 Hi everyone this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson I'm going to introduce you to something you can do in your left hand to accompany pretty much any melody which you are faced with whether the melody is like classical or folk or a nursery rhyme or a rock song or a pop song or a fusion song at the list goes on. So it's really simple but at the same time there are a few you know intricacies about it and when you start bringing in the right hand that's where the challenges occur. So I'm not going to give you a specific thing to play or a specific thing to learn or a scale or a melody as such until the very end of the video. So stay tuned till the very end there'll be a tutorial there'll be a melody at the end which we'll which we are going to also notate and keep on our patreon and you'll have my notes for the whole lesson of course. So in order to do this lesson it'll be nice if you can also bring out your sustain pedal. The sustain pedal will be very helpful while playing along because you need that intricacy. You'll also maybe need to play along with me in the video. I'll be just going through a lot of options and yeah you can do a lot of songs using this technique. I'll try and just do that but remember at the end of the lesson we are going to learn something specific so stay tuned and before we get cracking it'll be great if you could hit that subscribe button to stay tuned to all the lessons we regularly put out on our channel hit that bell for notifications give our video a like a share leave us a comment with what you thought and what you'd like to learn next and if you'd like something more structured there are quite a few lessons which are on youtube as well as listed neatly in a chronological order on our website and you'll have access to books which I've written to supplement our piano foundation piano intermediate music theory year training or you could just pick up everything for life as we call it we have a bundle which is there on our site so nathanielschool.com is where you'd like to be so let's get down to what the left hand is doing because this lesson is primarily about an engine which you're trying to develop in the left hand so if you take let's say G it's really simple the first thing I want you to try and work out is go up a perfect fifth from this G what's the perfect fifth well the circle of fifths can be very helpful for that purpose that'll be D G A B C D in the G major scale right so you could do G D and the exercise or the pattern in the left hand would be okay so what I like about this way of playing first off if you move your head one two three four so you see the thumb of the left hand is not really coinciding with your head movement right it's playing at the off beats at the off quaver beats and and and four and one and and and okay another intricacy is the pinky finger of the left hand which is not lifting I could have so easily lifted the guy but no the pinky finger is holding and the third thing which you can't see physically but you can see it in the diagram is the pedal so you can use the sustain pedal which is that one and basically sustain whatever you're playing so right so step one get the pattern one and two and three and four and one and two let's do that without bothering about the pedal let's do that together one and two and three and four and okay two three four one and two and three and four and one okay now slowly but surely try to squeeze in your pinky finger try to hold that in one and two and three you see the pinky is actually playing on a semi brief so there's a little bit of finger independence if you want to call it that going on during this exercise one and two and three and four the pinky has to ring you hear that ringing okay now to make it a bit more legato bring in your pedal you get the awesome harmonics of the sustain pedal and you just get a sustain so the notes come together in a nice way and this is a fifth chord so it's gonna always sound good there's no collision of frequencies in the left hand so this is the pattern now along with this a nice strategy to start off with the right hand before you start playing your favorite melodies is go through all the basic non-division rhythm rhythm notation so you start with semi briefs which is one note for this whole bar and let's say I'm in the key of G major I just play G maybe just whack the G two two three so that's a semi brief in the right you can play around with it pretty much every note sounds good because you're not playing a major chord in the left hand or the minor chord it works with everything start with semi briefs and see if you can press and hold your pedal that'll make a lot of impact I'm also using octaves which is quite nice in the right hand now you could do minims which is one two three four one two three four do like a dotted minim and then a crotchet E note in the G major scale for now you could also be in the G minor scale that's the power of the fifth chord works with anything okay then you can do a crotchet and then a dotted minimum now if you want to get more aggressive or more intense in the left hand you can do you could do a minimum in the with the pinky you don't have to semi brief hold and wait you could do minims or you could do dotted minims if it's a three by four song two three one two three one two three especially when you're playing a three by four like that okay so you could do dotted minims with the pinky semi brief start with that that'll be easy then you can do minims dotted minims and you know you could that'll be boring if you just do crotchets because then it's just like you're alternating between the two fingers so semi briefs with the pinky only two three then minims one two three four one two three dotted minims one two three for a mostly a three four song two remember this is still playing those offbeat quavers and and all the ends basically coming back to the right hand so we've done semi brief or whole note for four counts two minims then we've done dotted minimum in a crotchet then we'll do crotchet and a dotted minimum that's done then what else is remaining we can do the normal pulse like crotchets so quite easy if you ask me three four then you could mix it up mix up a minimum with two crotchets and look at all the permutations do one minim meets two crotchets i'd leave the notes to you and the scale up to you we are just committing to the key of g then we could do like two crotchets followed by a minim okay what else is remaining put the minimum in the middle crotchet minimum crotchet so if you want to train your ear you can actually try to play as you sing like play something and sing it at the same time but follow the rhythmic framework of what you're trying to achieve let's say i go back to minimum meets two crotchets and try to sing it as you go along on the keys so it becomes very musical because it's coming from you from your body to prove it you can also like sing it don't play the piano for one bar play that now sing something what's what i find fun is to sing two bars so you could probably put two of those bars together like maybe a dotted minimum dotted minimum and a crotchet following with two minims let's see how that sounds so by the way i'm singing it and playing this left hand thing it's quite tricky should try it out and play what you just sung now what can we do okay so that's the technique now why did i tell you to do all of these like rather mathematically formed rhythms there are eight by the way if you choose to not divide the beat and then combine semi-brieves minims crotchets and dotted minims over a bar of four by four you're going to get eight permutations right and we've covered all the eight sofa in this video now moving forward what we can start doing is this can equip us hopefully it has already equipped us with the skill of playing a melody in the right hand with this very very cool and you know workable rhythm in the left hand which is built strangely enough with just two notes and it sounds really workable because it's adding to the rhythm party you know it's playing the offbeat so i figured this will work for a lot of ideas so slowly but surely you can build this to popular tunes like maybe this one now it gets slightly tricky to maintain the left hand at the offbeat and to hold that pinky and the pedal sounds really good for folk songs you know try to create something change the notes so you can actually build up all your fifth chords in the G scale so you watch the B's the white note going to black note that'll be B's fifth C D E F sharp F sharp you have to be careful F sharp doesn't form a perfect fifth with any note because it's in the G scale the seventh degree the fifth will be a tritone so f to the C f sharp to the C so these are all your fifths okay A B C D E F sharp tritone yeah you could just work this out now you can explore a lot more options i like about this technique is even in the left hand you can go quite deep so there's a rhythm component there's a bass component there's a lot of body because i'm holding that finger and it doesn't sound muddy at all because i'm not playing major and minor chords which tend to sound muddy it's just a fifth sound so if you play let's say like an A if you play like an A with its fifth E you assume like it's an A minor chord right which any way your melody will tend to carry so let's say you you develop a pattern i like that pattern B G with its fifth more notes basically a lot of songs which i've also used this technique like let's say you take this one this is a bit of that the forest gum theme isn't it slightly tricky to actually get that going maybe we should do another video on this later anyway so you see it's quite scalable you can play a lot of a lot of material why don't we try taking a couple of songs which may not really have this technique but could still work let's also look at it in a three by four context because i think that is also very interesting so if you take two three one two three it works a lot for the three stuff right so i just wanted to make this technique a bit more bulletproof so you can play a bigger volume of music so this works great if a chord is major or minor right but then what if the chord is not major or minor what if it's like a diminished chord well a diminished chord i already told you you play the root with the tritone instead of the perfect fifth another thing i like to do is what if you wanted to play a G major or let's say you want to play a D major without the D in the bass but maybe with another note in the bass it's a very common thing to do like an F sharp in the bass see this is a D major chord what is its third F sharp so if i create this as a slash chord i want F sharp down below so how do i make it a two note technique so this is D major slash F sharp in the left hand so let's just toggle between F sharp or D over F sharp played like this so how do you do that you take a D major chord knock off the fifth take the third and whack it in the bottom and hold the third and then back to our G major which is the one check that out so you have your one and the five and you can then do the four chord which is C major but again invert it by playing C E only but then move the E here ignore the G because you just are allowed two notes in this technique so that's G with a D bass there that's its fifth so in conclusion you can play the left hand pattern either with a fifth chord or with a slash chord so this would be a D major chord with an F sharp bass then you can play D major with an A bass which carries that F sharp on top then D major with an F sharp bass carries the F sharp in the bottom there we go and good old D major so D major D fifth D slash F sharp again D slash A because A is in the bottom so depending on the chord you have your voicing here and the last way to kind of mess with this technique is what if you have a seventh chord like a dominant seventh chord you know so you know the the key ingredients of a dominant seventh chord would be its root and its dominant seventh which is the flat seven D versus C D going to C so so you can get this cool descending pattern so this would be like a dominant seventh or a major seven it'd be like a augmented chord if you want to look at it that way so you what are we trying to do basically a triad and a seventh chord these chords have a lot of notes they have three or four or a lot of notes so you're trying to tell yourself i will play only two of those notes in the left hand but imagine it and study it and use it just like a triad or a extension or a seventh chord but you're allowed to use only two notes here and we hope that the melody will carry through by playing any way it'll play those notes which you've missed out in the left hand so it declutters the left hand the left hand is a lot nicer and cleaner and it brings out that rhythm it brings out that so the audience is more feeling that rhythm and the harmony is just about enough for feeling the emotion which the song needs to carry so that's about the technique guys let's just revise it and as i told you at the very beginning stay tuned i'm going to teach you a tune which will work with this entire technique it's going to cover pretty much whatever we covered in in the whole lesson most of the lesson was about the G scale then i wandered off i think i went into some forest gum theme which i think is the exact same concept so that's a bonus you can learn that song and yeah you can leave me a comment and maybe i'll do a video of that specific thing so but the technique is really really powerful you can you know let's just actually have some fun before i summarize it let's just play some songs which may not really warrant this technique maybe let's see could work right overdoing it i'm trying to play a nirvana song this way but anyway you get the idea so what i'm going to do now is don't don't like finish the video where we are going to learn a concrete tune so we'll put all this together and let's recap the whole summary of the left hand pattern at least so we've primarily learned this shape on the G G major just a G fifth chord and you whack the pinky first hold it on for dear life and then play this at every and depending on the time signature the length of the chord you want if it's four beats two three four one two two one and and and if it's three one and two and three and two three next bar two three yeah and then hold the pedal for that impact that's how this technique will sound effective by playing the pedal so hold the pedal throughout the deal okay okay and then in the right hand we slowly built up to it we took just the G major scale we looked at all the permutations which will really help build our hand independence then i just jammed a bit to show you hopefully the scope of this technique you can play a variety of music and now let's actually learn some specific music and learn it well and do support us on patreon and get yourself a copy of these notes so let's get to it it's basically what i played in the intro video something like that so so i'll just break down my left hand so the first three are very easy you just have to drop your pinky semi-tonally down G with the consistent D G D F sharp F E E with C it's like a C major over E then E flat with a C on the top D B then you have a C sharp with an A D C which is like a D seventh so let's break that down slowly G D F sharp D F D C E flat C D B C sharp A D seventh or D over C and the melody let's play that together change to F sharp D okay let's do only that break that down F sharp if you're a bit uncomfortable to play so fast notes you can do just simple okay just okay again the whole story first four chords now coming to the minor let's break that down that's E flat C in the bass G A B flat in the right hand what's that B G D which is G major chord and D B in the left okay the ending that's actually a secondary dominant chord which is in A A seventh with a C sharp bass anything in the end you can slow it there whole story again repeat and that's the melody get yourselves a copy if you'd like you can learn the notation it's available on our patreon and thanks a ton for watching this lesson till the very end thanks a ton for supporting our channel it means a lot do do stay on the channel hit that notification bell that'll help subscribe if you haven't already please do that that's important and I will see you in the next one cheers