 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson, I want to talk about syncopation and how you can first of all create a syncopated rhythm. The definition is of no great significance for me. It's more how you can use it on the piano in the most organic way possible. And today will be about chords using syncopation with chords and getting both your hands to kind of evenly groove together. And the way I understand syncopation is from a percussionist's point of view. Whether it's a drummer or tabla player, a mridangam player, whoever it might be, I'm sure all percussionists agree that groove or rhythm is created when the low chats with the high or when the low drum or the kick drum or the bass tabla will have a conversation with the higher instrument or the snare drum. So the groove I made in the beginning of the lesson, you observed it perhaps from the point of view of me making it on the body, something like this. So that was my rhythm. And then I executed it on the piano and it kind of sounded at least to my ear or to my view pretty much the same as what it was on the body. So versus if you bring that, so the whole lesson is going to be about taking, or first of all, creating a rhythm organically and then bringing it on to our piano. And I'm going to also share with you some of my secrets, if you will, which I would do after having created the rhythm and after having played it over the chord progression, I would still want to have my own flavor so that people know it's Jason playing or it's you playing, you know, when you play you have you will have your a vibe of your own. And I we should always believe that when we play an instrument, it is an extension of our personality in a sense. So when someone hears you playing the piano, it should just sound like you, right. So moving forward, I'm going to show you a chord pattern, a very simple chord pattern. I've made a note of all the inversions as well. So you can play it with whichever styling you would want or whichever shape you'd like. And then we'll get into how to play it on the piano, what should the left hand play, what should the right hand play, we're going to do ghost notes, we're going to talk about that a bit, because that's important for groove. We're also going to look at a bass filler, a couple of these bass fillers. We'll also look at right hand variations with the chords. And then there's going to be a bonus. So make sure you hang around till the end, where I'm going to show you a bonus way of playing this. I don't know why they call it bonus, even we've decided to call stuff bonus, which is the last thing we do in the lesson, which will be very cool. Okay, so let's get cracking. So the first thing is the rhythm pattern. So how I created this rhythm pattern, if I simplify it to maybe most more easier rhythms, like maybe everyone's favorite. We will rock you. If you take a rhythm like that, or if you take a thresio, something like, you've created it, but you've created it with pitch, with a pitch difference between the low and the high. So for me, the low I'm playing here, I generally prefer to play it on the chest. It gives me a nice deep sound, also gets me to feel the pulse some in some way, or maybe it's just me and maybe you can hit something else. Yeah, if you have a problem or a medical issue, please don't hit your chest. Just I'm just doing it. It's also easy for me to explain it in a video like this. You could also consider, you know, using a bongo, a bongo like this would be helpful. This will give you the low pitch and that would give you the high pitch. So bongos are equally useful and it's a great simulation for the piano. So we've looked at, we will rock you and the thresio, very common rhythms. We will rock you was kick, snare, kick, kick, snare, kick, kick, snare. While the thresio was boom, that's left, right, right. So it's pretty much your hands. So you tell yourself, what should my hand pattern be? So if you have this sort of a rhythm, that's left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, and so on. Now you can do these patterns pretty much on your own. So just let your mind free, let loose if the, as the phrase goes and see what you can do with your two hands. Think of a genre like reggae or maybe something Indian. And just see how your hands interact with each other. So create your own grooves. However, for this lesson, I've prepared one for you, which I like, which I use very often. So let me do it on the body and explain it. I'll play it first. So if you only isolate the left, it'll be do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, and the right. So you have four beats here and you have four beats here working together in eighth notes. If you count it one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one, right. But a boring way to have done it would have been, well, it's not boring, it's just common. People have heard it before or even more boring would be to maybe do it together. You won't find anyone whacking both tabla's or both the kick and the snare together, maybe in heavy metal music, but yeah. So the rhythm I have for you is a kind of juggle between the two hands in an irregular way. So it's not like da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, it's basically a syncopation. It's the two hands having an equal say in the conversation. So you go da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, and da is my kick. Higher pitch is my snare. So only my kick. The snare. If you're getting confused with my strange vocal syllables, I would suggest to just look at the notation which is prepared for you. So go through the notation and also if you don't read notation, it's okay. You can see the hit points which we've laid out there, which shows you one and two and three and four and to a point that you can see, okay, this hand has to come in at the end of the two and once you get it, get it very, very naturally into your system and it should eventually be smooth. You should be able to do this rhythm wherever or whenever at different speeds perhaps. You could also, what I do is I sometimes hit the kick as a slap and sometimes like this. Like we do on percussion instruments. So you get that sort of a, so you get different textures which you anyways will get on the piano, right? We have not come to the piano yet. So there we have it. Try it as quick as you can or as slow as you can. Same. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, bass. Right. Snare. And I'm kind of deliberately doing the bass with my left hand on a bassier sounding part of the body like my chest while I'm doing the treble deliberately in my right hand on a more treble part of the body, which is my leg, right? So that kind of gives you a very good simulation of what's to come on the piano because the right hand hits are going to be what you did on your leg. While the left hand simulation would be what you did here. So becomes pretty much the same correlation, right? So now let's bring in those chords. You cannot play the piano without those fancy chords. So D minor, first chord, G minor, second chord. Come back to D minor. I've kept it very easy for you guys. So D minor, G minor, come back to D minor and then end with A major. I'm using these inversions. A D F, B flat D G, A D F, A C sharp E or D F A, D G B flat, D F A, C sharp E A or F A D, G B flat D, F A D, E A C sharp. Depending on which flavor, which style you like of each chord. Okay. Follow my inversion chart as well. I've given you with unique colors how you can move from each triad or each chord to the next chord in the most efficient way possible. And if you're new to the subject of chord inversions, we've prepared a neat playlist called chord inversions. So check it out all the way from the very, very beginning. And there are lots of exercises even for advanced people. Check out the playlist of chord inversions after the lesson. First finish this lesson. Okay. So you go this is my pattern. Let me play it on the piano so you can internalize it and then let me break this all down. As you can see the same pattern is getting moved for each chord. D minor, G minor, D minor, A, D minor, G minor, D minor, A minor job. So it's the same. Pretty much the same pattern, the same pattern actually. So in your left hand, right now I would advise you to start off the process by playing single octaves that would be D and the thumb on the octave, whack together and the right hand playing the chord in whichever inversion you prefer. I'm going with A, D, F. So I'll only do D minor. Practice it on your drum or body percussion as well to and fro. Sometimes it's very important if you're struggling to get this rhythm. It's always very important to focus on some simple things like focus on your breathing, breathe easy, relax. Take a few breaths if you can while playing, play a bit softer. You could even consider closing your eyes. That helps me a lot. It allows you to be one with the music and you don't it's looking at the piano sometimes is like going to like the 50th story of some building and looking down is really scary because there's so much going on with the 10 fingers. So sometimes you can take a step back or in this case just close your eyes or focus on more bigger picture things like breathing comfortably while you play. Just closing your eyes and enjoying your own music which you are producing. So those are a few tips to nail it to really nail the syncopation. Also when you close your eyes and when you focus you'll also improve your dynamics like you can play softer, get louder or maybe make some chord hits longer, legato and some staccato. Very different flavor right? There we go. Great. So let's make the left hand a bit more interesting. Now you've learned the pattern. I hope you can play the pattern, could even pause the video at certain times and practice and then hit play or whatever. I'd like to now dissipate the left hand instead of doing with root and octave played or whacked together. I would say go. Okay. Okay, so that's root, octave, octave again and then the fifth. Okay, slower. So root, octave, octave back to fifth. These are also what we call ghost notes which are a bit more softer and a bit more staccato. And make the music a lot more interesting because otherwise it was both root and octave together. Sometimes very forceful in the bass register. So the right hand is still going. With the chords D minor, G minor and I've made it easy. Come back to D minor. That's the syncopation. Once you get it, develop some confidence, played a bit slower if you want, focus on your dynamics and so on. So once you've got cracking with this rhythm, I've also introduced a nice bass filler which you could try. Let me play it and then teach you. This is at the A chord. So G minor, D minor, A, A, G, F, E, A, G, F, E, D, A, G. It kind of goes nicely back to the root and it recycles, making the pattern I guess less monotonous because you're adding that bass flavour at the end. So I'll only show you over the A. It's designed to come back to the D. So Okay. This has all been notated for you. So do check out the notation if you read notation. Otherwise, you can just follow along. Let's do the whole thing. Eat, recycle, put some dynamics. But it all came from, just came from that simple groove which you could have come up with on your balcony or wherever you would, wherever you felt the inspiration from, you know. So let's do something in the right hand as well which I do quite often. So I've looked at a bass fill. Now the right hand could go, check that out. Nothing great in the right hand, the same hit points but with inversions. So root, first root, next, it's not going to be root of the next chord rather just figure it out based on the very next inversion. So if you're having an issue with this chord played this way, or you can ignore it for the A because you're doing the bass filler at the A that may be a bit tricky. So with the right hand inversion options, so that's without inversions. Now there we have it. That's your D minor, G minor, D minor. Right, so we've looked at pitch variations in the left hand, we've looked at pitch variations in the right hand, inversions there, ghost notes here and we've looked at a nice, that nice bass filler you have there. Now what I'd like to do is showcase a few approaches which I do very often to a rhythm I have created. I'll try and think of the rhythm in two different ways and these ways are going to be very, very helpful and I would encourage you once you've made a rhythm, once you've played it on the keyboard, try to think of the rhythm in these two perspectives which we are calling as our bonus tips. Very, very important I do this all the time. The first thing is, are you playing this rhythm staccato? The answer is a yes, isn't it? So think of the opposite of staccato. What is the opposite of staccato? Lagato. So a great way to develop lagato would be to hold down your pedal and play the same music. Immediately the pedal just changes the mood. The fact that it's brought out the lagato just makes it a lot more serious and a lot more journey-like, you know, as opposed to the earlier version which is more dancy. I guess staccato had all to do with that while the non-dancey version with the pedal held and also legato fingers with a lot of dynamics. This is the lagato. So try it. Of course now I'm getting carried away but the same rhythm. Now staccato and play around with both. It's the exact same rhythm. Lagato with a lot of dynamics. Staccato. There we have it. That's very very important and you could even do it in the same song perhaps. It depends on what you enjoy but when you make a rhythm, remember it can be presented to the listener or depending on what story or what theme you have for your music, plate, lagato or else staccato. So the last bonus tip which I'd like to leave you with in this lesson would be swing. So let's swing now. So you take the same rhythm pattern. Now this is going, it's going pretty much on a straight field. What you could consider is swing it and see how that sounds. Completely change the vibe of the whole music. So straight. Swing. Same tempo. The body wants to move this way as opposed to straight I guess for the straight version swing. Maybe that's why they called it straight or swing. I don't know. Please that's how I move. How do you move? Let me know in the comments. Okay. So these are some of the bonus ideas which I thought I'll share with you as well. So let's summarize everything so far. We took a very, very simple syncopated rhythm pattern with our hands on the body or you can do it on a bongo or something. Then we looked at analyzing that over a chord progression. The chord progression is D minor, G minor, D minor, A major. Then we played the pattern in a vanilla style. Just left and right hand. Then we looked at ghost notes in the left. Then we looked at inversion movements in the right or before that we did the bass filler in the left. Right. Then we looked at some inversion movement. Right. In the right hand. Then we looked at embellishing it legato staccato or revisiting it in those two different styles of flavors. And lastly I talked about the difference between straight and swing music. So you can pretty much make anything which was straight swing or anything swing which was once straight. Right. So we've also done a YouTube lesson on straight versus swing. You should check it out. It'll cover a lot of examples which we've come up with. So make sure you watch that if you want to gain the difference between straight feel and the swing feel. Also on ghost notes, bringing ghost notes into the party, we have a nice lesson on ghost notes. As I said earlier, chord inversions. If you have any kind of doubts, perhaps you could go over our playlist on chord inversions. Right, guys. Again, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. I hope you found the lesson useful. And I hope that you can use this approach with a lot of your own personalized chord patterns. Again, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. If you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe to our channel. And if you have subscribed, hit the bell icon for regular notifications. Whenever we release a new lesson, you will not miss it because we release a lot of content on YouTube. So something which may have been released, let's say last week, you may not have even seen it because of you have not hit that button. Right. And all the notation, notes, handwritten stuff, everything is on Patreon. So do consider being a subscriber on our Patreon page and support our channel as well. If you are a beginner on your instrument, you could always consider something in a more structured foundational level with me at Nathaniel. 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