of shows where I've got completely destroyed with that transpose button because over time you play music for about 12 13 years you start knowing the sounds of notes you know what C sounds like you know what E flat sounds like especially when you play music very often it's like colors you know something is red you know something is purple blue whatever it may be because you learned that and you keep using those colors and your eyes are open you keep looking at them with music well a musician deals with this stuff every day so if you have to transpose my advice to use please don't do it I've had a lot of show failures just by going up by one down by one or worst case up by two man if I will never do that anymore ever I'm never going to use that transpose button right so coming back to why I think this advantage of multiple scales helped to end this you know this the suggestion for you the way I look at practicing on multiple scales is to see if the scale can motivate you otherwise we are all human we are like okay let's do it on one or two scales let's chill out and avoid the other scales but what if I were to tell you that every scale has a feeling has a unique shape gives you different ideas for the brain to compose and think well that's all true right so try playing a song on about five or six scales and if you are at a more intermediate level you're going to realize that you give birth to so many different possibilities to a point that a scale is really different even two major scales A major and E major or E flat major feel so different on the piano that that brings out the beauty of the music when you compose very different than a guitar because a guitar is driven by shapes so guitar players are taught with shapes then they could even use a thing like as they call the capo you can move up and down so the guitar and the bass and a lot of stringed instruments work in shapes piano doesn't so use that to your advantage and you'll see even with the riffs which we make at a very you know good pace of one a day you you may be arguing how does this guy do it how does this guy come up with these ideas well it's just the concept of multiple scales so I will compose something on G major it'll sound like a folk song then I go to F becomes bluesy then it goes to E flat it sounds country or I'm inspired by like maybe Nora Jones then I go to D and then I start doing something heavier you know that's the idea so the scale inspires you to change your game almost like tennis courts you know french open versus Wimbledon grass versus clay you know or if you follow one of my favorite games cricket you know you have the ball swinging in one part of the world where it spins way way more in the subcontinent part right so the game changes the batsman has to adapt the bowler has to adapt that's the beauty of certain sports where the ground or the dimensions of the field affect the way you play the game and that's the point I wanted to make and I learned that again once I started teaching so let's move on to the last thing which I think I failed miserably as a pianist right so I'm going to leave you with this thought sight reading right sight reading we always think is staring at notation and playing what you stared at you're looking at notation you look at the treble clef you look at the bass clef or you're doing choir so you see satb you read that and play or you're an orchestra conductor so you're going to look at all those parts so the complexity of reading goes on and on and on there is no end to it it's always a game you play between your eye and your fingers because if you have to read the book you can't see the piano it's very difficult so I admire people who read complicated music and play the piano you know and in my own family I have my mom my uncle my granddad before them who would literally read the paper play the entire choral part and then when it comes to our rehearsal or a choir practice or something like that they don't even read the book they have to figure out a way to look at the choir look at the notation and make sure they're not making mistakes on the piano and conduct the entire ensemble at the same time so I would always admire that so reading became a huge challenge for me growing up so I became a kind of a revolter I was like I don't want to learn how to read let me go rogue you know away from the family's perspective and be and just do my own thing basically be a rocker play rock music just play by feel as we used to call it or play by year all of these things would would keep cropping up but now in hindsight I realized that was wrong because you should learn how to read reading inspires you and you also look at different perspectives which I would like to leave with you in this video if you don't like reading and playing or if that's not your thing don't stop reading you can do so many other ways of growing as a reader or being inspired by notation ultimately reading is notation so what if I were to tell you that you know you look at rhythm look at a bar of rhythm or two bars of rhythm read that get inspired by that rhythm and see where it goes you play any melody you play any chord arpeggio whatever you want on that rhythm so reading rhythms is something which has fascinated me because I have a lot of drummer friends who do the same thing right the other thing you could do it reading is sight singing so what you do is you stare at the paper now instead of playing the keyboard or the guitar or whatever you have to sing okay now singing trains your ear because you have to know the note whatever you're reading you have to know that note before you actually sing it you need to know the intervals of that note whether it's do re mi fa or sa re gamma and then you have to read the words as well so sight singing fascinated me as a kid reading rhythms fascinated me once I started working with a lot of drummers and then it kind of slowly removed the bias of reading reading is like ah it's only for professional people or you know we used to sort of it was a bit annoying that you know we we would always kind of the non-readers we would always kind of diss the readers the guys who are reading in some cases yes because I had a friend not a friend just a fellow guy who was playing the piano who couldn't play jingle bells unless he had the notation for it now I think that's a bit silly you have to know how to play simple songs you have to use your ear right so there are pros and cons of reading that we leave for another discussion topic but I just wanted to put this thought for you that don't let reading become a bias don't brand it as something really fancy and over professional and don't brand it as something useless because you can't do it that was what I did right because it is a very very important skill and spice it up with learning to sight read spice it up by learning to read rhythms and get inspired by rhythms and obviously sight sing learning how to sight sing train so many things at one time you become a better singer you better you you know your intervals better everything becomes better if you sight sing so see what fascinates you more about notation and reading and also see if you can consider using a software for learning notation that that has tended to inspire me softwares like Sibelius newscore which is open source you can just download it and use it and just be part of that community so notation software could be a great perspective I found that it's really helpful even with younger kids like eight year olds seven year olds they they they are very happy using a software like the world has changed right but it doesn't mean that notation needs to leave us notation is a great tool it has been used by the greatest of the greatest composers so it's something you have to know okay so these are the the six things if I've counted them right which I've done wrong as a pianist over the years I've been playing it for a while it's been about 25 plus years of actually playing it you know gigging wise maybe I played it before even earlier but in 25 years lots of things changed so you need to realize what are the things which which have worked for you there are a lot of things which have worked for me maybe I'll do another video on that in a later lesson but these are the things which I think I did not do which I don't necessarily wish I had done but I think for someone like you who's starting off your journey or if you're in the middle somewhere you could consider these points these are just food for thought I don't feel bad about not having done it I just think some of them are wrong in hindsight you just made like a silly mistake you you are hanging around with the wrong group of people and or maybe you had a fairly useless teacher which which is sometimes the problem or in most cases the problem you may you may be guided poorly which I think is very important also you have to know the facts of everything and move with the times right guys thanks if you have watched this video till the very end wow thanks a ton I rarely do a lesson where I just go on talking like this I am very happy to do the teaching stuff and the arpeggios and whatnot but I just felt you know that I should do this video even for myself it's good to do this video and kind of see where you've evolved from where you started if you haven't already give us a thumbs up to the video share the video see if you can hit the subscribe button to our channel and hit the bell icon for notifications you could also support our channel on patreon or on youtube by hitting the join button and you can learn piano through a very very structured course which is on youtube as well as fill up a form and learn from the music school which I am part of which is the netineal school of music cheers and have a great day