 Hi guys, this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to learn Imagine by John Lennon, an incredible piano intro and once you learn the piano intro, you will be able to kind of continue that intro for the verse as well. It's on the C major scale, all the white notes of the piano, not my favorite scale, but anyway, we'll go ahead with it. I'm thinking we should do it on A flat or something. Maybe at the end of the video. For now, we'll just do C major, the original version of Imagine by John Lennon. So first, a few things to keep prepared. If you have a 61 key instrument, you may want to transpose it down by minus 12, so you can access the low notes. If you see the notation, if you see how it's played, it's not played in the higher regions. It's not played there. It's played in the bass clef down below. So everything needs to be low in this region, almost the second last C of the piano. So C major scale and pretty much two chords in the intro, C major, F major. Let's try and just learn that. Then I'll teach you the broken chord pattern, then this lick which he plays at the end and then a few things here and there which make the composition incredible. Get your keyboards out, it'll be very helpful and play along with me. By the end of this lesson, you're going to be able to play that, play this song. So don't watch the lesson, wait. You don't need all that. You're going to learn it right now. Watch till the very end, sit down, get the keyboards and let's roll. So C major is the first chord. The fingers I would suggest are not the conventional thumb, middle, pinky because you won't have room to play the upper extensions and then the lick later. For C major, we upper extend it to B, so you need a finger to play that B. So this is my preferred fingering thumb, index, middle and the left hand will just hold a C, the root of the C major chord. And these two fingers now can be free to do something else. The lick which is coming, this is how you play C major and then to go to F major. This is F major. So the first thing I'd like you to try is play each chord four times each, one, two, which is the pulse, quarter notes, one, two, three, four. Keep doing that for a while till you get comfortable, one, two. You could even pause the video and just do this, one, four, changing, two, three. Now you could play the F major with your ring finger or you can just move these two right side, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. And from the point of view of posture, there are a few things which I'll talk in this lesson because usually people who try to do, imagine, are probably beginners or people who have not played the piano that much before. So one thing with posture in this sort of a song is where you sit. So the more towards the left you sit the better, don't go fully left but don't sit like a lot of teachers say the middle C should pass through the center of the body and all that stuff, absolute nonsense and especially for this song it will never work. Your wrist will start hurting a lot so sit comfortably, you can even move, you can even stand and play if you wish for a while. Anyway, so coming back to the chords, we break the chords up now, that's what John Lenin does. He, instead of going quarters like that, he breaks it. So this is what gives you that movement or that motion or that energy, how are we breaking it using quavers or eighth notes? So it's one and what's a broken chord again, a chord which is broken as simple as that. Instead of doing that we go what was once this, crotchets or quarter notes becomes quavers or eighth notes dividing the beat by two. One and two and three would be a good way to count, okay, pinky, left hand C, next chord. This could work actually but you know something's missing. The lick and an extension. So the lick comes in for the F chord and the extension comes in for the C chord or the C major chord. So let's look at the C major chord first, so that makes it a C major seventh chord. Watch this again. One, two, three and four and it's really colorful, it's the C major seventh chord, that's what he's implying. It's also a passing, passing note, the B passes back to A which is the F chord. So let's do that together, one, two, four, lick coming up there. Now for the lick you want to, you have to play it with middle finger on A, ring finger on B flat and B and you want to try and keep, I guess you could do it other ways but then you'll have to like take away cross and it'll be a weird circus. So you have to use the correct fingers. Let me show you again, C. Now if you're here, keep your middle finger somehow, eventually keep it on A, even if it started on A, it's okay, slowly bring the middle finger and then you can do that lick. So whole thing again, F. We are also trying to hold the pedal and play so pedal can be held for each chord. Three, four, ten, F, seven, works for the verse. Sometimes I like putting an E in the bass to go to F, sounds nice I think. Okay, another mechanical tip when you're playing that, your ring finger is like congested so you could give it a little bit of a slam with the rest of your hand, probably your forearm or your wrist, that could help. So if I bounce my wrist, okay, it can give you more impact and it can help you play the tougher parts of the piece. So John Lennon may be playing a fifth in the bass, you know, so the G sounds nice as well so you could consider that. Okay, the whole thing again very slowly and then we'll conclude, E was optional so I'll not play E. Take some time with that, right, thanks a ton for watching the video, hope you're able to play the song fairly well. If it doesn't happen right now it will eventually happen, keep at it and if you're a singer as well I would encourage you to sing the lyrics along with this, it will work for the verse and not for the chorus that I can talk about in a future lesson for sure, right. So that was the intro of Imagine, hope you guys found the lesson useful, again don't forget to hit that like, give the video a share, leave us a comment and do consider getting the notation on our Patreon page. Cheers, this is Jason.