 Hi everyone. This is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson, we're basically going to study a very important left hand arpeggio technique or a pattern, if you will, which can be used for a lot of music. It can be used for music, which pretty much is on a four by four, anything on four and anything which doesn't sound too dancy or jumpy or groovy. It'll also work in an event where you want to play something in the right hand like the melody line and you want to support that melody line and what better than you know chords and obviously chords played with some really nice arpeggio. So what you heard in the introduction video was where I just took a simple chord progression which is four chords. I'm going to show you that shortly and then you play this arpeggio pattern a very free flowing you know system and then over this you kind of play melodies. And if you do stick around till the end of the lesson, which I sure hope you do, we are going to look at how to play the piano theme song from the French movie Amelie, which goes something like this one, which will work on the same chord progression. Stuff like that you know and we'll also look at the theory behind it and the logic behind and how melodies can be composed also given an existing chord progression. So it all starts with a chord progression which you're going to play in the left hand following a really nice arpeggio technique, a go-to technique which can be used for pretty much any genre, any melody which goes on here. You find the chords, play them in the left hand, arpeggiate them nicely using this technique and you're good to go and then you focus exclusively on the melody and whatever you need to improvise. So before we dive in, perhaps if you haven't already, do give the video a like, leave us a comment at the end of the lesson for something you'd like to learn, share the video with your friends and do not forget to hit the subscribe button and that notification icon for regular updates whenever we do a new lesson. Okay so the chords it's a four chord progression E minor, G major, then you go B minor and D major. I repeat E minor, playing it in the left hand, G major, then you go B minor and D major. Okay now the first concern with these chords is if you play them the way it is, the way they are written down in normal books in the block system, you'll find that E minor is E, G, B and then G major is G, B, D. So you have to jump a long way to play these chords and thus you would need to know your inversions. Inversions in a nutshell, what's going to happen is you play your E minor and then when you do have the next chord G major, make sure you don't jump too much rather figure out is there something in common. In this instance there are two notes in common, there's G and B. So the upcoming chord G major will be G, B retain the position, don't change those fingers. What is the remaining note now in the G major chord? That's D. Now you don't want to play D there, that'll look really awkward. So instead of this E, it gets replaced by D which is just played down a step. E, G, B, D, G, B and D, G, B is nothing but the G major right there. So E minor, G major, the second chord. Now the third chord is B minor. Again we don't want to jump all over the place to play the B minor chord rather we play it this way. What's in common between B minor and the preceding chord G major you'll find that B and D or D and B are common. So only thing which has to change is G which changes itself to F sharp that creates the B minor. What do we have so far? E minor, G major, B minor and lastly D major and you're already seeing it here. D major, D F sharp, A, B minor is already given you two of those notes, D F sharp. So only thing remaining is A and you slide the thumb down or add some other finger and play the D major chord. So the four chords E minor, G major, D minor, D major and now coming to the arpeggio pattern in order to play these chords. So I'll play you the arpeggio pattern and then demonstrate it for you. So it goes as you can see it's a very consistent pattern. So if I just show you over the E minor chord it'll be E, B, G, B. So how do we kind of translate that to all the other chords? You go low, high, middle, high in terms of what you're seeing and what you're hearing in terms of pitch. This is the low note, high note, B, middle note, G. So if this is your chord hold low, middle, high and the pattern we are proposing for the left hand is L H M H L H okay keep that going and then apply it for the next chord which is G major. Once you're done with that do it for the next chord B minor same thing L H M H and then D major okay and don't overplay the chord so just do everything over a bar of eight eighth notes so that'll be one and two and three and four and so you do L H M H into two cycles so L H M H L H M H. So L H M H change keep it nice and slow B minor D major repeat add some dynamics make it a bit loud drop it up dynamics basically means volume control. So you need to set the bass at a solid foundation for what's to come which is the right hand right so you should play the left hand in a very you know autopilot kind of way you know also as you can see I'm talking to you while playing this so it means that there is some kind of confidence being developed in this particular hand because ultimately you can't think of two things at the same time you know it's very difficult even in day to day life I guess so one thing is preprogrammed which is this you need some time on this it's going to take you a little bit of time and then we need to slowly bring in the melody line in the right hand so I have a lot of approaches towards producing the melody in the right hand I'm just going to share them with you these are just melodic improvisation techniques so in addition to that left hand I figured we might as well also have some fun in the right hand this video shouldn't just be about one hand you don't leave a piano lesson without talking about both hands so first off in the right hand the first technique or the first approach would be look at the chord tones of every chord in this case E minor has E G B and just play those chord tones start with maybe E hold it maybe now you could try G G could also try some other notes F sharp sounds more colorful but there's some notes which just won't sound good like B flat not too bad actually but you get the idea you want to just play on the chord tones to start off with you know and a simple triad three-note chord structure so first thing you could do is get acquainted with the notes of each chord just play them like that hold it and then we can be a bit more adventurous we can just take one note play it a bit more maybe a rhythm you don't have to play octaves you can just do single notes something like that improvise with just those three notes then when you change the chord B minor and just take one note basically one note per chord two notes per chord or three notes per chord which is all the notes of the chord and explore those notes either higher or lower on the piano and work on some rhythm pattern before you play play anything on the keyboard if you want some rhythmic interest or a rhythmic challenge for your hand independence skills you know with left hand and right hand because the left hand has to hold its ground while the right hand will keep exploring and right now you're just exploring over the chord tones right so apart from the chord tones let's look at another way to kind of melodically improvise in the right hand while holding your ground in the left hand playing pretty much the same progression and just for your information the chord progression has originated from the minor scale from the E minor scale right derived from the G major scale of course one sharp F sharp so all your melodic elements will tend to come from the scale and so will the chordal elements so coming to the right hand another option which you can do is improvise around the pentatonic scale which as I always say is an anything goes scale so you can use this scale along with any chord progression you know within the scale it kind of really works let me just show you what I'm talking about and then break it down something like this five notes so pentatonic scale will be E G A B D you can add the final octave D it's a great scale to kind of just shred away and you know and build very catchy phrases and very catchy long-lasting melodies like now when you play the pentatonic scale you can build it on any key it's just the one three flat perfect fourth perfect fifth minor seventh or flat seven or if you're doing it in this context just remember the notes E G A B D E E D B A G E okay so you're supposed to now improvise on the pentatonic scale in the right hand and play the same chord progression in the left hand which I'm calling the amily or chord progression which is from the movie that this is the piano theme song of that movie right which you should definitely check out so it goes pentatonic or stick just in one shape okay so that's about the pentatonic scale so we've looked at chord tones pentatonic scale how else can you improvise in the right hand well a great way to improvise is to see what you have within yourself first of all you know by singing singing is the most unfiltered way of bringing your thoughts out on the piano so play the chord progression play the regular chord progression and hum a phrase and you don't have to play it real time you can hum a phrase and then proceed towards trying to play what you sung for example and again on the scale or even on the pentatonic scale is fine but you will not leave the scale in any case so it's very rare because the chords are inspiring you to sing diatonically or within the within the scale elements so let's see keep it simple just that right so in some instances you could practice this by singing and then playing like a call and response sing a bar play a bar right actually that is a great way to practice come to think of it and after a while you could just sing you could forget the piano for a while just sing and see what all you can come up with maybe keep a cell phone recorder on so you can keep documenting your work as you go along and maybe work on that on the piano and you've sort of given yourself like a finger exercise in one a ear training exercise where you have to match up what you just sang and even an independence exercise so all the things of piano all the departments of piano are sort of covered in that sense so that's about call and response that's another great way to get things going in your right hand and what next another very very simple thing before I move into an actual song which is this amily theme for you will be to just get a handhold of about three consecutive notes in the scale maybe E F sharp G 3 is nice you can even do four this is within the scale so E minor E minor is this first of all so you go sets of three sets of four or maybe sets of five so and now go in another set of three starting on F sharp start on G it'll all sound decent because it's it's all part of the scale then maybe sets of four and even repeat that right so I've promised you a song as well which you can do right so the there are basically three sections in the song right this is the amily theme song I'm just going to share maybe one section or a couple of them I will do another video explaining this entire song I think that would also be nice but for now the purpose of this video if you remember from the start was to get a great workhorse left hand arpeggio pattern which will work on anything a ballad any melodic thing you do in the right hand anything whatever which is actually if I come back to it was just this L H M H L A so this is the point of the lesson but let's just try and look at what we can do the amily theme so first off first section is okay G B minor okay that's four parts so first part that's E G F sharp G B C B okay that's over E minor then when you go to G okay from the beginning right over the G then very similar so ending F sharp E F sharp back then okay then that was just on pairs or just sets of threes or fours as I showed you and then it goes to like chord tones so you go they just do parts of the chord F sharp B F sharp A something like this so it goes you can play it with octaves just highlighting the chord tones okay and then what happens you can also play it in thirds you know basically thirds so that's G with B and then G with B and then D with G then you do F sharp over B and then F sharp over D and then or you just do single notes right right so then it goes to that crazier part which is so what happens there you basically divide your arpeggio into threes there as sixteenth note so you go that's for E minor you have to figure out a way to keep this rocking right so you go sort of the chord tones but this is 16th notes and over accents of one two three one two three one two three one two three one two three four and you wait there so stretch out your hand a bit for this new chord because it's D major you just play sorry because it's G major you just play the G major chord tones here but in that arpeggio so then B minor and then D major but you end with an interesting note which is G let's do that again G major B minor A D major right so that's a quick a quick rundown of the amelie theme song which you can easily play along with this chord progression right guys so that's pretty much the lesson what I wanted to share was a really rock solid workhorse left hand arpeggio rhythm which you can use for anything you know even if it's major whatever you want to play whatever you like to play really you know or just improvise as we've also seen so you can use this rhythm L H M H we've looked at a chord progression and then we've also looked at since we did not want to leave that out it's not just a left hand lesson that would make the lesson rather boring so in the right hand what we ended up doing was five ways of embellishing the melody the first off thing we did was just pretty much latch on to the chord tones the second thing we did was jam on the pentatonic scale which is that five-note magic thing sounds good on anything right the third approach is make it more primal sing play sing play and you'll be very surprised what's going to happen on the piano and how it can challenge you you know because when you sing there's no filter you just do whatever you feel like doing you know then the fourth approach was shapes those sort of things and improvise over the hand shape and last but not least we just looked at and captured the essence of that amily theme song which is played beautifully on the piano i'm sure you've heard it i'm sure you love you love it right guys so again this is jason here from nathaniel i'm going to sign off the lesson by just doing a little bit of improvisation over the chord progression stick around for a bit and don't forget to subscribe to our channel turn on that bell subscribe to our patreon for various notes and other stuff which i'll be regularly putting up and leave us a comment leave us a thumbs up share the video blah blah blah so let's get cracking with some improvisation