 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are basically going to take a very standard chord progression as you probably heard in the intro video and we are then going to try and develop our own unique personality or our own flavour or our own style using just the same notes of the chords, pretty much the same hit points, the same inversions. So, there are a few very important things which so-called professional pianists do, you know, which make them stand out of the crowd. So, for example, if there's like 100 people who know this exercise or this pattern which I just played, the main goal of this video is to help you reach like the top 10% at least, you know, within a pool of people who already know this stuff. So, we are going to divide our lesson into five parts. We are going to use dynamics, first of all, to kind of make the chords a lot more unique and that's going to be really easy if you stick around. Then we are going to bring in a groovy baseline for our left hand, which will also improve your hand independence on the piano, very important. Then we are going to explore a topic which I call as time feel and then use two approaches on the piano, one with the right hand using broken chords, the other with the left hand using what we call as ghost notes, similar to what a drummer calls ghost notes. Then we are going to look at the inversions of the chord and look at building more thematic stuff by just using the inversions and modifying a few things and last but not least, we are going to look at how we can explore or expand this chord progression to develop different sections of a song, to try and build a verse or a chorus, you know, which work really well together, maybe a very busy chaotic verse and then a epic chorus, you know. If you haven't already, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and consider liking the video, sharing the video and so on and so forth. Now let's get right into the lesson. If possible, try and get your keyboards out or a book or both, perhaps. Let's begin. So there are four chords in this exercise and then we are going to develop those same four chords and try to build a unique personality as we are trying to say on the piano. So the chords are, I'm going to play them and then I'll break them down for you. Okay. So that's C major, C seventh with an E bass, F major, then F minor with an F bass or you can even play an F minor with an A flat bass. Let me show you the notes one by one. This is how I'm playing the C major chord, C in the bass, obviously. And the right hand, I'm starting off with a nice inversion, which will be G, C, E. Okay, not the normal one. Okay. So you do this four times. The first thing you could practice is play the right hand four times and play the left hand once. Like that, one, two, three, four. Okay, one, two, three, four. And then we move on to the next chord, which is B flat C, G, B flat C, G. And in the bass, I would like you to play an E bass. So altogether, it kind of becomes a C seventh with an E bass in the bottom. Okay. So normal C major, first chord. Then C seventh with an E bass. Then you go F major. How am I playing F major? A C F, A C F. Very close to the first two chords, right? Two, two, two, two. E flat C, G with an E bass. And then third chord is F major, playing it as A C F. Then A flat C F. Two, two, two. So I think it provides for some nice voice leading. So you could learn how to play these chords this way. Again, everyone. G C E, B flat C G with an E bass. Then A C F with an F bass. A flat C F with an A flat bass. Or stick on the F bass. Let's do that again. The first thing I want you to practice now is try playing the chords. First of all, the way I'm playing it now, which is nice and legato. Long, long, long hits. As long as possible. Yes, you have to lift it when you re-hit the chord or when you're shifting. But as much as possible, you're trying to keep it longish. This is again where you need to listen to the sound very often as you play. And then try staccato. Get that tonality. Back to legato. Staccato. And another thing you could try is to use the pedal. Just hold the pedal but practice lifting it just before or at the hit point of the next chord. Sustain on. And then the next chord. Almost as I'm showing you with my breathing, that's exactly where I'm lifting the pedal. So if you could follow my breathing, it's pretty much exactly how I'm lifting my pedal off and on. Okay? So it's pretty much a four by four. Counting. Two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Okay, so first focus on these three articulations, legato, staccato and pedal. These three articulations will, if you use them hand in hand in your song or in your section of music, it's automatically going to sound very interesting and very unique compared to what someone who programs music will end up doing. You don't have that many options. You do consider options while programming. It's going to take a long time. I think you can easily play legato, staccato, pedal on your own with you as the human in control over everything. Moving on. So now coming to adding dynamics to this whole equation. So when you're getting legato, staccato and the pedal going after you've got that, the dynamics are basically playing louder and softer over time. So specific chords, chord hit points will be louder than the other or dynamics could be looked at as varying your legato and staccato. So some chord hits will be longer and some other chord hits would be shorter. So I'm going to give you a couple of demonstrations and then I will explain exactly what's going on. You see the variation of each chord or rather within a bar of four, even though I'm playing the same chord, the intensity or there's something different about each hit point. So this actually for me, when I'm playing music, it comes from the groove of the song or more specifically what the drummer of your song is doing or what you imagine the drums to be doing. So if I try out the first approach, which is where you accent or hit a bit louder at the two and the four of the bar, that would be something like this. Doesn't it feel like a snare drum going on there? You can imagine like a... Something like that. Pardon my beatboxing skills. In fact, you could actually superimpose that drum groove with your voice with basic level beatboxing and on the piano, you could hold your ground. So wherever I'm imagining the snare, I'm just going to play the piano louder. Yes, some drummers may get a bit angry with that notion, but that's just something I wanted to practice and it automatically feels like there's a groove going on. As opposed to without. This just feels like someone's playing chords, but the chords are not dancing. So here I've used a kind of volume articulation to hit every two and four of the bar louder. Now, along with playing it louder, I could also play it longer or broader in terms of the duration. So you could either make it longer with your fingers itself, like what I'm doing, or you can even use the pedal and that gives you a bit more control and the pedal also changes the sound of the piano a little bit as it's adding some additional harmonic elements to the sound. So this is how I want you to practice. Basically, make the two and the four sound different, maybe louder or, well, longer. Or, you know, legato with the pedal or without the pedal. It'll be, there we go, with the bass. Another thing you could consider doing is perhaps play only the four of the bar a bit more louder. Sort of emulating an open hi-hat. So at the end of the bar, the drummer will sometimes open the hi-hats and I think that sounds incredible. So you keep that in mind and then try and play. So you could actually combine legato or make the notes longer and make it maybe even slightly louder. You don't want to make it annoyingly loud so that it startles people. But something like this. Some punch there. You could also flip it around and maybe accent on the one and the three of the bar. Okay, let's see what that does. For me, this gives you like a very different feel. It gives you a feeling like as though the drummer or the drum groove has been sort of done in a more laid-back or a half-time feel as we call it. Right? So your kick will be at one. So if you highlight the one and the three, you're kind of forcing the issue here wherein the drummer is not going to do kick, snare, kick, snare. If you were to do the kick, snare, it would be tat, tat, tat. This is a more like double-time kind of drum feel. Okay, but if you do something like this. See where the snare is coming. So you have these three articulations which I would like you to practice with the exact same chord progression, same inversion, same everything at the moment, right? So what happened there again? Two and four. Make it louder or make it, you know, more accented. Then you do opening the hi-hat at the four. Four. Open the hats at the four and then you kind of slow down or half in the drum groove by intensity, by doing forcing the kick and the snare. There you go. The first option on the other hand was doop, da, doop, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Snare coming in faster. That, that, right? Okay, then the hi-hats opening. Okay. I hope you're getting the idea. You must've all heard a drum groove something like this. These are very standard drum groove. So a great way to just make your piano playing very unique and develop a very a vibe where you're playing chords in a very emotional way it's like the chords are speaking something you know and it's really serving the song and going to serve the groove and the melody of the song this could even relate to what the singer is doing which we can get into in another video so this is the first point I wanted to bring about with respect to chord dynamics let's now move on to creating a bass line and that's what we're going to do in the next part so thanks again for watching part one if you haven't already please like the video leave us a comment hit the subscribe button and share the video cheers