10 Playing Style for Beginner Pianists

1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my course on ten different piano styles for beginner pianists. In this course, we're going to cover the basics of tons of different styles, and we're going to kind of compartmentalize things into a few different areas. Some of the genres that I'm going to cover are going to work really well for people in band settings. Ska reggae, blues, rock, and jazz are going to be covered, but at the same time, if you're a solo pianist and you want to play piano balllads, classical piano, or cinematic piano, we're covering that as well, too. That being said for newer musicians and producers, I'm covering a couple of electronic subgenres that I think might also be quite helpful, such as drum and bass and 90s dance piano. Also, I just finished a whole course on romantic harmony. So we're going to sort of summarize that course a bit, and I'll teach you a bit about romantic stylings, as well, too. This course is really designed to expose a lot of different styles to beginner pianists, so they can start to hone in to either the sound that they like the most the style that they think they could play the most easiest to get started. We'll be covering harmonic and melodic approaches, as well as some rhythmic tricks, and we'll even talk a little bit about sound design in terms of how to get the best piano sound for that genre. I'll be sure to give you about five solid tips for each style, as well as a couple of artists that you can check out that I think really reflect that style iconically. This course is also great for someone who already knows a couple of styles, but wants to expand and learn some new styles. Even if you're not a beginner, if you haven't covered all of these different styles already, you're probably a beginner to that style, so why not try it out? There's also going to be a project for this course where you're expected to take a song that you know. It could be original or a cover, and you're going to simply change the style using some of the tricks that I've supplied for you. Now, one of the classes ahead is going to give you all of the information that you need for this class project. So do make sure that you check it out to get all the details. I want to thank you for taking this course, and I hope you have a ton of fun exploring some new styles on the piano. Let's start to dig into things. I'll catch you in the next class. 2. Class Project: Alright, let's get talking about your class project within this course. It's pretty simple, for the most part. What you're going to do is take either an original song or a cover that is in a particular style, and you're going to play it in a different style using some of the tricks that I've offered up within this course. A great example might be the band, Easy Star All Stars. They have a whole album that just takes Beatles songs and makes them into reggae hits, and they're fantastic. From production to the performance, it sounds great. But we just need to do a really simple version of that within this course. Now, Reggae might be a very simple and logical stepping stone from rock or pop, as it covers very similar chord structures, but just sort of plays on the offbeat. I'm not trying to say Reggae is simple, but it might be a good starting point to try out. That being said, you could take a rock song and turn it into a ballad. You can take a balllad and turn it into a 90s style dance piano track. Basically, all you need to do is flip that style using some of the tricks that I've given you within these ten different stylistic options. From there, you're going to record yourself playing this new piece. Whether it's a video recording or an audio recording, both should be able to work. You want to do a video recording, you're going to upload your video to Vimeo or YouTube, and then you're going to share a public link within the project description section of this course project. It's the same if you want to go the audio route, but instead, maybe you upload to SoundCloud. Again, make sure that you're sharing a link that is not private, but SoundCloud, generally, the links would be public. And again, you'll put that into the project description section. Now, ideally, what you'll do is you'll share the original version or a piece of it, and then the altered version or a piece of it. But as much as you're willing to share, I'm willing to check out and give you some feedback toward. So let's say it's an original song of yours and it's a rock song. Play me the verse of your song. Maybe the verse and chorus. Give me a little snippet so I can really understand how the song sounds. And then also record the sort of remixed version of that song. Just put them back to back, so it's just one file. So we're kind of A being the two different styles. We're hearing the original style and then the new style. And from there, I'll give you some feedback, some things that I think maybe could improve, as well as some areas that you've done really well. If you're doing a video recording, it's fine to just use your phone and make sure that you're doing it on a day where you really feel ready for it. I'm not trying to force you into this project. I want it to feel natural, and I want it to feel like it's on a day where you're really in the zone so you get the best results from your. So have some fun with this class project. I can't wait to give you some feedback. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. I'll see you in the next class. 3. What is a Piano Style?: So what is a piano style? Well, first, I think we have to talk about what a musical style is. And just so you know the term genre is interchangeable with style, so you'll hear me at times saying style, and other times you might hear me saying genre. So just so you know those two terms do mean the same thing. So at this point, you probably do know what a musical style is, right? From an early age, we get exposed to classical music, maybe rock and roll, or maybe some traditional music depending on where you're from. But we end up hearing a collection of a few different styles so that we can discern the difference between them. Well, if I was to play piano in a rock band or piano for video game music or piano in a jazz band take a different approach based on that style. So what I'm playing on the piano, this piano style would be specifically suited for that style of music. So that's what I'm talking about when I say piano style. But what's worth mentioning is we'll need to know some melodic tricks, harmonic tricks, rhythmic tricks, and in some cases, even some sort of sound design tricks. Now, we're not going to go deep into sound design and synthesis, but the idea of using a mellow piano tone or a bright piano tone, a large sounding reverb on the piano or maybe no reverb at all. These are things worth considering and are usually readily available on any standard keyboard. Oftentimes, one of those tricks, a harmonic trick, a melodic trick all by itself won't convince the listener that you're playing in that style. But once you have a few tricks and you sort of put them all together, those techniques are going to collectively allow you to sound like you're playing in that style. So that's why for each of these different styles, I'm going to give you five different tricks. Some of these techniques are easy. Some of them are more challenging. I understand that not every beginner is at the same level, so I want to give you a bunch of different types of tricks that will allow you to either feel confident in that was nice and easy. I learned it quickly or challenged and intrigued to take the genre to the next level. Now also, I understand that many pianists taking this course will be beginner pianists, but I bet there's a few of you out there that are at more of an intermediate level, and maybe you know a couple of styles already, and you're just hoping to fill out your bag of tricks by learning some other styles. And that's totally fine. This course is also intended for you. That's part of the reason why the jazz class goes a little bit deeper. Also, it's really hard to just brush over jazz theory. It can be quite dense. So I want to kind of warn you now that the jazz class is going to be a little bit more dense, theoretically, but I wanted to give you one sort of dinger that gave you a pretty good challenge. That being said, for the most part, we kind of ramp up difficulty throughout the course and then taper things off at the end so you're not left feeling flabbergasted. But keep in mind, like I said, the level of difficulty ranges from beginner, even up to at times intermediate level. Also, at the end of each class, I give you a few examples of some of the best bands or best artists or composers for that style. Most of them, I'm going to give you examples where you will hear piano. But I understand, too, like for rock, I recommend checking out ACDC, for example. They're not notorious for having a great keyboardist, but keyboardists are also really influenced by guitars a lot of the time. So I do want to give you a couple of acts that don't have piano, but are also really iconic to that genre, just so you can really understand how the genre sounds, some influences that we can take from other instruments, and then apply that to the keys. But like I said, most of the examples are going to have really great keyboardist, or the composers will have been very good pianists. Ultimately, if you want to get good at any of these styles that I'm sharing with you within this course, make sure you check out a lot of music within that style, find a favorite artist or favorite band and really dive deep into their collection. No course will make you amazing at music. You have to be passionate about what you're learning, and the best way to do that is find an artist that makes you feel that passion and pair that with these types of courses, and I think that's the best recipe for success. That's my spiel on piano styles and what it means to learn a piano style. But really, we haven't dug into the meat and potatoes yet, so I'm going to catch you in the next class, where we're going to talk about Ska and Rege as a nice, friendly starting point. I'll see you there. 4. 10 Styles Reggae & Ska (EDIT): Alright, first off, we're going to be talking about reggae and ska music discussing how this style focuses on playing on the offbeat, especially on keyboard and guitar based instruments. So let's dive in. So what do I mean by playing on the offbeat? Well, most of us at this point, are used to counting a straight one, two, three, four. But in between each of those numbers, we could be counting an and one and two, and three and four. One of your first challenges would be to count that out loud while snapping not on the numbers, but on the s. In fact, let's try both. Let's start with the numbers first, and we'll graduate up into snapping on the As. Join in with me. Here we go. Three, four, one, two, three, four. Easy Psy, right? Now you're going to join in with me snapping on the offbeats on all of the As. Here we go. Three, four, one and two, and three and four, and. That's the basic idea. We're going to take a chord progression. Let's take the chords from stir it up by Bob Marley. G major, C major, and D major. We're going to play four Gs, two Cs, two Ds, and we're going to try them on the offbeat. First, let's just try playing the G major chord on offbeats in our right hand. I'll count us in three, four, one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four, and. Now, if you have a melody that you want to play on the keys, you would play this chord part in your left hand, and you would play the melody in the right. But first, I'm just going to assume that you're in some sort of combo. You have a singer or someone else supplying the melody for you. So, again, we're left with this one and two, and three and four, and. That really is step one, applying that right hand part to the chord progression that you're working with. So remember, we have four Gs, two Cs, and two Ds. Let's try it out. It would sound like this. One and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four. And one and two, and three and four, and and two and three, and four, and one. Now remember, you can do this with any chords that you like. Once you figure out the chord progression of a song, you simply apply this right hand part to get started. But what's our left hand supposed to do? Well, let's talk about this second step of adding in the left hand where you're going to be holding an octave of whatever chord you're playing. Preferably the root unless it's a slash chord. So if it says play G major, you play G in the left hand. But if it says play G major D, then you would play D or Ds in the left hand. Admittedly, in Scott and Reggae music, there's not a ton of slash chords. So most of the time, you're going to just be supplying the roots in the left hand. So for now, I'd recommend holding the left hand up to four beats. So on our G chord, we're going to be holding this for all four beats. On our C chord, it's for two, on our D chord, it's for two. It would sound like this one and two, and three and four. And one and two, and three and four, and one. Now you can also consider playing inversions in the right hand. For the G major chord, let's say we start root position, you could play C major in second inversion and D major in first inversion to keep your notes really close to one another and to keep your hand closer to one position. That would sound like this. One and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four. And one that sort of idea. The third step that you can add here is a very subtle detail, and it's such a convincer It really helps pull this sound together to sound like more professional style reggae. It would sound like this. We're going to take our octave in the left hand and play the occasional thumb while still holding our pinky. So we're playing both pinky and thumb and then restating some of these thumbs as little flicks, almost like a little tap of a drum. So after you play the first chord, that thumb to get started could accent just before every chord that comes afterwards. That would sound like this. One, and, two, and three, and four, and one and two, and three, and four, and one. So we have this one and two, three, a, four, one and two, and three, and four. Every time I'm playing a new chord, everything kind of plays together. So it's really on the next chords that kind of keep floating. So if there's, like, two chords, it would be the second chord. If there's four chords, it'd be second, third and fourth chord. By floating, I mean, just kind of chugging along, playing that pulse. That's a great time to throw in that left hand accent. Now, personally, I don't like when this sound is overused, but I do use it quite a bit, just never too much in one setting. So it might sound something more like this. One, two, and three, and four, and one and two, and three, and four and. Just using it a couple times per progression. Now, again, if you don't want to be playing with a singer or you don't want to sing yourself, you can play the melody in the right hand, which means your left hand is going to be primarily playing on those offbeats. You don't get the big left hand octave with those little accents. It's just playing the chords. Again, you can use inversions. It's fine. I'm assuming at this point you're playing with a bassist. Even if you're not it's not super important that you keep those roots on the bottom, you can, but there's a lot more jumping around involved, and that can make things a little bit more difficult, too. So let's take this progression and play the melody for stir it up in our right hand. That would sound something like this. Okay. So keeping it nice and simple in the right hand. So instead of just playing the left hand on and on those offbeats, you're playing on and. If we think of 16th notes, one anda, you're playing on the and one and two and three, and four anda. That also works in the context of two hands. I would sound like this. One and two, and a three and four, and one and two, and a three and four, d. Putting it all together with the left hand octaves and the accents with the left hand thumb and some of these double taps in the right hand, you get a sound like this. And you can kind of improvise around those rhythms a little bit. I had no direct intention to play certain beats on doubles and certain beats with those accents. It just kind of it becomes a feel thing. The more you work with this, the more you can get away with playing it in a way that feels natural. Off the start, feel free to overuse it. You're going to have to overuse it for a bit so you can really get comfortable with that sound and understand how to play it in a subtle way that works for you and your band. Now, we're going to discuss ska music, which takes a lot of the fundamental rhythmic tricks from reggae, but just plays it quite a bit faster. There's like first wave sca, second wave ska, two tone ska. There's a bunch of different types of ska. So I'm going to give you, like, an overview of how to basically play ska and then you can find out what subdivision or subgenre of ska you want to play and adapt from there. Now, we are switched over to an organ sound, as it is very common within SCA to play organ. And in this case, I'm on a Yamaha on jazz organ two. Find an organ that works for you, but this one works quite well, as it usually has a bit of a high, shrill sort of sound to cut through the mix, as there's not a lot of other instruments outside of horns up in that register. If we were to play everything twice as fast, we would get something like this one and two, and three and four, one, two, and three and four, one, two, and three and four, one, two, and three, and four end. You'll see we're still playing one and two, and three and four, and playing on those offbeats, but something still doesn't quite sound super sca about this. What I want you to try in your left hand is playing the octave, but just Nice and short, nice and staccato. So you end up getting one and two, and three and four, and one, two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four, and one, two, and three and four d. Now, I should also mention that organ sounds great in reggae. I'm not saying it's specific to ska. Feel free to use organ and Reggae. It's used all the time. But piano is a little more appropriate and Reggae, you'll hear it a little bit more. In sca, organs are just used so much that it's worth bringing it up as a fun instrument that you can try. So we have this one, two, three, and four end. The problem is, we're still not quite up to full speed for most ska, so I'll speed it up a bit more. And I'm also going to add a couple extra left hand accents, one and two and three, and four and one and two, and three and four, and one. So on one and four of each chord, it ends up sounding like this. One and two and three, and four, and one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four. That's it. Again, apply that to a progression that you really like. Maybe it's something minor. Maybe it's like That still works as well, too. Now, I should mention that scat and Reggae tend to quite often be major. It makes sense. This is island music. We're in Jamaica, we're drinking coconut water. We're on the beach. We're having a really good time, so the music needs to reflect that. It's light hearted. It's major. We want to keep things nice and happy. Now, if you're interested in checking out some sca music, I would recommend starting with the specials and real big fish. And one of my favorite artists who throws back to First Wave sca is Chris Murray. Uh, he's also Canadian as well, too, like myself. I believe he's from out West, but he is a nomad. He's all over the place all the time. So feel free to check out those bands. And if you're interested to check out more Reggae, please do feel free to check out the legend Bob Marley from Bob Marley and the Whalers. Also Damian Marley and Peter Tosh are great acts to check out, as well, too. So that gives you three reggae artists and three sca artists that you can check out to help you develop your listening skills within this genre. Don't forget to check out the included PDF for these tricks summarized to help you if you're more of a sight reader or just want to see things a little bit more visually. So remember, keep things on those offbeats. I hope you had fun, and I'll catch you in the next class. 5. The Blues: Alright, we're going to dig into the basics of the blues, and step one is to understand the blues form. Now, what do I mean by blues form? Basically, I just mean the chord structure. Once you know something called the 12 bar blues structure, you would just loop this over and over. You can solo over it. You can create melodies over it. There's a lot you can do with it from there. Now, there's a lot of variations of the blues form. I'm going to give you one of the most basic ones to start, and we're going to keep it in a very piano friendly key. If you're a guitarist watching this, you'll probably want to keep things in the keys of E, A and D. But for now, I'm on keys, so we're going to be talking about the blues in C major. So starting off, we're just going to play some chords, four beats each and go through the 12 bars structure. It would go something like this. C major, two, three, four, C major, two, three, four, C major, two, three, four, C major, two. So there's four of those Cs. Two Fs, three, four, F, two, then back to C, C, two, three, one more. C two, up to the G, G, two, three, four, F, two, three, four, C, two, three, four, C, two, three, four. Now the last chord could be a G. The second chord can be an F. There are certain substitutions that can slowly turn this into a more evolved version of the 12 bar blues, but this tends to be a really easy way to get started. So C, C, C, C, FF, C, C, GF, CC. That's our basic starting point. But playing chords in both hands doesn't feel particularly bluesy yet. So now we're going to take some concepts and apply them to that song structure or form. The first thing we're going to do is take a simple version of a baseline put it down into our left hand. Remember, this is a bass line, so keep it nice and low. It should be maybe not the lowest C on the piano, but I'm going with the second lowest C to start. You're going to play the notes of each chord moving up individually and then adding one step above. So we have C, skips to E, skips to G, and then one extra step. Now the fingering I would recommend here isn't comfortable for a lot of people when they first start trying because for the life of us, we try to avoid using this finger four. It's like, imagine pressing an elevator button with finger four. You would just never do it. But on the piano, we need to make sure that all of our fingers are readily available. So we have five, four, two, one. If I take the chords that we talked about before and play those in the right hand with the baseline, we would get this. See. F. C G F C, C. So, admittedly, I do want to take the song structure a little bit further into a more developed 12 bar blues, but I really do want to keep this as a beginner's course. Now, for our next step, what we're going to do is we're going to take a tip from our Ska and reggae class, and we're going to play some right hand offbeat chords. This is a little bit more like a shuffle or an upbeat blues, but it works and it's a really fun sound. It would sound something like this. You're going to play your baseline notes, and in between each bassline note, you're going to play a chord. I should also mention you want to be swinging one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four end. Now, when you put that full speed, you end up getting something that sounds like this. Generally in the blues, you wouldn't be using major chords. You would be using dominant seventh chords. The dominant seventh chord in short, is a major chord, then you find your octave from your lowest notes, so see up to C and then go down one tone. So it's a major chord with a minor seven or a flat seven. But if you can't remember all the terminology, it's major chord and then down tone from the octave. I'm going to play the same part again and listen to how much more bluesy it sounds now. Now I'm going to sneak in a couple of inversions where I'm going to reorder the notes of some of these dominant seventh chords. It ends up sounding something like this. Alright, so don't mind the fancy chord at the end. That's another dominant seventh variation. Getting a little jazzy, but I just like throwing little endings onto some of these examples. Now, the next thing we can talk about is a little bit more advanced, but it's really fun, especially when you get playing this stuff hands together, and it's called rolling. What I want you to do is position your right hand on a C major chord with the fingers one, two, and four. And what you're going to do is you're going to play the top two notes of that chord followed by the thumb, and then you're going to move up one note in your scale from both the middle note and the top note of your chord. So we're moving from CEG to CFA. You can also think of it like a F major chord. But in second inversion. In other words, the four chord from our home key of C major. So one, four, one, four, with four being an inversion. Now, there's an extra step we have to add here. We're going to slide into our third of our C major chord, in other words, the middle note from one semitone below. Now, in C, part of the reason I chose this key, it's nice and easy because we can just slide from a black to a white. If you're in something like A major, you have to use an extra finger because you can't slide from a white up to a black. So I'm trying to keep us in a piano friendly key to start. Now, if we slide into that E, and we're not thinking rhythmically in terms of, like, a subdivision of a beat, it's just a just a little tongue roll into it a little slide. Then we play our thumb. And then those other top notes, F and A that we talked about back to the thumb. If you do this with swing, it ends up sounding something like this. Now, there's tons of variations that you can add to rolling. You can complete the top notes of your dominant seventh chord at the top of a roll. I could go through all these variations, but this is a course for beginners. I just want to keep things nice and simple, and down the line, I will be doing a full fleshed out course on the blues, where we'll go through tons of variations of rolling. But for now, I don't want to overwhelm the beginners, so we're going to keep it nice and tidy, nice and simple. So we get this sound on our C chord. It feels like finger two sliding to that E. I'm going to jump to G for a minute. We're going to do the same thing up on this G chord, where I've taken a G major chord, GBD, played it with one, two, four, slide into that finger two and also play finger four. Then you're down to your thumb, three and five on C and E, the fore chord of G major. One, two, three, four. So we have this C major chord. So on G, it feels the same as C. Now, why did I skip F? Well, when you're playing F, it starts to feel the same. Like, you're playing this finger two scooping the same way down to the thumb. Then you're going to play three and five, but this time a B flat, because in the key of F major, B flat is our fourth note, so it supplies a B flat major chord. So we need to play an inversion of that B flat major chord. So it ends up sounding like this on C. Sounds like this on F with that B flat, you're gonna want to slide off of that B flat. Don't do it. It takes practice, but don't do it. So we got that F chord and then the G chord. Now, when you combine it with the bassline, it sounds particularly great. But keep in mind what you're going to do is you're gonna be playing the top two notes with your left hand note, and the thumb of the right hand sneaks in between everything. So if you're playing your right hand thumb with something in the left hand, impacting at the same time, something's gone wrong. Your left hand should be impacting with the top notes of the right hand. So slowly, And the other thing is, you want to make sure you're swinging one and two, and three and four, and one. If that's too tough for you for now, think of it like one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one and two, and three. It's all the same. So I'm gonna keep it going and speed it up a bit. It sounds like this. The blues doesn't have to be fast. Take your time. So that would be rolling in the right hand with a basic baseline in the left hand. Now, another left hand option could be to play a shuffle, and a shuffle sounds like this. Another really iconic sound within the blues. So simply put what we have is a root and a fifth up to a root and a sixth played blocked. So together, together, together, together. And these are steady beats like one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. With our right hand rolling at the same time, we would have one. And again, the and is our sneaky right hand thumb sneaking in 2-3 and four, and one. Now the next step of the shuffle to really get it to sound like a shuffle is on those right hand s when you're playing your thumb, you're going to replay whatever you had played in your left hand. So you play each thing twice, one and two, and three and four, and one. It ends up sounding something like this. One and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four and continuing with no counting. D. And we can talk a little bit about endings as well, too, but there's a classic ending. So the ending that I just played replaces the very final two chords of whatever structure you have for the blues. And what you're going to play is instead of the very final C, C, those last two C chords, instead, you're going to play the single notes, C down to E, and then short or Stacca you play F sharp, and then work your way back up GABC. Almost all white notes in this case, root, third, fourth, sharp four, five, six, seven, one. And then from there, you can play maybe a big Dominic chord or something a little spicier or just kind of shake around some notes from your Dominic chord, and it's a really classic blues ending. So we've talked about the structure of the 12 bar blues in C. But in order to understand the context outside of just playing in C major, we'll need to discuss the Roman numerals associated with this blues form. So if you want to play in keys like G, D, E A, B flat, E flat, some really popular keys within the blues. So it's not just about remembering the order of a bunch of letters like C, C, C, C, F, F, C, C, but rather numbers associated with some sort of scale. Like in our C major scale, we have C, the first note, F, the fourth note, and G, the fifth note. So if we create dominant seventh chords on the first note, the fourth note, and the fifth note of that scale, we could say, it's a one chord, a four chord. And a five chord. And that leaves us with one, one, one, one, four, four, one, one, five, four, one, one. So once you understand that structure, you can take it into other keys. F is another popular key, and it feels pretty similar to C, it would end up sounding something like this. One, one, one, one, four, four, one, one, five, four, one, one. It works the same way in terms if it still sounds like a blues, it's just all repositioned to start on a different note. So you need to understand those Roman numerals. If you want to try this out in other keys, you really only need to know what the one chord is, the four and the five. And again, refer to the major scale. What is the first note of the major scale? What is the fourth note, and what is the fifth note? Take the one, four and five from that scale and just build major chords above each of those notes. F, the one gives us F major or F dominant seven. Four, in this case, the B flat gives us B flat major or B flat dominant seven and five, in this case, C gives us C major or C dominant seven. Now, I'm going to explain one of the two popular blues scales that can be used for improvising or creating melodies over top of the structure that we've already discussed. There's a major blue scale, and there's a minor blue scale. It just so happens that I have a full course that is all about blues scales. So if you want to learn more about these scales, how they can be used in really great detail, I'd recommend checking out that class. But for now, what I'm going to do is supply you with a minor blues scale. The reason I'm going to start with minor is because this works over a major blues or a minor blues. To let you know, there are technically also minor blues that you can play, the one chord is minor, the four chord is minor, and the five chord would still be dominant. The bassline doesn't quite work the same. You can't really roll quite as well, but the song structure would follow the same structure. And quite often you see this in jazz or in, like, a six, eight blues, all outside of the context of the beginner stuff that we're talking about. But I wanted to mention that if you do eventually learn a minor blues, and you know some major bluesesblu Zs, Blues, apostrophe. Then you can use this minor blues scale over either. It works on a major blues. It works on a minor blues. Let me show you this scale because you'll get tons of mileage out of it. And I also use this in rock and funk and hip hop and a lot of other styles as well, too. So if we were to take the C minor scale because we're still in C at this point. We're in C major, but we're going to take the C minor scale. We're going to eliminate two and six from that scale. And then the note between the fourth and the fifth is tritone or sharp four or flat five, whatever you want to call it, we're going to add that note. And this is a blue note that we're going to use to scoop or sort of sidestep to its neighbors. So you get C E flat, F, F sharp G, B flat, C, root minor third. Fourth, sharp four, five, flat seven, and then the octave, another root. If I was just to noodle around on those notes only and understand that the function of this F sharp is to sort of slide, I would get a sound something like this. Notice how it sounds totally fine over the major blues. Now, if I'm playing a song like Mr. PC by John Coltrane, this is a jazz song, but it's still based around a minor blues sound. We would get something like, The chords change here a bit. It's flat six, and then five. Again, that minor blues works over the sound of a minor blues or a major blues. So that's why I want to teach you the minor blues scale because no matter what you're playing, whether it's in a major key or whether it's in a minor key, this will allow you to be able to solo or create some melodic lines yourself. If you're looking to check out some really popular blues artists, first, I'd recommend just put on some blues playlist on something like Spotify. But you can check out BB King, Muddy Waters, or even someone like Eric Clapton, where it's a more contemporary sort of rock version of the blues. That will give you a really wide breadth of the style, so you can check it out through various decades. So those are my basic tips for getting started with the blues. I hope you have fun practicing that stuff and applying it hopefully within a band context. I'll see you in the next class. 6. Rock: Alright, let's get talking about the basics of rock piano, and rock takes influences from a lot of other styles, including the blues. So we're going to have a bit of an overlap, but I also want to make sure that I'm covering not just the beginning stages of rock n roll or the newest stages, but some of the tricks all along the way. One of the first and easiest tricks that we can apply is find your chord progression within a song and try just stomping the right hand on quarter notes. The left hand is going to play on beat one, a big octave, and then in between some of the chords. This can sound great, straight or swung. So, for example, if our chord progression, let's say we go back just to the chords from stir it up by Bob Marley because they're nice and simple, four G chords, two Cs and two Ds, we would get this. Now, with the left hand in between some of the chords, Super easy. It's a really great way to get started. So what I'm playing in the left hand is one, two, three, and four and one, two, three, and four, and one. I'm playing beat one, a staccato quarter note. And then on the end of beat three, I'm holding for 1.5 beats. One, two, three, and four, and one. There's other ways you could play this. You could try some other variations, maybe something like one, two, four and one, two, three, and four, and one, two, three, and four, and one, two, three, and four, and one. But the concept is basically that we're playing the right hand on this steady quarter note pulse. The left hand is always playing something big on beat one. And then most of what the left hand is doing after that is playing in between the chords. You can still play on the chords, but it sounds really nice and syncopated and groovy if you play between those chords. So that one's really simple. It's really quick. The next one is a little bit more involved, but it depends on what you do with it. It can be simple or it could be complex. And this is the idea of creating some sort of Ostenado. Now, an ostinato is some sort of repeated loop, we hear it a lot in, like, house music and a lot of electronic styles as well as hip hop, but it was also really popular in rock music. Now, a really simple Ostinato would be take out your wordy sound because we're going to play some of the doors, something like That just keeps repeating. And then eventually they do something like, I think, a D major chord. And then they're back again. So that would be a really easy example of an ostinato, taking notes from the E minor blues scale, B, D, B, B, D B. We hear this a lot in modern rock and old school rock. These ostinatos are very popular. Now, something a little bit more complex and switching over to an organ sound, we could get something sort of like four play long time by Boston and the intro organ part. It sounds like this. It's more complex than we get. And it kind of goes into this really fancy thing afterwards. But right off the bat, we're just playing this over and over. And what they're thinking of is a B flat minor chord and an A flat major chord. So these notes are from B flat minor, and then these notes are from A flat major, B flat minor, A flat major. Okay. And then it takes a while to get kind of comfortable with that feeling, and then you can start to throw in the left hand, et cetera. So some sort of an ostenado. But what we're noticing is that both of these riffs, based on my selection, are minor. Quite often, rock can be major, but very often, as opposed to the blues, we'll see a lot more minor songs as well, too. And these astonados just sound really cool. You could call them ifs, too, by the way, a lot of guitarists will just, like, a guitar if. But to clarify, like, a riff sometimes will change a bit more. Aostonato is implying that it's kind of looping. So if we were to create a random Ostenado it might look something like this. Take a scale you like. I like the minor blues scale. So C minor blues. And if you were in the room with me, I'd say, pick numbers one, three, four, sharp, four, five, flat seven, and one in a random order. Let's say six of those notes. So one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, and then some left hand contexts. Maybe some little variation at the end. You could also try this with an organ sound again. It might sound something like this. I've supplied a couple cords in the left hand that support the key, C minor, A flat, F minor, A flat, throwing a bit of color on, which is also okay in rock. And then we have our Astinato and some sort of if that can be built upon. Now, when I was talking about foreplay Long time by Boston, I mentioned the idea that they were building their riff off of B flat minor and A flat major. And these are called Cord pairs. So if I was to take something like C minor and a neighboring cord like let's say B flat major, check this out. If I play them going up through their inversions, C minor would look like this. B flat would look like this, and a lot of the notes from our C minor scale are covered between those two chords. So now what we're going to do is play C minor. Then I'm going to move my thumb up to this D and play the B flat chord, where the inversion starts on the D, in this case, first inversion. The next note of the scale is E flat. C minor first inversion, we get that E flat on the bottom. Next note is F, B flat, second inversion. Next note is G, C minor second inversion. There is no A flat in either of those chords, so we'll skip it. B flat is again a root position and then back up to C minor. If you start to break that up, you get sounds like this. And then you can take chunks of that sort of concept and apply it to get some sort of a riff. That's what Boston did, so we can do it as well, too. Let's say C minor first inversion to B flat major second inversion. Using a similar trick to what they used, you'd end up getting something kind of like this. And then you can build upon that. So chord pairs can also be something very much worth exploring and developing. Now, taking a tip from Elton John's book, what we're going to do is play a chord progression using some inversions, and we're going to start to break up the chords in what feels like an almost randomized fashion. But you'll find there's some sort of pairing of notes and some way to approach this that sounds a bit more musical. So it's going to take a little bit of practice on your end to see kind of what suits your musical style, but I'll show you what I'm talking about. Let's take E flat major. A flat major and B flat major and apply this technique. Now in my right hand, I'm going to be using these inversions, root, second inversion, first inversion. You get this sort of sound. I added one extra A flat chord at the end, so it's like a one, four, five, four, but the concept still applies. I'm taking that chord. In the right hand, I'm playing the traditional three no triad. In the left hand, I have a pinky, a finger two, and a thumb on the octave. So root, fifth, octave. And let's just say, as a general rule, you want to start with this pinky some sort of weight. As much as it is the weakest finger on likely or weaker hand, it has a very important role. From there, we can kind of randomize. And then next chord. Next chord. Back to eighth let. As long as that pinky is starting, you can basically randomize what's happening up above and get a very convincing sound similar to old rock like Elton John. Now, if you want to learn tons of these types of patterns, do feel free to check out my course on funky piano rhythms. One, the patterns, because it's basically this concept, but a whole course just on different patterns that are very similar to what I just showed you. Keep in mind, within that technique, it's a really good idea to use inversions, so both hands aren't jumping around so much. The left hand does need to jump between these different roots, so it makes sense to just kind of keep things inverted in the right hand, so they're all nice and close to one another and you're not moving position too much. Another really popular sound in rock is to take a rock organ or a Hammond B three would be the traditional rock organ and try some organ grinds up into chords. Let's say our chord progression is C minor, F minor, G major, C. You're just going to hold them on your organ, and you're going to grind up into it. You're going to use the back of this finger. You're going to use the fingernail on finger three. You're going to brace a little bit with finger four and two as well, and you're going to brush like this along the keys. You can also try this with your thumb like this where you're using the inside of your thumb to brush along the keys. But I prefer this way, and I think it's a little bit more supported. So you end up getting with those chords, C F minor G, C, you get this sort of sound. Now, you don't want to overdo this. You don't want to grind into every cord. And also, you'll get a different sound if you hold your petal or if you don't hold your petal. So not holding the petal. You get these little spaces in between, and it feels quite separate. But holding the pedal can make things sound a bit blurry sometimes, like this. So I'd recommend knowing when to use that petal. I mean, keeping in mind that a ham and organ doesn't have a petal, so the default is no petal. But what I like to do is go no petal on the grind. And once I'm holding the cord, then I press the petal, and that allows me to position down low. And once I start the next grind, I let go of that petal until I can catch that next cord. So during the grind, no pedal. Once you've played the chord, hold your pedal so you can reposition into another grind, if that's what you're about to do. Now, in rock and roll, we can use piano, electric pianos, organ, but synthesizer is totally on the menu. And one of the best synth players is Jordan Rudess from Dream Theater. Now, Dream Theater is more proge rock, but again, we're covering a variety of different styles of rock, so feel free to check them out. But he plays pretty fast and prolific stuff, especially when he's using his distorted synthesizer parts. I'm going to use a simple synth sound so you can really hear clearly what I'm doing. But the idea is you might take something like A minor chord. And a D minor chord, use whatever inversions makes sense. So I'm root position A minor and first inversion. You'll see why in a moment. And second inversion D minor, root position. The reason for these inversions is because I'm going to break up the notes, and I don't just want to play the same three notes in both hands. A simple inversion really opens things up, so the listener, especially if they're not inclined with music theory, is just thinking, What are they doing? What is that sound? And it's as simple as just applying an inversion. So let's say we have these triplets moving in contrary motion inward toward one another. We'd get a sound like this. Now, that's quite slow. Let's speed it up a bit. It would sound like this. Maybe E major chord, you can play around a bit. So for these Cyth parts, you can follow along with what your chords are doing, or you can come up with a melody. And something like Time Is Running Out by the band use comes to mind. They have this sort of Melody that they play, and it sounds really great. And that's another example of something that almost kind of feels like an ostinato, but it supplies a little bit more of a melodic function. So whether you're following chords, whether you're playing an ostinato, or playing a melody, synthesizer can be a really great option. And synthesis is a really huge topic. It's probably a multiple chorus series explanation just to get through all the different types of synthesis and the ways that you can manipulate a synthesizer. So I'm using a basic sound. Again, just to show you its function, but feel free to play around with whatever synthesizer sounds. Inspire you the most. So in terms of listening recommendations, I would say if you're looking for something heavy, check out something like ACDC, Deep Purple, or Aussie Osborne. If you're looking for something a little bit more complex, check out Rush or Dream Theater, and if you're looking for something more new, I would recommend check out them Crooked Vultures or audio Slave or use All grade options. Now, don't forget to check out the PDF, so you can see some of these tricks on the page if that helps you and that's the way that you prefer to learn, that will be available to you. I hope you enjoyed this course on the basics of rock, piano, keyboard, synthesizer, whatever we're calling it, and I'll see you in the next class. 7. 10 Styles Classical (EDIT): Alright, next up, let's get talking about the basics of classical piano. Classical piano can get very prolific and very intense, but there are some basic starting points that we can address so that you can start to tap into the sound of the classical era. The first thing I want to discuss is two of the primary chord progressions that we're going to be working with known as cadences, and we have a perfect cadence and a plagal cadence. So what is a cadence? Imagine you have a bunch of chords all in a row, and then you have a couple that you tend to always finish with. That would be a classic example of a cadence. So what we're going to do is we're going to start on our home base chord. Now, let's say we're in C major. The C major scale is all white notes, CDEFG ABC. And every one of those notes, we can add two skips above to create all the chords that are available within that key. The one chord, which in this case, is C major, tends to be our home base. We start here, and we also like to finish here. So where am I going to go in between this one chord at the beginning and the one chord at the end? Well, four and five tend to be the best options. So one, five, one is a perfect cadence. It's considered the perfect way to finish a classical song, whereas a 141 plagal cadence is a little bit more on the churchy end of the spectrum. It's your classic Amen at the end of a church hymn. You can start to combine these like 14, five, 41 or 15451. But for now, let's keep it simple 151 and 141. Now in a minor key, our one chord is going to be minor, which makes sense. We're in, in this case, C minor. Second, third, fourth chord would be a minor chord as well. And the fifth chord, while naturally it would be minor, we're going to change our scale to C harmonic minor so that the harmony can change and I'm allowed to access a major five chord. So to recap, the one, four and five chords in a major key are all major, whereas in a minor key, the one is minor, the four is minor, and the five is major. So let's say in my left hand, I'm choosing the minor 151, the perfect cadence, 151. Now, let's use an inversion so that our five chord is in first inversion. My melody that I'm going to create over top, it makes a lot of sense just to stick to chord notes for now. So when I'm on my C minor chord, these would be three notes that would work really well in my melody, and when I'm on the five chord, GBD, in this case, would work really well. So we might end up getting something that sounds like this. Now, it's starting to sound a little bit classical. We can also do the same thing for major. Now, what I do with the left hand pattern is also going to influence how this sounds. We have some chords picked out the idea of 151 major, 151 minor or 141 major, 14, one minor. And again, these are just starting points. We're just doing cadence you can really elaborate on these chords more and more as you start to go deeper into harmony. But for now, we're keeping it nice and simple. Now, actually illustrate the sound of the 141, we're going to change up our left hand part a little bit. I want to give you some examples of melodies that would work over this playgal cadence, 141, but I'm also going to influence the next sort of technique that you can apply, which is an Alberti bassline. Alberti bass lines are really simple. Once you know your three notes in your chord, providing you have three notes, you play the pattern low, high, middle, high. The most classic example would be a Mozart sonata. In G major. I digress. The idea is we're keeping it nice and simple, low high, middle, high, and we can apply, again, notes from our chord. So if I'm on C major, CE or G, and if I'm on F major, CF or A to help me with a melody in terms of creating that melody. So we end up getting something like starting to sound a little bit more classical. And same thing for the minor key. C minor, F minor. And I threw in a little five chord. That was one, four, one, five, one, combining our perfect cadence and plagal cdnces together. The next tip I'm going to recommend is something called an open voiced chord. Now, we have a C major chord in our left hand, and this is a close or closed voiced chord, where the middle note is closed within the other notes, but we're going to open it up. We're going to break it out of jail, and we're going to bring it up one octave. So now we get this sort of sound. So we have something like so again, I'm only choosing melodic options in my right hand based on the notes that are available in the cord in my left hand. I was moving between a C major, open voiced, and then a G major, open voiced where we bring our B up an octave. It's always the middle note though, and this works with inversions. If I have a C major chord and I choose to put the C on the top of the chord, we would call that first inversion. If I take the E and bring that up octave, so it's on the top of our chord, we now have a second inversion C chord. If I do that one more time, I'm back to the same a shape that we started on the root position chord. So if I have a first inversion C major chord and I want to make this open voiced, it's the same technique, the same sort of approach. We take the middle note up one octave, and then we have really beautiful sounding first inversion open voice chord. So you can start to play around with this one and five using different inversions. Check this out. One root position, so be our five second inversion because I'm starting on the D on the bottom, so it's still GB and D, but opened up. Next, we have C major first inversion with E on the bottom, G major, root position or C major, second inversion. There's lots of ways you can play your C chord and your G chord in open voicings using these different inversions. So if I was to play in my right hand a simple melody and go back and forth between root position one and five, as well as some inversions, you might end up getting something like this. Oh Now, there's something called ornaments in classical music, and it even comes from the Baroque era beforehand. We're going to cover a couple of basic ornaments and show you how they can take your melody and make it sound a little bit more classical. So an ornament is exactly what it sounds like. You put an ornament on a Christmas tree to make the tree look a bit nicer. We're going to put some sort of little melodic flair onto some of our notes to create an ornament within our melody. We have upper mordants, where you take a note for your melody and you go up a step down a step within the scale or the key that you're in. Lower mordents move down and back up. We also have thrills that start just above whatever note is being written or the anticipated note in the melody. So if our melody note is C, we're starting on a D, and you wiggle back and forth between those two notes. Landing on the destination note. And the last one that I want to talk about is called a turn. And a turn based on whatever your note is in the melody, you'd be above that note, then you play the note. Then you go below the note, and you come back. So one more time to recap. Upper Mordent again, we're thinking this whole time our melody note is C. Upper Mordent CDC. We visit the neighbor above. Lower Mordent CBC, we visit the neighbor below. Trill starting above our sea wiggle and land onto the sea and a turn is above the sea, then we hit it below the sea, and then we come back. Let's try another melodic example over top of the basic chords we've been discussing using an Alberti pattern, low high, middle high in the left hand, and some of these ornaments in the right hand. It would sound something like this. You can already see how this starts to add a bit of a classical flare to your melody. Now, just remember that these ornaments in their most basic form, you want to really consider what key you're in. So if I'm in A flat major, a much more complex key than C major, I need to consider the notes from that scale when I'm visiting a neighbor above or below, it should be from that key. Ornaments are not exclusive to major. You can also try them in a minor environment. That might sound something like this. So adding in some upper mordants, lower mordants, turns and trills to your classical melodies will make them sound that much more authentic. Lastly, I'd like to give you a bit more of a complex concept where we're going to talk about theme and variation. A theme is a simple set of a few notes, and then we're going to variate those notes either rhythmically or in terms of their notes. And the most classic version of this that I can think of is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which I highly recommend you listen to all the way through listening for themes and variations. The main theme that he supplies Gets turned upside down. There's rhythmic variations. There's a sort of cascading effect that happens between the various instruments. There's a lot that happens to that main theme. But we're going to create our own theme right now, and we're going to keep it really simple and talk about some ways that we could variate that theme. This is a little bit harder for me to come up with on the spot, but I like being challenged, too. So here we go. So the theme we're going to work with is a MR d321 in C minor up to the fifth. One of the first variations that we could play around with is something called a sequence. This idea that we're going down two steps and up a fifth, let's try that again, but this time starting one note higher or lower in our key. So now we start on F, down a couple of notes, up the fifth, in this case, a diminished fifth, but it's still up five notes. So we can apply a sequence this way. We can also try a sequence moving downwards. Again, a sequence is just a set of notes. Let's say we go down two steps up a fifth, you just shift that up higher or down lower, and that creates the sequence. Also, you can reverse it. So now it's the fifth down and then up a couple of steps. You can take that and put that in a sequence. And then maybe some sort of ornament to authenticate it even more. Some rhythmic variations might be all of our fast notes happen, and then we have one note that holds at the end. Maybe we hold instead our first note and then move quickly through the rest of the notes. A sort of idea. We can also take the minor sound of M do so, and based on the harmony, we can hear that's very minor, but we can also take it and put it into the relative major key or the parallel major key. The relative major key, in this case, to C minor is E flat major. They share the same notes. They are essentially relatives with similar DNA. So we're taking the same three, two, 15 in E flat major because that's our relative major key. The parallel major to C minor would just beep C major. Keep the same note C and just flip it from major to minor. So Maybe we have a modulator. Now we're in a major key. And by modulator, I mean some sort of chord that takes us from the minor tonal center into the major tonal center, C minor into C major, but makes it easy on the ears so it's not so jarring, just jumping from minor to major. I do have a full course on modulations. It's pretty dry, it's pretty theoretical. If that's the sort of stuff you enjoy, I'd recommend checking it out. So let's try to create a small little piece using some theme and variation on our main theme that we've created. It might sound something like this. Is that as complex and awesome as Bethoven's fifth symphony? No. But I was taking some concepts and working with them within the rules of theme and variation, taking the melodic theme or the melody notes, in other words, three, two, 15 and the rhythmic theme of short, short, short, long and variating those themes. For me, personally, I find this approach is easier with pencil and paper and seeing what you're doing with the themes and then learning the piece. It's quite difficult to improvise theme and variations, but some people are experts in it, and if you want to be, you can, too. So we've covered some harmonic concepts, some melodic concepts, ways to ornament our sound, as well as how to variate and come up with a more complex version of whatever classical piece we're working on. That covers some of the most fundamental basics of classical piano. It's a very deep topic, so feel free if you feel inspired to go even deeper into your study of classical piano. But those are some basics to help you get started. Now, don't forget there will be a PDF supply to help you with the basics of what we've talked about. If you're a visual learner or like learning from the sheet, there will be something provided for. Also, if you want to check out some really famous classical composers, I'd recommend check out Bach from early classical and late Baroque, Mozart and Beethoven from the middle of that era, as well as Chikovski leading us into the romantic era. So have fun checking out those composers from the Classical era. I hope you enjoyed this class, and I'll catch you in the next one. 8. 90's Dance: Alright, next up, we're going to talk about how you can play some 90s style dance piano. And this is coming back right now, I'm recording this in 2024. So you're going to hear this sound from pop artists like Duipa to a whole lot of electronic artists right now as the 90s are coming back strong. So I thought this would be a fun little sort of subgenre to be able to add within this course, but at the same time, something that I think can be quite practical in today's productions. Step one is you're going to want to get a piano sound that is very bright. There are a couple ways to do this. One is, if you have a keyboard, scroll through your presets and pick the brightest. On Yamaha keyboards, which is what I tend to play. Most of the time, that's going to be some sort of a rock sound. So if I compare this rock piano with something like a more standard piano, you can see the second one sounds a whole lot more classical or maybe even towards pop, but that bright rock piano sound really does help us sort of dial in the tonal qualities of that 90s dance piano. Okay, so that's how you're gonna lock in that sound of the 90s style dance piano. Now let's start to talk about some patterns that you can play rhythmically, because after all, this is a very rhythmically driven sort of style of music. Now, I want you to get really comfortable phrasing threes. Now, what do I mean by that? If we were to usually count one and two, and three and four and phrasing threes would be taking any three of those utterances that I just said, like one and two. Or and three and. And from there, you'll take that little group of three and block it together, like one and two, and three, and four and one and two, and so on and so forth. Now, usually, at the end of these phrases of threes, you're going to need some sort of two beat or four beat closer to wrap it up squarely within a two bar or four bar phrase. If it's a two bar phrase, you're going to throw four at the end. If it's a four bar phrase, you're going to throw two at the end. So allow me to explain. 2 bars would be one in two and three and four end, one in two, and three and four end. And watch what happens when we start freezing threes. One and two, and three and four, and one and two and three, and four end. Three and four at the end is your group of four. That rhythm would sound something like this. One, three, one, one, one, one, two, three, four, W W one, W one, three, four. Alternatively, if you want to do 4 bars, you'll need a two at the end. Which would sound like this. One, three, bunches and bunches and butch buchchch bunches Bunches bunches punches punches and bunches bunches, punches what you want. One and two, and three, and four and one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four end. At the end, you get that little rhythm of two. Now, I've done a course called funky Piano Rhythms that teaches a style of playing an octave in the left hand with chords in the right. And we're going to take the same blocked rhythm that we just worked with because you could play those chords blocked. Where everything is just smashing together. But you can also break it up where you have the cord in the right hand and an octave broken in the left. So for a group of three, you'll play cord, thumb, pinky. When you have a group of two, it's cord thumb, and when you have a group of four, it's cord, thumb, pinky, thumb. So when we have a two bar phrase, when we're finishing with a four, it'd be one, two, three, one, two, three, one. Three, one, two, three, four, one, three, two, three, punch, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, four. Going through it slowly, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, and then maybe on a different chord. One, two, three, four. When we have 4 bars, as I mentioned, we finish with a group of two. That would sound something like this. Here that it stutter at the end. So that's one, two, and three and four, and one, two, and three and four, and one and two, and three, and four and one and two, and three and four, which is a chord thumb at the end. Let's take what I just showed you and apply it to a chord progression. Maybe it's A minor, F, G, back to A minor. It would sound something like this. Okay, so you can play around with different chord progressions. You can find other ways to break it up further from there, but I think playing everything blocked with these groups of threes in mind or breaking it up chord thumb pinky is a really great way to start. In fact, 90s dance music, I was really influenced by because I did seven years of karate and every single day, it was just constant 90s dance music playing. And so when I was playing classical piano, a lot of my playing ended up kind of having this sort of broken sort of piano technique that was not necessarily classical and definitely influenced from this sort of piano playing. Now, another thing you can add to all this is sidestepping some notes. Let's say my right hand thumb steps up, back and forth between this C and this D. On this A minor chord, in this case, my right hand is first inversion CEA. I'm moving back and forth with my thumb. It could also move down. So you would end up getting a sound sort of like this, and I just realized I wasn't on my bright piano sound, so we're back. It'll be even more authentic. Check it out. It sounds like this. Notice how staccato I'm keeping things, da da da da da staccato being short and plucked, like you're touching something hot and quickly pulling the finger away. And then little accents in terms of volume and also holding certain notes longer really bring out sort of sub textures within that rhythm instead of we end up getting That sort of idea. So as I'm bringing out volume accents, I'm also elongating some of these notes. Now, that's sort of like a little counter melody within the rhythm, but you can pull out a more sort of proper melody by playing the top notes and sidestepping those with the same sort of technique. It might sound something like this. So whether you're doing this technique with middle notes or inner notes or top notes, you can kind of determine how much the melody that you're creating is either the star of the show on the top notes or something a bit more subtle and sort of complimentary, which would be those more middle notes. I would not recommend messing with the left hand much. It's more right hand variations for that technique. Now, video games from the 90s were also really influenced by 90s dance music. And one video game that comes to mind with a really awesome main theme was mortal combat. And there's something to be learned from this theme, which sounds like this. An. Something like that. The ending is more of just like a if using the minor pentatonic. You can think of it minor blues, but it's really just the notes from the pentatonic. But leading up to that point, they had a chord progression that they were outlining. So the chords we have are A minor, C major, G major, and then a quicker F major E major. And most of these chords, when we're breaking them up, we're just playing chord tones exclusively. But on a couple of the chords, we're going to lend some other notes from our A minor scale. So what we end up getting is something like this. Now you can see most of the notes on that first little pattern are A, C and E from A minor. But we do have a D in there, which is acceptable because it's from our A minor scale. So we have. And then only notes of the C major chord, G is similar to A minor. A little sort of turnaround at the top, that's a little different. But again, mostly outlining the G major chord notes, and then we finish with only chord notes on F and then E. So the whole thing sounds like So now let's try things on a different progression and see how 90s we can get it to sound. Let's go F minor, A flat major, B minor, C major. We might get something like? Again, this is very influenced from that Mortal Kombat theme, so it sounds similar rhythmically, but I'm mostly playing around with notes from the F minor scale. I'm sticking to chord tones more than anything else. And quite honestly, if you didn't even know any scales, but you knew a couple of good progressions, you could just use chord notes and get away with something that sounds very authentic. So I'd recommend checking out Robert Miles, specifically the song Children, which is one of the most influential 90s piano dance tracks. Alice DJ also comes to mind, especially in terms of the playing style. The producer isn't always using piano sounds, but I think it still really fits with this class quite well. And then, lastly, I would just recommend checking out some playlist of 90s dance music or even 90s video game music, and you're going to hear a lot of these techniques used quite often with these bright piano sounds, but sometimes with synth sounds or other keyboard sounds. So that's it for this class on 90s Dance Piano Trick, and I'll catch you in the next class. 9. Drum n' Bass: Alright, we're about to get a little more subgenre and talk about a style that is popular with an electronic music called drum and bass. I'm sure many of you know about drum and bass, but if you're not familiar already, the two primary instruments are drums and bass, hence the name. And it's generally around 180 beats per minute. If you'll see it down around 170, maybe up to 185, 188 at Max, but it tends to kind of float around that 180 beats per minute. A lot of old House and drum and bass would resample disco and jazz and other records that had pretty colorful chords. So let's say we had from our influence of jazz, a major seventh chord like C major seven. We would sample that chord and then re pitch it to different spots. So you're hearing only that one chord quality, in this case, major seven moving around almost in random intervals. You can really play anything. Like, for example, if I play something that sounds bad, even with single notes, it'd be here to here. And then sounds kind of questionable. How about something like this? All of a sudden, it kind of works. We've heard this resampled sound of the same chord quality so many times that it just works really well within house and drum and base. But we're talking specifically about drum and bass, and one of the chords that gets used a little bit more is the minor seventh chord, L E minus seven, A minus seven, D minor seven. And then it's almost encouraged to be a little not diatonic, like, a little chromatic. So you have, something like one, four, five, and A minor, and then a flat five sounds something like this. Or. Let's try it with an actual drum and bass. Beat. Here we go. Something like? All right, so already, we're getting into that drum and bass sort of territory where, again, we're just resampling minor seventh chords or major seventh chords and occasionally playing one or two that does not fall within our regular diatonic scale. Now, that's kind of step one. Get these major seventh and minor seventh chords learned so that you can move them around, and don't venture too much between the two. Keep a major seven, keep it minor seven, just for now. Now, the main voicing that you're going to hear in house and in drum and bass is a minor nine chord rootless. Let's talk about it. So we have an A minor chord. If I take the root and substitute it with one note above and below from whatever minor scale this is associated with. So A minor would be associated with an A minor scale. We're just using a natural minor scale. So in other words, we are one tone up from our root, A to B, and one tone down from our root, A to G. Now we have this sound. Then throwing something like a fifth in the left hand can sound quite nice, or you can even double up that voicing in both hands. Now in Ableton, there's something called a Cord tool, and what you're able to do is build your chords. So in this case, you would go up seven semitones for your fifth, up ten, up 14, 15, and 19, and that should give you this particular chord voicing. But for now, I'd recommend be able to play this. So if we have A to E to G to G flat, now we would get something like this in one, two, three, four. Alright, so you can see, I'm intentionally choosing a lot of chords that don't make sense. A to E is a great starting point. G even kind of works G flat very adventurous. A to E a stable starting point again, G to G sharp or A flat, again, another weird spot. And then I think I chose, F sharp and B flat, really random chords before resolving back to A to loop through it again. Now, that's a more rhythmically involved approach where you have to be really thinking of these chord voicings on the fly. But what if we just played something like a synth pad, something like with a slow evolution, so we can't play too many chords. Well, this works really well for like two chord chord progressions within drum and base. Let's make it really simple. We're going to go A minor nine rootless. This is what we talked about. A minor, tone up and tone down from our root, supplying a fifth A to E in the left hand. Again, being adventurous with our harmony, we'll go to F minor for our next chord. Back to A, and then back to F. Let's try it with a drum beat. Here we go. In, one, two, three, four. Okay. So there what I did was I had the first two chords as we discussed, and then I played the same chords again, but with different voicings. This time I did Root fifth octave in the left with three or flat three, five, seven or flat seven, nine in the right hand. It's all the same notes as what I had before. Reordered so we have more skips. Now if you enjoy chord voicings, I do have a lot of courses just on chords and chord progressions that cover all of these sort of basics and dive into jazz harmony. So if you want to learn more about this kind of stuff, as this is a course for beginners, I can only go so deep into these chord voicings, but there's a lot of resources available to you. So what's worth mentioning is you can get a lot of mileage with these chord voicings. So I had these first two A minor to F minor and then a different version of A minor to F minor. But what you get is if you listen to the top notes, you have E on top, C on top. B on top, G on top. So you get this sort of melody that's happening up above. So even when you're just using two chords within your chord progressions, try different voicings to see if you can get a little bit more mileage out of that progression. Next up, we're going to try some chord stabs. And again, we're going to syncopate the rhythm by relying on groups of threes. One, two, one, two, bunches, two bunches, two bunches four bunch bunch bunches bunches before. Let's take that rhythm and try it out with a drum beat. Our chords are going to be G minor nine, A flat minor nine, C minor nine, B minor nine, really weird chords, but all the same quality and in this case, all the same voicing. Let's try it out in one, And again, in the end, I switch the voicing to the other type of rootless voicing, but you can get away with interchanging between these two types of rootless voicings really easily. And again, you can see with these chord stabs, it works really well. Now, you can't do those with a synth pad because they take so long to evolve into the sound. So I'm using an electric piano and also because they're velocity sensitive. When you play it lightly, you get smooth sounds, and when you play it harder, it's slightly more saturated. So You can really slam into some of those accents, which is a whole lot of fun. Lastly, I'm going to recommend that you try a one to a flat two chord progression. When I'm done here at the keys, I'm going to pop over to the computer and show you how it sounds with a gnarly baseline. But for now, let's just explore some chords. In this case, we would have something like C minor nine, and then we're going to change it up. We're going to do C sharp major seven. Quite often, this flat two chord is going to be major when we are in a minor key. So when we're in C minor, the flat two would be C major. This one to flat two is used so much in baselines. Let's try out just the chord progression with some drums, and then we'll hop over to the computer afterwards. Let's check it out. Here we go. One, two, one, two, three, four. Maybe halftime, something like crunchy. So you can really start to explore and experiment around that one to flat two sound. It takes its sound from Phrygian. It tends to have a bit more of a Middle Eastern sort of sound, and it takes some influence from other electronic genres like GA and trans. So we're going to pop into the computer. I'll show you what I'm talking about with those baselines. Let's get into some synthesis. I'll see you. All right, so we're over here in Ableton 12, and I just wanted to show you if we took a drum and bass drum beat and applied a baseline, as well as some chords over top using this one to flat two sort of chord progression, as well as some really convincing sound design in terms of the base sound, how quickly all of this comes together. So here's our drum beat right off the bat. Here's our base sound. And then here's our keys sound. So a nice soft pad, just kind of some sort of, like, cloud that floats behind everything. So what I'm going to be playing, and I haven't I think there's gonna be too many cameras if I start to show you the hands and me talking and Ableton. But I'll just kind of explain. Basically, in the bass part, I'm gonna play a low F. And then a high F. So it sounds like this. No. And then I'm going to step up a semitone and play the high note F sharp, and then the low note F sharp. Notice that I'm just using octaves as I see fit, F to F, F sharp to F sharp, same idea, F to F, maybe F sharp to F sharp going down. That's basically what I'm going to be doing, and then I'm going to add some chords, and quite simply, it comes together really quickly. Before I do that, I also just want to mention, yes, this is a preset. This is not a course on sound design and synthesis for drum and bass. That's just way too intense, maybe down the line. But I just use a preset something simple for now. If you go into the hard based presets of serum or if you download a pack of drum and bass base sounds for serum, that's going to give you a great starting point for this type of technique. So if we go into little short recording with adding the bass and then adding the keys, it would sound like this. So at the end there, I threw in an extra octave. It's just F to F, octaves, and then F sharp to F sharp with an additional F sharp up above. And just playing around rhythmically. It doesn't have to be this exact pattern. We're just kind of having some fun with it. So there's our bass part, and now we're going to add in some keys. Really simple. I'm just going to hold some minor seventh chords on F minor, and then on F sharp minor. So F minus seven, F sharp minor seven. I'm going to do some rootless voicings. I'll throw in some nines, a little bit of a jazzy sort of flare, but you can get away with just doing basic seventh chords, minor seventh in this case, and it'll sound fantastic. So here we go. In, one, two, three, four. The So, with a pad sound, like what I'm working with here, the attack is very slow. If I play a note, it sort of swells into it. Now, this attack actually isn't so bad, but some pads that are great for drum and bass have a really slow attack. If that's the case, just kind of double everything up. So if I take this and duplicate it, we're going to do a new bass sound that stays on the F for longer, and then the F sharp for longer. That would sound something like this. One, two, three, four. Un. So in that case, I threw in one extra note that you might have noticed on the F sharp minor. I threw in an A. So it's F. F sharp, F. F sharp. That's an A to F sharp, but that's coming straight from the cord. Fharpn has F sharp A, C sharp, E. So I'm just borrowing some other notes from that particular chord. Now, let's say we have a pad that is a bit slower in terms of its attack sound. Okay, so for the keys, we have something that's a little bit longer in terms of its attack. It swells in, but I don't want a huge release. I don't want a really long swell out. If you have that, by the time you play the sacking chord, the two chords are going to smash together. Especially when you're doing a chord progression that moves by a semitone, you have a collection of, in this case, eight different notes and in pairs, they're a semitone away from each other. It just sounds bad, trust me. So you want something with a slow attack and a fast release, or it can have a slow release, but you want to pick a sound where when you play another chord, it chops that release and starts fresh, sort of like a resampled sort of sound. So here's the sound we're working with. So you can see it it flutters out quite quickly, but it's pretty slow to evolve in. The last thing I'll say is I'm actually going to echo with a chord a little bit early to let that release do its thing, and then I'm going to anticipate the next chord so it's starting to swell in on that next beat. So you don't want to be playing exactly on the beat. You have to anticipate it. And playing around with these sort of sounds will give you a good indication of how you need to treat that particular synth pad. So that being said, it sounds something like this. One, two, three. Out. Okay, so if I was to go in and show you the first chord I kind of have to play in time, but look how early I am. This is the next main sort of beat where I would usually play a chord within this time frame. You can see everything has really shifted forward. The only chord I kind of didn't shift forward enough was the last one, but we can just do some little edits to kind of get us into the right place there. And yeah, so that's a pretty solid example of how you could use the semitone one to flat two chord progression with a drum and bass bass sound. Some of these chords that we're talking about within this class. So we're going to jump back to our regular course setting. This is actually the first production thing that I've done. I have tons of production courses that I'm going to be showing down the line. So if you are interested in more of this sort of material, just message me because I'm trying to make sure I do courses based on demand. I digress. Let's head back in. Alright, so that's it for this class on drum and bass style keys. I hope you enjoyed that. It was a bit nuanced. It was a bit niche, but I thought it would be really fun to share because a lot of this sort of technique and these tricks also work in house music and even in hip hop. So feel free to try out these harmonic and rhythmic tricks in other electronic genres as well. I hope you enjoyed these techniques, and I'll catch you in the next class for some new techniques. 10. Ballads: Alright, next up, we're going to slow things down a little bit and talk about how you can play some ballod style pianos with a few easy tricks that we're about to cover. Now, the first trick is a little bit of a rehash, but it is so important to ballad pianos that I have to mention it again, which is open voiced chords. So take one of your favorite chords and bring the middle note up one octave. The way you're going to play this in your left hand is 52 and then rotate the wrist slightly upwards to play your thumb on this new middle note that's been brought up in octave. Pinky index thumb index or five, two, one, two. If it's one and two, and three and four, you'll just cycle through the notes. If it's in three, four, one and two, and three, you'll only play the pinky ones and oscillate between the top two notes to help fill out that third beat. You'll also notice as a general note for balllad piano that I'm using a more mellow piano sound. In this case, the Bosendor for setting. On my piano, and you can even add a little bit more reverb to help bring it into a space that feels ethereal. And at the end of the day, usually balllad piano isn't accompanied by a lot of other instruments, so that reverb is a little bit more welcomed just to help fill out the mix and the space a little bit more. So once you have an understanding of these open voiced chords, try playing them within your favorite chord progressions. In this case, the simple progression of C major, A minor, F major, G major, 16, four, five, in the key of C major, sounds great. We took this concept of open voiced chords from our classical class and we've reapplied it into the ballod setting. But what we do in the right hand is really going to help tie things together. Again, as an extra little side note, try to keep things nice and slow. Ballads are intended to be nice and reflective and quite often that comes from a calm, slow, peaceful place. Once you have your left hand set, I want you to consider how we could harmonize our right hand. Now, let's say we're going to go really basic back to Mary Had a Little Lamb. Just the first few notes. How do I harmonize this? Well, one of the first things we realize about harmony is that quite often thirds are stacked above each other, in this case, creating triads or chords. So what if we just added a skip above each of these notes? Well, that can be problematic because now the new top notes are apparently the new melody. We have this harmony that is above our melody, and because our ears are sensitive to higher pitches, this becomes the priority, this new top melody that we're creating. It's sort of, likewise, soprano singers get the melody. It rings out over top, so it just pierces through the mix a bit more so we can hear that melody more clearly. So if this isn't our best solution, maybe a skip. Below might be a good solution. But now it kind of feels like it's an A minor, like this first chord is based around an A minor chord. So instead, what we're going to do is we are going to go up a skip and then transpose that down one octave. So now we have the interval of a sixth below. So check it out. Now, our melody is up on top. We have a beautiful harmony below, and we're able to harmonize that melody in a way that makes sense. And again, the notes aren't really close to each other, so there's a little bit more space in the left hand with open voice, in the harmony of the right hand. Things are feeling spacious from the reverb and just from the situation of the notes on the piano. I'm going to improvise a right hand melody over this one, six, four, five chord progression in the left hand. It would end up sounding something like this. I notice I wasn't only using sixths, but it's a great starting point. And then from there, you can find some other harmonies that work well for you. Also, generally in ballid piano playing to again contribute to this big spacious reflective feel, we're going to use a lot of our sustained pedal, and it also helps these left hand open voice notes ring out. Whereas for some hands, you might not be able to hold all three notes at once. The petal is going to help you sort of emulate as though you're doing that. Now we can dial things back quite a bit and make things super simple. We're going to create a two beat pulse with really slow chords. Left hand plays root fifth octave, and the right hand is going to either play an inversion. You can play root position, but generally, I like playing a first inversion just above my left hand thumb, and it just creates a really beautiful voicing. So check out this two beat pulse, something like So I did add a little bit of color on some of the chords. I did create a little bit of inner movement, maybe with the right hand thumb. But the basic idea of this really slow two beat pulse can then also lead us into a beautiful 68 sort of bald, where we're just playing some extra pulses in between, something like one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, one. Two, they're very related. We're just taking this slow two V pulse and putting two extra chord instances in between, so chord and then some accents, Cord, and then some accents. Still on the same chord. But again, it's fun to change around the right hand thumb or maybe the right hand index to create some inner movement within that chord structure. Now, similar to the open voicing of root fifth, third, where our left hand is nice and spread out to keep these thick notes away from one another. After all, chords down low sound really bad. But as you open things up, they ring out quite a bit better. Instead of the third on top, you can cheat and keep it really simple and just play root fifth, octave. Similar to open voiced chords, you can have root fifth, octave fifth, one and two end, or root fifth, octave, fifth, octave fifth, which gives you one and two, and three end. So you can create a two beat pulse or double it for a four beat pulse, or you can create a three beat pulse using this left hand trick. From there, you can even call in response. Left hand plays its three notes, and then right hand responds with a bit of a melody. See if you recognize this one. Do you recognize it? It's right here waiting for you by Richard Marx, a song from the late 80s, that's a really popular balllad that has stood the test of time. We have the left hand calling out the harmony, the right hand responding with the melody. Everything is spread out, luscious, and it's just a really iconic ballad that's relatively easy to learn. The last thing I want to mention, and it's kind of corny, but ballads can be kind of corny sometimes is you can sprinkle in some high notes sort of as a little ornaments or frills over top of whatever you're playing. Let's take a little piece of that song by Richard Mark and adapt it with some of these higher notes. It would sound something like this. Okay, so I'm moving up top. And I'm playing some chord notes. You can also have, like, little arpeggios, sort of raindrops falling down so that on an F chord would just be F and then down the F chord and then then maybe down another F chord. But you could also just play a couple of notes. Also dire dire Docs from Super Mario 64, kind of a underwater ballad, does this quite a bit. Check it out. Oh So it's just this idea of having the left hand creating a lot of space, the right hand filling out that space, and then even some light, sort of dreamy echoes up top on the upper part of the keybd. So for now, what I'd recommend is take some of your favorite chord progressions and try them with this left hand open voiced concept. Some of the chords are going to be a bit tougher depending on their shape. Something like B flat minor used to give me a bit of trouble. But over time, they all get easy and apply it to your progressions to help you learn this better. Now, you could also just start with some simple progressions, maybe C major. To F major, back and forth. Keeps the left hand nice and simple, and then add in some right hand sixths. Okay, so feel free to play around with that. Ballads are usually major. They don't always have to be, but they're meant to be sort of meditative, reflective, and friendly compositions. But there's nothing to say that you can't play a minor balllad. It just hits a little bit more on the cinematic end of the spectrum and a little bit more sort of grave for the listener, but it's still totally acceptable. It might sound something like this. You can see it sounds a little less like a traditional ballod, but it still fits the mold, so feel free to try that out as well. So, Hey Jude and Let It Be by the Beatles, as well as something like Don't Stop Believing by Journey, do technically classify as balllads, but you'll notice that they have a very different approach for each of those songs. The types of balllads that I'm giving to you admittedly is, let's say you're out for sushi and they put on a piano balllad playlist, you're going to hear these sort of playing styles that I've introduced to you almost pretty exclusively throughout the whole playlist. So I'm not saying necessarily rock bad I mean, there's ballods within all different types of genres, so it's another really widespread sort of style. I've boiled down some of the most basic techniques to give you that balllad sound paint by numbers style, super easy, super simple. And from there, you can explore ballods in other genres, as well. Feel free to check out on Google or Spotify some playlists of balleds to help you get into the zone with this sort of sound. I hope you appreciated some of the techniques that I've shared with you in this class, and I'll see you in the next class. 11. Jazz: Next up, we're going to get talking about five solid tricks that you can apply to the keys to sound nice and jazzy. So, step one, we got to talk about harmony. If you're used to playing three note chords, buckle up because we got to add some extra notes. The idea is if you take a C major scale, for example, and just play each note and then again, each note with two skips above, you get some pretty solid chord options that are available within C major. But we're going to do the same thing again with one additional skip above each top note. And now, these become our chord options when we're in a major key. Now, you could do the same thing in the relative minor key. In this case, the relative minor to C major is going to be a minor, relative because it has all the same notes, just starting from a different position. I also think of it like relatives having the same DNA. In this case, sharps and flats are DNA, and these two scales have the same DNA in that they have no sharps and no flats, all white notes. So again, you could go through all the chords by adding one extra skip above each. So you have four notes per cord. But one thing I would caution is that usually the fifth chord is going to have a raised note or a raised third, which is a dominant seventh chord, and we will talk about that soon, but it's just something that you have to watch out for. So allow me to give you the formula for each of these types of chords. As we go through all of these available chords, we have four different types of chords that pop up, three of which have more significance. The first chord in C major, for example, is a C major seven. Major chord with one semitone below the octave. A seventh is always going to be just below the octave oct is eight, and we're just shy of that eighth note. So think of seventh as hanging down below the octave, as opposed to thinking up from the bottom root, it's just a lot more difficult to think of it that way. So the major seven, again, major chord, semitone down from the octave. We call this a major seventh. So it's a major chord plus a major seventh. Gives you a major seventh chord. Next up, we have a minor chord with a minor seventh, a tone below the octave, minor seventh being this distance here, a D to C, in this case. So we call this a minor seventh chord. We get another minor seventh chord, another major seventh chord, and then we're on something more unique. We have a major chord with a minor seventh, and this only happens on the fifth scale degree of major keys. This is called a dominant seventh chord. I think of it as dominant because it's very demanding in its sound in that it wants to pull us back to our one chord. So something like you can see it has this gravitational pull back to the one. Some people in some cultures will call this a major minor seven. I love the name. It's great. But generally in Western music theory, we call it a dominant seventh chord. After that, we get A minor seventh chord, followed by a minor seven flat five or half diminished seventh chord. Allow me to explain. Minus seven built off B would be a minor chord with a tone below the octave. But this chord that we played before has a flattened fifth, so it's a minor seven flat five. Half diminished seventh refers to the fact that it's a diminished chord. So three semitones, three semitones, or minor third, minor third. But we don't add one extra minor third up above. That's a diminished seventh chord, and we'll talk about that in the romantic class. We have instead a minor seven. So it's not a fully diminished seven chord. It's kind of half diminished. So it's a half diminished seven chord or minus seven flat five. But for now, that chord isn't quite as important as the other ones, because we're going to start by talking about a major 251 chord progression. In other words, the second note of the C major scale with the extra notes to create its chord, the fifth note of that scale with the extra notes to create its chord, and the one or the first note of the scale with all those extra notes we need to create that chord. So we have all these seventh chords. We have 25 and one. Now, admittedly, if you know how to invert chords, the idea of reordering the same four notes into different positions, if you're going to start your two chord in a root position, totally normal version of that two, I'd recommend playing the five in an inversion, so you're not jumping around so much because the two to the one, they're neighbors. There's really not much of a jump there. It's really when we go to the five and then to the one, the two to the five is a jump. The five to the one is a jump. So what if we mitigate that by changing the order of the notes for the five chord? After all, D minor seven has a D and an F, and G dominant seven has a D and an F. So why not keep those notes where they are, lower the other notes to a G and a B. Now I have GBD F, the same notes, GBD F as G dominant seventh, but inverted, and now I'm easily able to move to that one chord. We end up getting something that sounds like. Sounds beautiful. I don't even have to look at my left hand because I can feel out the inversions and not have to worry about leaping to the wrong chord or wrong position. So in the PDF that I provide, I'll give you all of the major seventh chords, minor seventh chords, and dominant seventh chords. I'll even supply the minor seven flat five chords because they also have an important function. They're just not as plentiful and we don't use them quite as much. We end up using those in a minor 251. So again, a minor is our relative minor key. So the two is this minor seven flat five. The five chord, as I mentioned before, is actually going to be a dominant seventh because that dominant demanding sound brings us back to a one. And dominant chords fall a fifth to a major or minor sound. They're not really picky. So either way, that dominant five chord is like a staple in a lot of classical, but also in jazz and other styles, and it takes us back to that one chord. So now we have the two of A minor. Again, I'll invert the five. It's really handy, and then we have our one chord. With a melody of some sort, it might sound like. Sounds nice and colorful and jazzy. So whether it's a major two, five, one, or a minor two, five, one, we end up using major seven, minus seven, dominant seven, and minor seven flat five or half diminished seven chords. In the PDF, I'll also take some extra time to write out all those 25 ones with the five inverted in major keys and in minor keys, just to make sure you can really get the most out of this class. The next thing I want to bring up is how to swing a rhythm properly. So a lot of people think that swinging is sort of lop siding the notes, so they're long and then they're short, then they're long, and then they're short. Something like kind of a bit of a galloped sort of sound. And those people would be mostly right. But there's one thing that's a convincer that really helps make the swing extra hard, and that is accenting the upbeats. So we get something like To bat, bat do, bat, but do. Now, to help you break all this down, let's start with some clapping. Then we'll bring it to the keys, and I'll explain a little bit more about how you can conceptualize and think about swing. So usually, when we say one and two, and three and four, we have one that's half of a beat and and that's half of a beat, and that continues on for beats two, three, and four. But with swing, instead of half and half, we end up getting two thirds and one third. So it kind of feels like one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. But we're not really thinking of it like threes. We're just thinking of a long number and a shorter. But if you had to dissect it, how much longer and how much shorter, again, it's two thirds, one third. So like a one, two, three, one, two, three, and then counting one and two, and three and four, and. That's kind of the first step. We can break it down with the counting one more time. So we have one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. And with the counting one, one and two, and three and four, and. But now we want to take those ands or the threes in the case of counting one, two, three, and accent them, bring them out as a little bit louder. We end up getting one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, or one and two, and three and four. And. Now, if you go to do this and you end up saying one and two, and then really lean into that two and accidentally accent it, everyone does that at some point. As you're trying to sort of retrain your brain to accent these s, you'll find that you will end up accenting some downbeats. In other words, numbers, as well. Just try your best not to. Now, instead of always thinking of accenting the s, why not think of taking the numbers or the downbeats down in volume? One and two and three, and four. And notice I went painfully slow, and that's okay. As you're retraining your brain, how to do this properly, take your time and use as many tricks as you need to use so that you can execute it properly. Now, back to the keys, we're going to ditch the one, two, three, one, two, three, and just go into counting one and two. But if we took a C major scale, I don't know that you know a C major scale, but the fingering is one, two, three, one, two, three, four, and then we'll just cap it off with a five. And then reversing that 4321, three, two, one with fingers one, two, three, four, five, being the numbers that I'm talking about. So, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, five, 432 1321. Had to have that little disclaimer in case you've never played a C major scale. So now we're going to take that scale, we're going to play it. So we're accenting the ands and being quiet on the numbers. We could try it with no swing first. It would be like this one and two and three, and four, and one and two, and three and four, and. From there, we can try actually adding the swing where we have the two thirds, one third, and it ends up sounding like this one and two, and three and four, and one and two, and three. And four and. It might also help to verbalize the counting, like what I'm doing. I might make it harder, but for some, it might make it a little bit easier. Now, as you're learning jazz melodies, a lot of the time, you're going to be asked to swing. So I want to make sure that you understand how to do that and make sure that you're applying what I'm talking about right now in terms of accenting those offbeats because it really will help you add a little more swing to your swing. It's sort of like the difference of or all those little accents really help bring out almost little counter melodies or just generally make things feel a little bit groovier. So again, to practice this, you could play some scales or possibly a jazz head that you know, something like Okay, so make sure that you're applying that swing the right way. And in terms of a rhythmic foundation, that's super important in jazz. Now, in terms of coming up with a melody or improvising, whatever chord you're playing, I want you to really feel free to approach any of these four notes, let's say you're playing four notes with a semitone neighbor or sidestepping from one semitone away into one of these four notes. Let's say my note out of DF AC, let's say I pick the F. So maybe I play F sharp into the F. Now, if I really hold that F sharp, it sounds terrible. But if you have something like sounds quite jazzy. So you can approach from below or above any of those four notes. But the difference between jazz and romantic, which we'll talk about is a romantic era would often put these sort of dissonant notes or the sort of semitone sidestepped notes on downbeats. We're wanting to do this more on an upbeat. So, in other words, one and two. So we're playing the weird notes, you could say, on the s. Now, what's interesting, though, is if you remember when I was talking about swing, the and is accented. So we have a really loud version of the wrong note and then a quiet version of the resolution. But because the wrong note is happening on an upbeat on the, you can get away with the idea that the listener is anticipating some resolution down into the beat. So if I just played a small solo using mostly that approach, it would sound something like this. Okay. Just kind of improvising around a little bit. So what I'll do is I'll write out a small solo for you using a 251 in C major, and I'll use a bunch of these chromatic approach notes, and I'll sort of highlight where those are happening so you can see in a small solo context, how that works, but that's generally how it would sound. Now, to be clear, the little example I give you will probably be something a little bit different. We're going to keep it nice and simple in that PDF, but it's going to reflect the same sort of sound as what I had just played. Similar to this sidestepped chromatic note, you can also do chromatic fills. So if you know, for example, that C major, only has a couple of semitones within the scale. If you're aware of where the tones are C to D, D to E, where there's a note in between, you can fill in between, and it's a great sound. Now, this doesn't mean you're always going to be approaching chord notes, but this is kind of how you can start with chord notes and a harmonic foundation and move into more modal soloing. We're thinking about more scales as you're playing. So we would end up getting something like D fills to C, GA, fills to F EF fills to G. Chromatic side, step to B, chromatic side step to D. You can see this really starts to sound like it's twisting and turning in a chromatic way, where we have access to all 12 notes, but it sounds like it makes sense, and it sounds jazzy. So again, without me talking, a little bit of a different example, might sound something like this. Super jazzy, and it's really tapping into that language of Bebop. Now, similar to the chromatic side stepping and filling in with a chromatic note between your tones, you can also access something called enclosures within your melodic lines or improvisations. This is a bit of a longer discussion, so I'm going to breeze over a little bit, but it is available within my jazz piano Improv tricks course if you want to take that one step further. But basically, enclosure is you take one of your chord notes and you surround it with semitones above and below before you play it. Let's say the note is A that I want to enclose. Here's my A. I'm going to go a semitone above, semitone below, and then reach the A. So we might get something like sounding really jazzy at this point. And another cool thing is you can do the semitone above and then a full tone below and then fill in towards that destination note. So again, A is our destination note. The enclosure would be semitone above, tone below, and then up semitones until you reach your destination note. That might sound something like Again, super be Boppy, super jazzy. It's tough to think of on the spot unless you do some slow playing, do this stuff a lot. And it's also worth considering, let's say my destination is A, and I want that to be on beat one of the next bar, but I've started my enclosure a little bit too early, one and two, and three and four. And, oh, no, I'm half beat early. That's where you can add that extra note so that you land on your note that you're enclosing the destination note at the right time. But off the start, I would do the more simple enclosure, and then try the other version where you're full tone below your destination and filling up into that destination note. Now, I do want to mention rootless voicings because they really helped me when I was first studying jazz. They're easy to overdo, but they have other applications like I've talked about in drum and bass and house music and in hip hop, these particular voicings are used quite a bit. So there's two main rootless voicings, and we have to consider the idea of voicing from and what does that mean? So if I play a C major seven chord, right now, I'm voicing it from the root. In other words, the root is in the bottom of the chord. Now, I could have a bass note playing an E, and I can say my right hand is voiced from the C. It's more about the chord itself. And then there's this gray area where the hands are to create a chord together. But in terms of the way we're thinking of rootless voicings, we're going to keep things nice and simple and think of it all as contained within one hand. So we have this C major seven chord. Let's boil it down just to C major for a moment. What I'm going to do to make this rootless is I'm going to get rid of the root. I'm going to get rid of C, and I'm going to surround it with the seventh, which is just below by a semitone, if it's a major seventh chord. And up one tone, C to D. This is hour two or hour nine. So bringing it up a little bit higher, we have C major. Now it's C major nine. You could say C major seven, but often you'll use the most upper extension when naming the cord, the seven would be assumed at that point. We have C major nine, and we are voiced from the seven. So for a major nine rootless voicing, you are down a semitone and up a tone from your root. For a minor nine rootless voicing, you take the root and go up a tone and down a tone. And again, you still play your top notes just the same. So there's our sound for the minor nine, the major nine, and for the dominant chord, what you're going to do is move down a tone up a tone, but you're also going to take this fifth, which is sort of a filler note. And quite often, you'll move it up a tone as well so that you're playing a 13. Or you could think of it as a six, but on dominant chords, we're usually calling these thirteens. So again, I'll put these rootless chords that are voice from the seven within your PDF, all the major nines, all the minor nines, and all those dominant seven ad nine ad 13, whatever we're calling them. The major, minor and dominant sort of jazzified version of these rootless chords. Now for the minor seven flat five, same deal. I'll include that. If we take a diminished chord and move down a tone, up a tone from that root, you get your minor seven flat five, rootless voiced from the seventh. Now, we also have to talk about voicing these from the third. They're a little bit more simple at this point. I don't use them quite as much because I really like the crunch when we voice them from the seven. But basically, it's the same notes but inverted. So there's my C major nine. Here's first inversion, second inversion. Now, on my C chord, I'm voicing this from the third, from the E. And it looks just like an E minor seven chord. But my bass is playing a C and then me playing this rootless chord. Adds context so that it sounds like a C major nine chord. So really what we're thinking for the major chords is a major third, fifth, seventh, and ninth. That's us voicing it rootless from the third. For a minor nine chord, we're thinking flat three, five, flat seven, nine. Now it looks like a major seventh chord, but again, context. If there's a C down low, it sounds more minor, and this would be the minor nine rootless voiced from the third. Again, the dominant chord is going to access that 13th. So we have our C down low. Now we have a three, 13 flat seven and nine. And then for the minor seven flat five, if we take this shape that we had, invert it once, and invert it one more time, we end up getting what looks like a minor major seven chord. We haven't talked about these, but all you need to know is if B is our root, it's a minor third, flat five, flat seven and nine. So that would be your B minus seven flat five, rootless voice from the third. Now, all of this is super complex, right? And I get that this is a beginner's course, but I wanted to throw one thing in the course that's sort of an extra challenge. There's some things that are so simple that you'll boost your confidence, but I want to pair that with some things that are so complex that you consider yourself challenged and want to take this stuff to the next level. Now, this isn't something you're going to learn overnight. I certainly didn't, and my students don't, but you'll have the PDF to access all of those shapes. So as you're learning some jazz songs, try them out with basic voicings, where we just have the four notes all stacked on top of each other, but you can also try these rootless voicings, which sounds great. Now, that all takes me to our very final trick, which is a Bill Evans comping pattern, and we're going to use a simplified version of this pattern. If you haven't heard of Bill Evans and you haven't checked out his music, I'd highly recommend it. He is a fantastic player that really paved the way for how we approach the harmony of jazz piano. So the issue is, let's say we really like these rootless voicings. Here's my D minor nine, but I'm not playing with a bassist. So I might want to do something like a D down low. I'll hold my petal so I can move up to that D minor nine. And now the context of this D brings this all together. So it sounds like the right chord. But to now jump down to, let's say, a G and then play another rootless chord for my G dominant, and then down to the C and then play a rootless chord for my C major chord, this is a lot of stride. This is a lot of back and forth, a lot of room for error. So here's the really cool thing. If I voice D minor as a rootless chord voiced from the seven, if I then alternate voice from the seventh and then the next chord, voice from the third because we're doing a 251, right? We're doing D minor seven, G dominant to C. So D minor seven voiced from the seven, G dominant is voiced from the third, and I've only changed one note, one semitone, and then my one chord is voiced again from the seventh. So it ends up being just a couple of notes falling back into place. So it looks like this. And this is why you see jazz musicians kind of in one tight little area of the piano. They're using inversions, sometimes these rootless voicings, but they're finding ways to not have to move their hands as much, so they can focus their attention one between both hands and two to possibly some really prolific or tough right hand material. So you end up getting something like base chord. And then on the next chord, you have chord, base, and then base chord on the one. So two is base chord. Five is chord base. The one is base chord. And then maybe you want to do something kind of fancy like chord base for a six chord, which we haven't talked about, but I don't want to get too far, but it ends up sounding something like. And you're jumping back and forth a whole lot less. Now, technically, Bill Evans would also throw in some fun little rhythmic tricks that is much outside of the context of this course. I'm tempted to show you, but I really don't want to leave you flabbergasted. This has already been the toughest of all the classes within this course. But to boil down jazz so that it's simple is tough. I'm not saying it's impossible. That's why I give you a couple of simple tricks, right? Like the idea of how to swing, relatively simple basic seventh chords you put in the work. They're not so bad. But once you start talking about 251 chord progressions, rootless voicings, and then this Bill Evans comping pattern, well, now I've left you with something that's at a bit of a higher level. So although this is a course for beginners, what I can tell you is that if you could get comfortable with this class and the material within it, you're probably no longer a beginner. So this class is meant to help you sort of step up a level. But if you feel like this is too much, just take the information from this class that made sense to you, become a master of that first, and then move forward from there. So in terms of jazz pianists that you can check out, my recommendations, and these are biased to players that I like, would be to check out Bill Evans, as mentioned, Horace Silver, Bobby Timmons, and Bud Powell. Bill Evans is going to give you some beautiful sounding balleds. Check out Emily. It's one of my favorites. We had Horace Silver, who's going to add a bit of a Latin influence, and kind of it's a hard bop. It's like Blues meets jazz, but he also twists in a bit of a Latin feel. Bobby Timmons, who is straight hard bop, the language of Bebop, the language of Blues, fused together. And then Bud Powell, who's mostly Bebop, but does have some influence from Blues, as well, too. It's just, like, really fast hard bop. Don't forget to check out the PDF for this class. It's going to take me a while to put together, so you'll be doing me a favor by accessing it to make sure that it's being used. It's going to have a lot of information. Print it off, keep it by your piano, and review it so that you can understand the material and move on to your next level. So that's it for this class? I'll catch you in the next one. 12. Cinematic Piano: Alright, let's get talking about how you can create a basic cinematic piano part, and I'm going to give you five different tips. We're going to start with something very simple in terms of sound design and approach, which is you want a softer sounding piano with a large reverb. So, in other words, you want something that has a little bit of a muffle but sounds like it's in a really large room. And you also want to play generally pretty slow and pretty reflective. The piano sound that I'm using is actually not in the keyboard that I'm playing right now. It is a free piece of software if you do have a DAW of some sort, I would recommend check out labs, which is a sampler by Spitfire. And they have some free labs libraries that you can access. And the soft piano is the sound that I'm going to be using, and it sounds like this. Everything you play with this sound, if the reverb is up and you play slowly, it ends up sounding very cinematic. So I'd highly recommend get labs by Spitfire and download a few of their piano libraries and make sure that you get that soft piano. The felt and the cassette piano are also very good options as well, too. So in terms of what harmony you could use while doing something cinematic, you can stay diatonic. You can stay true to the chords that are available within some sort of scale. But I'd also recommend trying out borrowed harmony or parallel harmony. So borrowed harmony or parallel harmony is the idea of taking a scale like C minor, extracting all of its chords, and C major, extracting all of its chords and interchanging between the two. So maybe I start with C minor. But then I choose an F major chord from my C major scale. One more time. Sounds kind of like something you hear from the Avengers or something of the like. Another progression that I really like, and it's quite common is taking a major one chord like C major and moving to the third chord that's available in the parallel minor scale or the sixth chord, in this case, E flat major or A flat major. Now, listen to how sort of godly this sounds. It's mysterious, it's huge. It's like universal sounding. Allow me to show you. It sounds like this. As to the A flat, and that's the E flat major. So this idea of borrowed harmony is really worth exploring because what ends up happening is your two chord chord progressions, which don't really get in the way of the story of whatever cinematic thing that you're scoring too. After all, a lot of the time we're underscoring, we're doing something light that's considered background music. If you just wanted to use a couple of chords, they need to have impact. So I'd highly recommend exploring borrowed harmony because it's a little bit of a jarring shift, but if you find the right chords to move to, it's just really intriguing and really does tell a bit of a story and inflict some emotion behind what's happening on the screen. The next tip I'm going to give you is to try flamming some right hand octaves. Maybe you could call this kind of arpeggiating, but it's only two notes. In drumming, a flam is something like Now, that's a really loose flam dt Dat. But really, one after another is kind of what you're going for here. So it sounds like thumb pinky, thumb pinky, you end up getting a sound like this. And in my left hand, I'm going to supply an open voice chord. Let's say F minor to B flat major. That's the minor one to the major four borrowed harmony, like we just talked about. It would sound something like this. There's just something very, like rain droppy about it. Even though we're flamming up through these notes, it's like this crystallized version of a piano sound, and it feels like distant memories. I just really does inflict a particular emotion, depending on the scene that you're scoring. Another thing you can try out is a more advanced open voiced left hand. And in fact, because we're trying to underscore and not really get in the way too much, you can kind of start this in the left hand and then use the right hand to help you out a bit. So let's say I have a C minor chord, open voiced, C, G, E flat, and then my right hand is going to play a couple notes kind of close to where the left hand is, but continuing the pattern upward. It might sound something like this. So do you see what I'm going for there? Now, again, that's replacing this idea of something like all in the left hand. Because we're not trying to do too much over top, and again, we're staying kind of behind the scenes and underscoring, you can make it sound like your left hand is doing something quite advanced when really, your right hand is there to help you with those top notes. Now, hypothetically, if you are scoring for film, you could do all of that with both hands and then add another layer because you're in this recorded environment of the higher notes afterwards and achieve what sounds like an almost impossible piano part, but at the same time, still feels kind of subdued and simple, which is a hard balance to strike, but I think that's a really good starting point. The last tip I'm going to give you is another simple one. After all, we're trying to keep things simple. It's the idea of taking a chord in the right hand, playing it quite high, and oscillating the top two notes down to the bottom note. You don't even really need any left hand to go with this. I can give you some options, but the idea is the right hand will stand on its own just fine. Let's take F minor, put it in first inversion, and then go to a C major chord, second inversion. It might sound something like this. So it pair very well with some strings like cello, maybe some low strings, cello viola. We can add a left hand And then eventually finishing on an F or the root. Now, you might have noticed I went from the third to the root of my F minor chord, and then I went from the third to the fifth of my C major chord. I wasn't really supplying any low roots until the very end when you finish everything. Now that's one example of what you can do in your left hand, and the other one is what I would call a big octave. Really, it's just an octave, but I want you to lean into it a little bit. It might sound something like this. So on and so forth. Now, I'll admit this particular piano sound is sampled in such a way that it's a little bit hard to get a really big slam in that left hand. So depending on the piano part that you're creating, you might want to explore what sort of sampled piano sound you're working with. But what I can tell you with confidence is that this soft piano by labs, again, totally free, works really, really well in most cases, whenever you're looking for that cinematic piano sound, set the reverb to about 11:00. It's just one big dial. Set it pretty close to halfway, and you're ready to go. Of course, you could crank the reverb a little bit more, but at that point, it gets a little bit heavy handed. Cinematic piano music is pretty easy to find. Whether you're on Spotify or Apple music or wherever you're listening to your music, even on YouTube, just check out some playlists and you'll find some really great examples. Now, Hans Zimmer does come to mind, especially his soundtrack for Interstellar. There's some really great piano themes in there. From time to time, John Williams, like ET, creates some really beautiful piano themes. But again, you can start really simple and just check out a playlist of cinematic piano and you'll start to see what I'm talking about with the melo piano sounds, huge reverb, nice and slow and a few simple harmonic tricks. Don't forget there's going to be a PDF for this class to help guide you through just in case you're the type of learner that prefers to see things on the page, I got you covered. That's it for this class, and I'll catch you in the next one. 13. Romantic: O Let's get talking about some romantic piano. Now, what I'm talking about is piano that sounds like it's from the romantic era. Cinematic piano and piano ballads could be considered romantic. Maybe they're very loving and touching and heartfelt. But what I'm talking about specifically are the sort of compositional tricks by composers such as Chopin, List, Schumann, Schubert, Chikovski, so on and so forth. So romantic era music. Now, similar to jazz, a few of the chords in the romantic era are going to use more than three notes. So if we were to go through something like the A natural minor scale and go through with four notes on each of these chords, there's one that is extra significant, and that was the second chord that I played in this case, B minor seven flat five. It doesn't matter that it's B in this case, but minor seven flat five built on the second note of a minor scale. This is a very significant sound to the romantic era. Partially because we can play this as a two chord. So if you have a chord progression that uses a two chord at some point, you could try this chord instead if it's in a minor key, and it'll give you a little bit more of that romantic sound. But you can also invert that chord. So it functions as a romantic sounding four chord. Now the left hand and the right hand are built off the D. If I move up again, I have a flat six chord that's extra unique. And if I move up one more time, we get this A with a B diminished just above it. And that's the third inversion of that particular chord. So even just playing something like A minor, and then that last chord I talked about, very devastating. Its a beautiful sound to it. So we're going to focus in this class on the two and the four. So the two minor seven flat five built off the second note of my A minor scale, and the fourth note will give us a D minor six chord because it's a minor chord and we've added a six on top. For anyone that's still a bit confused, all I'm really saying is that the B minor seven flat five, in this case, built off the second note of A minor when you put it in first inversion. If you take the D that's on the bottom and supply that in the left hand as well, too, then you get a really great sounding four chord that can also work in romantic harmony. So let's say you have a progression and it's one, two, five, one. This minor seven flat five built off the two is a really beautiful sort of mysterious sound that works really well for romantic harmony. Same thing if you have one, four, five, one. Let's try that fancy four, where we're putting a six, one tone above the top note of that chord. It sounds like this. And that's just a basic 1451. But that four chord, just spicing it up a little bit with that six really does, again, sound very mysterious. And I think that because romantic music was really intrigued with what made humans feel emotion, rather than the technical theoretical side that Baroque and classical music took, where they were really trying to flesh out harmonic ideas, a lot of that groundwork had already been set. So at this point in the romantic era, it was more about seeing how we can connect as humans and get people to feel even more emotion with our music. There's nearly an infinite amount of chord progressions that we could go through in terms of how to use this fancy two and this fancy four chord. I do have a whole course specifically on romantic harmony called Romantic Harmony one oh one, where we start nice and simple, and I give you plenty of applications and examples using these chords. But for now, I'll give you one more example for each of those progressions. Let's try 16251 and 16451. The two and the four, we're going to use these fancy romantic versions. Staying in A minor because it's nice and simple, we would have 16, two, Five. There's that fancy 21 more time with a four. One, six, four, five, back to one. Now, I had also mentioned that if you take the minor seven flat five and raise it up to inversions, now the flat six is on the bottom of this cord. It's a very fancy cord. You would have to name it something like a flat six cord with a six and a flat five. It's a mouthful, and it's very confusing because you're saying it's a six chord with a six and it just doesn't make sense. I would instead say a second inversion, minus seven flat five in replacement of some sort of six chord. We could go one fancy six, fancy four, fancy two, five. And then you're getting a really romantic sounding chord progression at that point. Now, minor seven flat five is the same as a half diminished chord because it's a diminished chord, but with a minor seven instead of a diminished seven. But I'd like to take some time to talk about the diminished seven chord because it's also a chord that was used a lot in the romantic era. Now if we're taking our harmonic minor scale, let's move over to C minor just to mix things up. The diminished seventh chord is built off of the seventh note, but we could then invert it. So it's built off of the second, fourth, and the flat sixth note as well, too. So this diminished chord works really well to replace any of those seven, two, four or flat six chords that you might be trying. Now, admittedly the seven chord is already going to be diminished. But something like your four chord could be minor, but we could instead play it as a diminished chord. The flat six chord could be major or the fancy chord that we talked about, which is the second inversion minor seven flat five. I don't want to get too technical, but instead of that chord or a major chord, we could play a diminished seventh chord. So let's try this up. We're in C minor. Let's do a one, four, five, one go to make the four a fully diminished chord. It would sound like this. Let's try it with a flat six. One, flat six, five, one, and the flat six, I'll play as a fully diminished. Now we're gonna get sneaky. Let's try a 141. But what I'll do is I'll interchange the four as a minor four into a diminished four and then come back. Because both are options, you can kind of change them on the spot. Now, I never used to understand, for example, how Beethoven in his moonlight sonata, could just change a chord quality from minor to major or from minor to diminished. He does a lot of these sort of chord changes on the same root. But when you start to think of harmony as having multiple options and just exploring both options while on a specific scale degree, like a minor four and then a diminished 74, it starts to make a lot more sense. So here it is minor one, four, diminished four, back to one. Now, as a little side note, if your melody note is one of those four notes, the seven, the two, the four or the flat six, pair it with a diminished chord that is omitting that note. In other words, it's not playing that note. So you can have an A flat in your melody. Try going down one of those options. So from the flat six down to the four, play your diminished chord without the flat six. You could have this sound or you could build it off of the two. And again, no flat six. Both sound fantastic, and then you're not doubling this note and creating more tension down where the harmony is a bit thicker. You're alleviating some of the tension. The diminished chord is still going to be quite tense, but you're letting the melody sing out a little bit more. So as an example, let's say my melody is GGA flat, GF, E flat. On the A flat, we could try a D diminished seven or an F diminished seven, just not playing the A flat. It might sound something like this. So there's lots of cool things you can do with these diminished chords. But again, the scale degrees when you're in a minor key that you really want to think about are seven, two, four, and the flat six. Now, this is also kind of true for major. The flat six is not a note that would be in a major scale. In C major, we don't have an A flat. In harmonic major, yeah, technically, but not many people are using that scale. But we still have a seven, a two and a four. So again, you can substitute, for example, the four being a major chord with a diminished chord. So, for example, we see this in the first couple bars of Claire D Lun, something like there's our one chord, C Sharp major F sharp diminished seven. That is the fourth note or the fourth chord option within C sharp major. So while the seven is already going to be a diminished seventh chord, try replacing a two or a four chord instead of being minor two or major four as a diminished seven on the two or diminished seven on the four, you get a really fun result. Let's get fancy. Let's try a one, two, four, one chord progression. The two, I'm going to make a diminished seven. The four, I'm going to play major, and then I'm going to make it a diminished seven, as well. It might sound like this. Twists, it turns. It sounds generally romantic, but it leaves some room to be developed. That's a more bare bones example. The next trick I'm going to show you is really simple. We're going to go back into a minor environment, and it's a melodic trick. And it's just the idea of surrounding the fifth of whatever key you're in chromatically with semitones above and also below. So we have above, for example, C minor or fifth is G. Above that, we have a flat six, which is already native to our minor key, whether it's natural or harmonic. But we also have the sharp four. One of my favorite composers, Danny Elfman uses this sharp four over a minor sound quite a bit, or even on a major sound. Right, in the Simpsons theme. And just generally, you'll hear this sharp four come up a lot because he has this sort of gothic orchestral sound, and after all, the sharp four something very sinister about it. So let's try lingering around the five but playing semitones above and below. You'll see right away, it sounds quite romantic. Sounds like this. So, there it is nice and slow, but you could also try it as a bit more of an ornament. Really surrounding that fifth. When you get comfortable with that sound, you can try it on other pitches. But from experience, it tends to work best on the fifth of the home key. If you're doing something like a one to a five chord progression like I was, that note five is common between both of those chords. So you can dance around on the one, dance around on the five chord, and it works just the same. Next up, in the romantic era, waltzes were quite popular. This idea of boom, cha, cha, boom, cha, cha, in the left hand, having some sort of a low note going up to a chord two times. Now, this isn't meant to be as difficult as something like stride piano. Where you're tripling up the beat. So you have something like this. It's really slow. You get to take your time with it, and you can even start with something like instead of a low C up to a couple of C minor chords, play a C that's kind of low so you can complete the chord just above. If you try that down here, it's just too mucky, so bring it up. And this general version of a waltz is a very simple version, works quite well. Let's try that melodic trick. Maybe a fancy chord? Okay, so I was using the second inversion of the minor seven flat five, as well as the first inversion. So when we're in C minor, D minus seven flat five is the minor seven flat five chord built off the second note. I was using the first inversion of that F minus six, as well as the second inversion, which I'm not going to name because it's way too complex. Second inversion, minus seven flat five is how we're thinking about that. But the point here as you can see I'm combining a lot of these tricks together because as you start to combine them, it becomes more authenticated where it really feels like it's from that a melody is using some tricks from that era. We have this waltz rhythm that's helping us out, as well as some harmony to help supply that foundation for that romantic sound. The last trick I want to mention is something Chopin did a lot, but List did as well, too, and I'm sure tons of other composers from that time did, which is these big ornamental runs in the right hand. It ends up sounding something like this. Okay, so I'm improvising, so it wasn't really worked out, but you get the idea there's these big runs. Now, they can be scale runs, but they also use a lot of chromatics and you can base things around chords. So let's have a C minor chord. We could have something like semitone into the G, semitone into the E flat, semitone into the C, so on and so forth, and you end up getting this sort of sound. Okay, so you can see we have this twisting and turning. So I'm kind of really playing around with these semitones beside the main notes of my chord. And this is also really true in jazz. It's approached slightly differently. We're not swinging the rhythm, we're not accenting the upbeats, but it still generally applies the same way. So that's it for my tips and tricks on how to sound more romantic at the beginner level. And again, if you want to take this one step further, I would recommend check out my course on Romantic Harmony one oh one where I go through a whole lot of romantic for now, in this course, I wanted to give five solid tricks for each genre, so we're capped out on romantic, and I'll catch you in the next class. 14. Outro: Well, congratulations on finishing this course on ten different piano styles for beginners. Again, even if you're not a beginner and you took this course, I totally get it. Many pianists don't know ten styles already. So if you took this course, just to supplement some of your playing and explore some new styles, that's fantastic. But if you're a beginner and you decided to go through this, then clearly you're very passionate about music in a very broad sort of way. Maybe you like classical, maybe you like jazz, maybe you like drum and bass, maybe you like cinematic piano. And you don't know where you want to take music, or maybe you want to work on fusing these genres together to create a whole new genre all your own. And to that point, fusing genres is great for modern producers because hip hop is taking influence from electronic, is taking influence from Classic is taking influence from jazz. So why not start to fuse them together to create a new sound within today's technological musical limits? I hope at this point you can pick one or two of the styles as your favorites because I think it's important to be passionate about some styles until they sort of run dry a little bit. So I know, for me, that was electronic music, and I just listen to it to the point where I'm like, Okay, what are some other styles kind of similar? Well, I like music production, so I started to listen to hip hop. And from there, I got into jazz because the sole R&B and funk influence on hip hop was all influenced from jazz. So it becomes this cascading sort of musical development in terms of your education. So what I'm trying to say here is, hopefully you picked out a couple of styles that you feel really passionate about that you can now explore a little bit deeper. We've covered some styles that are fantastic if you play in bands. Right? We've talked about blues, rock, jazz, even Reggae, and ska. But if you're a solo pianist, that's totally fine, too. Jazz also works in a solo piano atmosphere as well as blues, but at the same time, we've covered classical, we've covered cinematic piano and balllad piano, and we've even dipped our toes into some more newer styles like 90s dance music. Okay, not that new, but compared to, like, jazz from the 40s and drum and bass, which admittedly was kind of an interesting pick on my end intentionally because I wanted to make sure that modern music producers understood it's not all about synthesis and sound design. There is quite a bit of piano theory that can go into achieving the sound of some of these genres like house, drum and bass, electro, so on and so forth. Don't forget there is a class project within this course where you're going to be taking a song that you know, whether it's a cover or an original and simply changing its style to something fresh. So maybe you take Hey Jude by the Beatles and do a reggae version. And by the way, if you're interested to hear that, check out the Easy Star All stars. They're fantastic. So just remember to catch all those details on the class specifically for the class project. Also, you can learn more about me as a teacher and a composer at Cook hyphen music.ca. From there, you can find me on social media like Instagram, Tik Tok, et cetera. But if you want to bypass that, you can find me easily at Let's Cook Music on Instagram. And on YouTube, you can find me at youtube.com slash at Cook Hyphen Music, where you can find some videos that I've put up that are supplementary course materials. So overlap with a couple of my courses, but if you haven't taken them all, they're free previews at this point, as well as some of the video based projects that I've been working on over the years compositionally. I also do have a music store where I sell my own original piano music, and if you're interested to check that out, you can head over to Cookmusic dot store. So that's it for now. One more time. I want to say thank you for taking this course and congratulations on getting all the way through it. I do want to mention that if you enjoyed this course, please do feel free to give a rating or a review as they do go a long way towards my teacher rating to help attract new students to find this material. Lastly, I just want to say, make sure that you're taking this material to your private teacher, if you have one. If you don't, I offer virtual lessons with a team of teachers, and you can find out more at cookmusicschool.ca. Make sure you review this course as many times as you need to. Some of the material is quite dense, especially the class on jazz. Depending on what you want to do with this material, I think it's going to be worth exploring pretty much all the classes a few times just so that this material sinks in a little bit deeper. And aside from just going through the course a few times, make sure you're practicing this material. I always recommend minimum three days a week on your instrument, but preferably up around five days a week. If you have any questions or comments, shoot me a message. One last time. Congratulations, and thank you for taking the course, and I'll catch you in the next one.