 Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. As you all probably know by now, the piano is one of the most versatile instruments of all time. It can play a bunch of genres, rock, pop, blues, jazz and the like, fusion, folk and so many more. In this lesson I want to show that to you or demonstrate that to you by giving you an exercise which involves a different genre in each hand. So the left hand is going to play rock as you heard in the intro video and the right hand is going to play a bunch of pop sounding or very kind of catchy sounding melodies like what you heard in the intro video and we are going to cap off the lesson with the famous chorus melody of the Incubus song Drive which kind of inspired this lesson as I was going along my routine of trying to brainstorm what I should teach you. Before we get started just for your information, the entire left hand pattern as well as all the five right hand variations which I have for you or the right hand melody lines which I have for you are waiting for you on our Patreon page. You will be able to download the staff notation as well as the MIDI files for the same and it will be great if you could also consider hitting that subscribe button and turning on the bell icon for regular notifications. Let's get cracking. So first off I am going to demonstrate the chord progression. All the chords hail from the G major scale or the E minor scale which is its natural minor relative or E minor. So the chords would be E minor, D minor, C major, D major. You could probably just start playing it along with me. Get your keyboards out. You might want to pause the video, get the keyboards out and learn along. So E minor, B minor, C major, D major, E minor and as you can see I am using some nice inversions in the right hand just to get by and to practice this exercise well what you should also do is the timing of the chords is what I chose to be I think quite interesting. So E minor, B minor, C major, D major, E what's happening there, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4 so it's an irregular change of chords. E minor for 3 counts, B minor for 1 and then C major for 3 counts, D major, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3 and that. And for the purpose of this lesson we are going to play the chords in the left hand so also get used to the same chords in the left hand, 4, 1, it's a very glam rock progression. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1 so you may want to get this first 2, 3, 4, 1, 2 and then in the left hand I am just playing it in root position okay, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1. Now the pattern in the left hand instead of just doing the rather boring so I am going to give you an arpeggio pattern over 2 levels of playing. The first level will not include the third of the chord it will just be a power chord which is used a lot in rock songs. Stuff like that so many songs go with just power chords right. So instead of playing it as a block power chord we are going to arpeggiate it by playing the notes in a scattered pattern or in a one by one way. The second thing we are going to do to the arpeggio is retain the pattern but however make the chord to be the original triad but in open position. So let me first teach you that the way I am playing each of the 4 chords E minor, B minor this is in the power chord shape, C major in the power chord shape, D, A, D in the power chord shape. Do that together E minor, D minor, C major, D major, E minor, D minor, C major and another nice way to practice it could be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. You could probably look at this as a pattern on its own rather simple but still rock sounding I think 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1. This is going to serve the foundation on top of which the right hand is going to play melodies. And then we learn the same chords let's try the same chords in the spread or the open position so to speak. So instead of playing 1, 5 and 8 which is the octave on the top I am now doing 1, 5 and 10. 10 would be basically the same 3rd which you would normally play but in the left hand if you play the 3rd together closed up with the root and the 5th it starts sounding very muddy in my opinion especially with the full band playing alongside you. So you would want to add the 3rd on top. It is what we call as spread or open voicing a lot of which I have taught on our YouTube channel we have even made a playlist on the same we will link it up in the description. So E minor that's how E minor is E B G then B minor a rather stretchy kind of shape B F sharp D then C major C G E and then D major let's do that again 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1. So a simpler pattern could be with the open 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 3 and 4 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 you can even do this with the powers 3 and 4 and 2 and 3 sounds pretty much the same of course a lot more emotion will come when you spread it 2 and 3 and 4 ok let's add something to this now 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and no breaks now and 3 and 4 and all the beats are covered right and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 2 and 3 and 4 there we go that's your left hand pattern which we are going to do pretty much draw the lesson however I have a really nice pattern which includes a little bit of 16th notes which kind of emulates what a guitar player would do in any traditional rock context or alternative rock glam rock all kinds of rock so the pattern would be something like din din ta ta ka din ta din din ta ta and that's also a common drum groove do do ta ta ka doom ta chum doom doom ta ka doom ta chum doom doom ta ka doom ta on the guitar it'll go jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing and the chords are not going to change evenly they will change at these irregular intervals so let me try and play that pattern on the keys and then try and teach you so it'll go jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing jing so we are bringing in some 16s 1e and 2e and 3e and 4e and again 1e and 2e and 3e and 4 if you observe I gave a gap at the on of the 3 that kind of allows you to move your hand to the next chord actually I didn't do that that's the pattern which I guess even guitar players do that so that they can kind of shift to the next chord easily however I think deep down it's an awesome drum groove which all of us have stolen from so 1e and there we go 1e and ta ta ta at the very end of the bar at the and 4 and I'm playing b minor in spread position pretty much how I taught you earlier earlier I did now we're just adding that 16th note embellishment making it more drum like ok so if you if you're finding it a stretch to go all the way to the third or the 10th interval on top what you could end up doing is use the sustain pedal and you can take away your pinky finger from the starting part from the starting root of the chord and give yourself an additional maybe 1 inch or half an inch more of width to access that G but if your hand is also painting if you have some kind of a wrist issue or if you're a kid watching this video and you still want to play along you probably can't stretch out your hand so much it will take you some time but you can still prepare for that when the time comes of course when your hands get bigger and your you get bigger in general and till then you can just play the fifth chord pattern in the same 16th note vibe with power chords so e minor b minor c major d major e minor b minor c major d minor if you can stretch to the third well and good as you can see it's the same rhythm it's the same hit points it's just more harmonic because of the stretch to the third let's look at power chords as well in the same pattern you could also toggle between the two patterns okay so that's all about the left hand done and dusted left hand over now in the right hand i have i've composed four melodies which i think you'll enjoy and the fifth melody is going to be the incubus song so stay tuned till the very end we're going to learn a lot of melodies now in the right hand and to approach this hand independence if you want to call it that between the left hand and the right hand the best way is to just drill your left hand and get it in a very muscle memory kind of way so that anything you play in the right hand should just happen you should not even think that your left hand is even doing anything you know yes you may find you may feel the burn of the left hand because it's a physical workout on your forearm your wrist and fingers of course you will feel the burn but as you can see as i'm talking to you also i've developed the independence to talk to you and play the piano which i think is a bit tougher please i think it's a bit tougher than even playing a melody or singing a melody but the idea here is whatever melody you have in front of you in the notation you're you're going to need to first sing it we'll sing it together and then we will try and execute it in the right hand and after i or while i played in the right hand i'm also going to help you with the fingering for the same watch out for the fingering and the alignment also you need to perhaps check see there are two ways to develop independence one is you drill the left hand to be so confident or so comfortable that you don't even know what it's doing it's just it's just an instinct it just happens and then you you're giving your conscious brain not 100 percent of its effort but at least 90 percent of its effort to play the melody in the right hand so that's pretty much the idea the second way of looking at independence which sometimes works but sometimes can be a bit stressful would be where you align the notes together you you have the staff notation this where reading comes into play you have the right hand in the treble clef you have the left hand in the bass clef and you actually physically see with your eyes oh at three uh at the uh of the three there is some kind of a interaction or the two hands are playing together while at the end of the four the the the left hand and the right hand are not playing together there could be a rest at the four or something like that so let me now bring you to the melodies and the first melody would be i'll play it with a simple pulse so you get the feel of it and i'm now singing this with my left hand pattern and then we get it so instead of playing this c i would recommend you to play the higher e as mentioned in the notation because otherwise the two hands will start fighting with each other so fingering what do we do you can start with your middle finger that will work pretty well and then pinky for the b you can even start with your index finger on e come to think of it i kind of prefer the middle finger slight stretch only the melody with the left four chords of course going on now tens spread chords good way to kind of remember this is to actually listen to me playing it don't focus your entire attention to just reading the notes you can listen to me playing it you can also download the midi files and the notation and play it and get to listen to it so listen and see don't only see some of you some of us are more comfortable with notation i understand but with notation you're looking at the stuff you're not you're not hearing it and thus you're not feeling it if you ask me hearing in music is feeling seeing i don't know how you can really feel it when you see it you're just observing okay what is the note how long is the note and when is the note occurring pretty much okay so let's move on to melody number two so melody number two includes a nice stream of eighth notes and at the end i have a sixteenth note run okay let's do that i'll sing it first so it ends with eight sixteen notes let's get that on the keys i'm trying it first with block chords e e minor e b minor c major d let's work on our fingering and and after we get the fingering we can then bring back our original pattern now when you do the semi quaver run i think you have to start the run with your middle finger and when you cross to the d you cross your thumb under again that's your first bar let's get that together slowly and now next bar cross the thumb let's try and get that slowly but surely with the left try to sing along with spread chords coming back in the left end very slowly so that's melody number two let's move on to the third melody basically the challenge will be very similar your independence has the same kinds of notes but i've made it a bit longer i've made it a four bar melody instead of a two bar melody so let's learn melody three i'll first play it with the block chords let's just do the first two bars that's your semi quaver flourish so you start with a higher e you come down to the lowest e high e e b a d um second uh third bar and fourth bar i'm playing now e b b e e c b f sharp e b b e e c b f sharp e e b a g b g f sharp e b b e e c b f sharp b e b a da da da let's bring back our left hand pattern now with power chords singing is very important you'll get the alignment between your hands a lot better if you sing the melody which means you need to have the knowledge of the melody so to speak you can also tackle this melody in smaller pockets so this took me some time so what i did was i just kept kind of looping just that bar you can even go back to the simpler pattern we discussed earlier you know and then maybe and then maybe bring back the 16th note flavor let's try that now with spread voicing go haven't taught you the fingering yet so pinky and thumb with your middle that's your semi quaver run you'll want to cross that middle finger there that was melody three let's move on to the fourth melody in this melody there's a pickup so i'm going to start my melody first and then the chords will take over so pump pump pump and then the song begins let me break it down bar by bar now with block chords in the left hand so it starts at one and two and three and four and and one and two and three and four and one and i'm also playing the chords as a pulse the pulse is essentially how your head or your body or the listener would move naturally to the flow of the songs important to play whatever it is you're playing first of all with the pulse that is really important b minor c major d e minor let's bring in our left hand pattern now to play the melody okay again let's start spread chords pulse it's okay if you make it's okay if you make mistakes but moving to the pulse will ensure that you're on time and has ensured and will ensure that your independence will be uh steady as well okay so i thought we'll do one final melody which is the song which kind of inspired this lesson or maybe a few similar songs it's drive by incubus so we'll just play the chorus melody i suggest you listen to the song it's a really nice rock song one of the hits of the nineties whatever tomorrow brings i'll be there with open arms and open eyes yeah okay let's break that whole thing down so we'll do our usual block chords in the left the challenge here is you have to start at the end of the two one can probably till you get the chord shifting you can just start with one chord with a pulse so one and two and three tomorrow brings i'll be there with open arms with open eyes yeah now let's do it with the changes e minor b mine c d it's a four bar tune yeah bringing back our favorite pattern let's just revise it before the melody comes so keep the drums also with you in fact if you listen to this song the drummer itself in the incubus drive song will inspire you greatly i've just chosen the chorus but you get the idea you can do the other parts as well so slow it down the spread chords guys so let's just recap the video we've done a very rock piano arpeggio pattern in the left hand with power chords with also spread chords and we've done five melodies let's break them down melody three melody four which which starts at the pickup and then of course incubus is drive right guys hope you found the lesson useful and we have a lot of other hand independence exercises concepts methods and you know ways of approaching the subject of hand independence that's probably the most commonly practiced thing on the piano because it's it's the one instrument where it's almost drum like in nature your right hand and your left hand can do completely different things and in this lesson i wanted to show you that it can also do completely different genres if you look at the melody it's quite pop all of them are very pop melodies and the left hand continue to play a rock pattern so try to work on your independence watch our playlist on hand independence we also have a structured learning process to develop all this from almost ground zero you can consider our foundation programs which include theory year training and those are structured lessons which you'll find on our website nathanielschool.com you can see the link in the description as well and don't forget to get yourselves a copy of the staff notation and the midi tracks which will be available on our patreon page and there's a subscribe button thanks for watching the lesson but we'll definitely feel your thanks a lot more if you press that button right now and there's a bell icon too as we release regular content so you will get notifications in whenever we release our daily videos right guys thanks a ton for watching cheers see you in the next one