Contemporary Piano Improvisation 101

1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my course on contemporary piano Improvisation one oh one. This course is going to have some very unique nuggets of information and some exercises that I'm sure you have not tried before. So let's dive in to what this course offers. From left hand open voice chords to borrowed harmony to chord progressions used in film scores, we're really going to be approaching contemporary piano improvisation from many different angles. I'm going to challenge your hands in some different ways, but I'm also going to help you become a more versatile pianist. That is ultimately one of the biggest goals of this particular course, because in contemporary piano, we have lots of styles that we can take influence from. So I want to make sure that you're able to be a hybrid pianist yourself. And after taking this course, I think that's exactly what you're going to be. A well rounded pianist ready for whatever's thrown at you. We're also going to get off the keys a little bit with a fun clapping exercise, and we will also be diving into polyrhythms. So rhythmically, I think there's also a lot that you can take out of this course. There's also going to be lots of PDFs along the way. So whether you want to be learning specifically through the videos or also have some supplementary material to help you approach these exercises and techniques and concepts from various angles, I got you covered. Now, there is going to be a class project for this course. And quite simply put, you're going to be improvising and you're going to be sharing that improvisation with me, and you're going to use some of the techniques from within this course. And so I'll help you understand what you did best and what areas you need to improve. But so often within my courses, I'm really trying to help you find out what type of pianist you want to be. So by doing a particular type of improvisation, using certain material from specific classes within this course, you're already going to start to shine some light on what type of pianist you want to be and what that piano pathway through your musicianship looks like. And from there, you can develop that further in that direction so that you're feeling passionate at your instrument, becoming very good at something specific, and also just generally feeling like a pianist. I am very much looking forward to sharing these concepts with you as I use them in my own improvisation. So let's start to dive in. Can't wait to see you in the first class. I'll see you there. 2. Class Project: For this class project, you're going to be recording a short improvisation. I want you to use at least two of the techniques that I've provided within this course. You can either fuse them together in a unique way or possibly play them back to back. Really, it's up to you, but you need to hit at least two of these techniques. Now, your video submission doesn't have to be super high quality. I just need to be able to see things and hear things properly so that I can give you feedback. But that being said, if you're shy and you just want to submit an audio recording, that's fine, as well, too. For an audio recording, I'd recommend submitting through either SoundCloud or YouTube with just a black background for your video. And then, of course, for a video submission, I would recommend YouTube or video. Make sure that you're supplying me with a public link so that I can easily view your submission. Now, either at the end of your audio or video submission or within the course description, I want you to explain to me why you chose those two techniques. Now, I say explain to me, but you're also kind of explaining to yourself. The hope is within this description, you'll be able to say why you liked those two techniques, and as a result of that, you're going to sort of show yourself what you appreciated about those techniques and where you might want to take your own direction as an improviser and as a musician. To just blindly go through all these classes, you'll still take something out of it. But I think it's important for every musician to have something that they excel at, but also something that they really appreciate within music or maybe many areas. Most of my projects, have you really questioning what it is you enjoyed about the course and then having some project that gets you to apply that material. Now, once you've submitted your project, I'll give you some feedback as to what I think you did well and areas of improvement. Again, this doesn't have to be a masterpiece. Just make sure that you're getting the ball rolling, doing an improvisation, applying some of the material from within this course, especially the material that you enjoyed the most. Make sure that you're doing this project on a day that you feel camera ready where you're feeling energized and enthusiastic to record the material. At the end of the day, this should be a fun process. So I hope you have fun with this course project, and I'll catch you in the next class. 3. Left Hand Open Voiced Chords: Alright, as we go through this course, the classes are going to get a little more wild and crazy, but why don't we start off with something relatively simple and discuss left hand open voiced chords? This is something that I've touched upon in other courses, but I think it's really important within improvisation because it means that you're not just plunking a chord and holding it or maybe breaking it up, but you're always stuck with this very small shape. A lot of great improvisers, especially when they're playing something like balllad music or something cinematic on the piano, are going to take advantage of these left hand open voiced chords. So let's talk about it. Why don't we start with a C major chord? This is known as a close or closed voiced chord. The notes are closed together, and the middle note is closed within the outside notes, the C and the G, in this case. Think of it like these are the walls of a jail, and E in the middle is closed into that jail. But we're going to break it out of jail. We're going to open up that note, one octave higher. So now, as you can see, this is quite a stretch, and there are many pianists that can make this stretch, but there's also many that cannot. So the idea is with open voiced chords, generally, you're going to lineate them. And there's two main ways that you're going to lineate based on if your song is in 34 or 44, basically, if it has three main beats or four main beats. Let's start with 44 as it tends to be the more common time signature. So what we're going to do is player pinky always on this bottom. And then we're going to play a finger two on the fifth. Now instead of the thumb being on that fifth, like a close voiced chord, we're going to stretch the hand out a bit more so that two plays the G, and now the thumb can swing up to the top note. In this case, E. Notice my pinky over here has let go. Now, you don't even necessarily have to hold the G. You could sort of come off of it, but I would recommend holding it if you can, because it acts sort of as this anchor point for swinging the hand. I'm tucking my elbow in a bit as I'm moving that thumb and then we're back down. So just try that with your elbow, pull in, pull out, and then we're back pinky on C. Pull the elbow in. It's coming in here as I swing my thumb up, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. There's our four beats. Even though we have three notes, the middle note is played two times. So you get low, middle, high, middle. This works for every major and every minor chord. The fingering can stay the same, as long as you're just playing basic major and minor chords. Now, if you're playing a song in three, four, you would just move up to the top note and then come back down to the bottom note. I have seen occasionally a low, high, middle, low high middle sort of sound, but I'd say 90% of the time, you're going to see this moving up through all three notes. So whether we have something like one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, or one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one. Either way, that left hand is going to supply a fantastic way for you to stretch out your chords in both the time signatures of 34 and 44. Now for seventh chords, you could play one, five, three, and then cross over to some type of seventh. In the case of C minus seven, C, E flat, G, B flat, you would play C, G, E flat, B flat, root, fifth, third, seventh as a starting point. But the problem here is that it's very widespread. Take a look. This is how wide that first chord is and if we move it around to other chords, we're occupying a large space on the piano. So I'd recommend instead try something like five, three, two, one for fingerings. And for scale degrees, it's root, fifth, seventh, third. Now, this fingering might not work for every single chord. You're going to have to experiment a little bit. Here's the thing, though. I chords, we don't need a fifth. If it's a major chord or a minor chord, the fifth is encouraged because the chord is very thin. It's not even technically a triad, at that point. There's not even three notes, but it just sounds like a diad two notes, a skip, a third, whatever you want to call it, doesn't feel like full harmony. But once we add a fourth note, now we can subtract that fifth. And we're going to still have a sound that sounds fine. Now we can do something like root seventh, third, instead of root fifth, third, like our more standard open voice chord. And this way, we can do the same return back to the middle note. We have this root seventh, third, seventh sort of sound. Doing it the other way doesn't quite make sense because if you have root, third, seventh. Well, that's just omitting the fifth. That's not really open voice. And if you have root third, seventh, something like that, it's just way too spread out. So you can ask yourself, do I want to play the fifth of this chord? If so, you're probably going to be playing one, two, three, four, just up through the four notes. If you get rid of the fifth, you can have one, two, three, four. And getting rid of the fifth also allows you to play this seventh chord in three, four time signatures. Root seventh, third, root seventh, third. So you have plenty of options based on those four note chords. Now, if you're wondering why can we get rid of the fifth? Think about the function of each note in a chord. Do I need a C in a C major seven chord? Yeah, I do. Do I need the seventh? In a C major seventh chord? Sure, do. Do I need the note that makes it major, the third in a C major seventh chord? Yes. C major seven. Don't need the fifth. The fifth is like flour to gravy. It's just going to thicken it. It's not going to change. Flavor. So those are some quick tips for left hand open voice chords that work with major, minor, major seven, minor seven, and dominant seven chords. In fact, any other four note chord, you just have to make sure that you're considering what fingering makes the most sense for that shape. So that's it for this class on open voice chords, and I'll catch you in the next class where we're going to talk about borrowed harmony. I'll see you there. 4. Borrowed Harmony: Alright, let's get talking about borrowed harmony. Sometimes this is known as parallel harmony, but borrowed as a term comes up a little bit more often. The term borrowed harmony comes from the fact that if we're playing in a major key, we are borrowing chords from the parallel minor key. Hence, the term that also works parallel minor. If I'm in a minor key, I'm borrowing chords from the parallel major key. Allow me to explain. So if we're in C major, many of you know, going through all these white note chords, these are our options in C major. If I now go through C minor, let's say C natural minor, I have a different set of chords available. One common thing that you'll see is within a chord progression. This works a lot in cinematic music, but also bands like Radiohead do this a lot. One chord, maybe two will be substituted from that parallel key. If I'm in, let's say, C major and I'm playing one to four, to a five and then back to one. Something that you'll see is something like this major one to a minor four. And then still the same five G major, and then back to C. Do you see this a lot in this sort of romantic sounding progression where there's like C major, F major, F minor, and then back to C. This is even from Mario, this whole right? So that's one of my favorite little sort of cadences for anything romantic and sort of melancholy at the end. So I use that a lot in cinematic progressions in various ways. So in that case, we're taking the one chord from C major, the four chord from C major, changing it to the four chord from C minor, and then we're back to C major. Let's try a couple other progressions using C major and C minor as our two main keys. This time, let's try A 141 chord progression in C minor, but we're going to borrow the four chord. So instead of playing F minor, we're going to play F major. We're going to borrow it from C major. So it sounds like this. C minor to F major. And then back to C. This is used a lot in Marvel movies. It has a very heroic sort of sound. So one of my favorite movements is, like, C minor to A flat major, this sort of one to six or one to flat six chord progression. You put in lots of variations to sort of color it. But what you'll hear in Marvel movies is this one minor flat six major. And then they borrow that four chord from the major key. So it sounds like this. Very heroic sounding. So we've borrowed the four chord from the major key. So something else that's kind of cool is if you consider that C minor and E flat major are relative keys. So C minor has the same set of notes as E flat major, then you could do this whole major one on E flat, major four, minor four, and then back to a major one. So we're just trying that same progression. But instead of in C major, we're trying it in the relative major of C minor. So C minus relative major is E flat, one, four, minor, four, one. This is a unique coord right here, this A flat minor that we can now sort of pull back into C minor. If it's available in E flat major, why can't we make it available in C minor? So we might get something that sounds kind of like this. 13. And then the flat six minor. This gets used sometimes in, like, Disney progressions. I think the song that comes to mind is Remember Me from the movie Coco. So feel free to go through that, but it has, at some point, while it's in C minor, it has this really unique A flat minor chord. And I remember thinking in the moment. I'm like, How are they justifying that? Well, I think it's coming from frame of thought of E flat major, the relative major and going to that four chord and borrowing from that other parallel minor key. So in this case, E flat minors four chord. It's getting kind of advanced because we're going like, layer into layer of relative keys and all this other stuff. But I'm just showing you that you can think outside of the box once you've already thought outside of the box. If you understand borrowed or parallel harmony, you can then start to think about, how do keys relate, and how can I borrow from those keys? It does give some kind of adventurous results, but that's what we're here for. So let's say you took something like C major, right, and you're doing an open voice chord F minor. Okay? So it has this bitter sweet sort of sound? So now you're combining borrowed harmony and open voiced chords. The point of this course is to be able to give you all these little modules that you can work with while you're improvising. I can't show you every way that all of these combine because it's probably infinite or nearly endless. So make sure that you're experimenting with different combinations based on which techniques you like the most. So one, four and five are really common chords within any progression. We've done a lot of one to four variations where the four is borrowed. Let's try some fives that are borrowed. If I'm in C major, five is G major. Let's make it G minor. So it would sound like this. This, to me, sounds very kingly. It sounds like it comes from the Mixolydian mode, but we're thinking of it as something borrowed from C minor. So it ends up sounding kind of like this Lord of the Rings. If you've watched the movies, you might recognize that sound. So again, very kingly. But if we take C minor, there's really no sense borrowing the five chord from the major because in C minor, we have natural minor scales, which give us a minor five chord, and we have harmonic minor scales, which give us a major five chord. So one way or another, if we're playing C minor to G major, we're generally not thinking of this as borrowed harmony from C major. Because it's actually available in C harmonic minor. But having said that, let's say you're playing a chord progression that is in C natural minor and you do this for a while, and then you borrow from C harmonic minor, you can take these minor scales and their different variations and sort of pivot between them. It's sort of like a nod to borrowed harmony, but I don't know that it would exactly be classified. As borrowed harmony. So my tip to you is to write down all the chords, for example, in C major, and all the chords in C minor, maybe both natural and harmonic. Play around with one of the progressions you're working with and start swapping out one of the chords for a chord from the borrowed key. So for example, if your chord progression is one, six, four, five in C major, maybe the six comes from C minor. Maybe the four comes from C minor or five comes from C minor. Let's try those out to finish up this class and see which one sticks and sounds the best. Let's go for it. One borrowed six. Four, five, again, kind of Marvel esque. One, six, borrowed four, five, back to one. That one works. One, six, four, borrowed five, back to one. I think my favorites were the one borrowed six, four, but I wouldn't go to the 501, six, borrowed four. And still, I wouldn't go to the five. I think they sounded great even on their own. But again, it wasn't until we experimented with this that we were able to come up with the sound that we like. Also, if you want to do a lot of songwriting moving forward, start to experiment with a lot of the basic chord progressions, do as many borrowed variations as you can think of, and create a notebook where you put in your more unique chord progressions and how you think they work in terms of evoking certain emotions. This is really important for cinematic composers to be able to make sure that when they're seeing a scene, they understand the emotion, and they can instantly or nearly instantly think of the harmony that they want to apply to that scene. At least as a starting point, we don't want to have the same tricks in every film, but it's good to know how certain progressions evoke certain emotions. So that's it for this class on borrowed harmony. I'll catch you in the next class, but we're going to talk about two handed arpeggios. I'll see you there. 5. 2 Handed Arpeggios: This next class is a bit of an overlap with one of my other courses, ten exercises to improve your piano chord playing. It's called flashy arpeggio in that class. In this class, we're calling it something a little bit different but it's essentially the same thing. That being said, I'm not trying to cheat and stretch out the concept. It does legitimately work really well within contemporary improvisation. I can't assume you've taken all my courses. So just to let you know this is a bit of an overlap, but we're going to dive in to the two handed arpeggios. Let's talk about them. Simply put, what you're going to do is play any chord in your left hand, preferably three notes, and then the same chord in your right hand lineated moving higher. So up through the three notes of F major, up through the three notes of F major and try sort of strumming. Doesn't have to be a super fast strum, but just get them all in succession. Once you've reached this top note, your left hand is going to cross over and play any note from the key you're in. So if I'm in F major, I could play any of the notes within an F major scale. But for now, let's just stick with the root, so we have. There's our root and then right hand back down. And as the right hand's coming back down, the left hand crosses back and returns. You get a sound like this, and I'm going to add the petal. It makes it sound better. If you make mistakes, it will make it sound worse. But don't make mistakes. Practice, so that you don't kidding. You'll make some mistakes, but just keep in mind the petal will make it sound better. It sounds like this. Okay. Now, in this last part, instead of doing a B flat major chord, I did a root fifth octave and then a first inversion. The point is that you're playing three notes from your chord in the left hand and three notes from your chord in the right hand. You need to make sure that all three notes are covered, so we don't have a D in this left hand, so I have to make sure that my right hand has it. And in this case, I crossover to the third of this B flat major chord. So root position, root position, root fifth octave, first inversion with a different note, not the root as part of that crossover. You can start to really experiment. You could do a root fifth seventh in the left hand, a root, third octave. You could do open voice. It's a little tougher in terms of the speed. So something like a little bit more room for inaccuracies, but it does sound great. So the point is three notes from your harmony in the left hand, three notes from the harmony in the right hand. Between the two hands, you should be covering all the notes within that harmony. So, for example, on a C major seven chord, your left hand might have root fifth, seventh, but I don't have a third, so my right hand will need to cover the third. Maybe now I have a third, fifth, and a root. There's the sound, and then you incorporate the cross. Okay. So what I was doing on that C chord is also kind of interesting. I had this pattern that we talked about, and I'm just coming down through all the notes pretty standard. So this is once you reach the top note, you come down two notes, and then you play another melodic note, and then you come down two notes, triple, one, two, one, two, three. So we're really working with these triplets. You could even turn this into its own exercise just to get used to that feeling. So we've covered lots of variations from being able to do a simple root position root position cross root position rout position cross to not the root, but another note from your key, left hand being not root position, but more spread out and right hand being able to play inversions. And then the idea that if you want to develop a melody up top, you don't always have to complete the whole pattern. Find ways to play pieces of the pattern so that your melody can ring out. Even something like Mary Had a Little Lamb. Let's say we have this E happening here. Right? This isn't the full exercise, but just showing you that it's a melodic note. And then, generally, we're completing this triplet. So triple triple, triple, triple, triple, triple, triple. The melody still rings out and the harmony is completed. So this sort of sound works really well for, like, bridges or breaks or some sort of a different sound outside of your initial improv. You could base a whole improvisation around this sound, but I'd recommend that if you have something blocked or very juxtaposed to this sort of sound and you're about to dive into a new section, try something more broken like this, and the flashiness is a fun change of pace before you eventually maybe come back to that original sound to complete your improv. So there it is. The two handed arpeggios ultimately much easier at the end of the day than a one handed arpeggio. You studied classical music, you're going to find this to be quite a breeze, but make sure that you don't breeze over it and give it a good try. So that's it for this class on two handed arpeggios, I'll catch you in the next class where we talk about film score style chord progressions. I'll see you there. 6. Cinematic Chord Progressions: Oh. Let's get talking about film score style chord progressions. Something like a standard one, four, five, one that we learn from classical music and we find in pop music might not translate to a film score, as well as something that is meant to evoke more emotion. Listen to this more unconventional chord progression, starting on C minor. E flat minor, F sharp minor, A minor, and then back to a C minor. In this case, I was moving through minor chords through a diminished seventh shape. Now I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but I'm showing you these are all minor chords. They're not from any one particular key, and yet it sounds great. I stole that chord progression from the early X men movies, I think early 2000 is when they came out. But I heard that progression, and I was wondering, what's going on here. Actually bought the book with many of the main themes, and a couple of times I saw this progression being used. So it's kind of evil, mysterious, but also magical at the same time. So that opens up our first discussion of keeping the same chord quality and moving it around. You're going to want to try many variations of this because it can give very different sounds. But, for example, if I'm only using minor chords, I'm going to get a sad or spooky sound. If I'm only using major chords, I'm going to get a sort of heroic or happy sort of sound. About to dive into a couple of my favorites. So, off the bat, that is one of my favorites. Moving minor chords by minor thirds. In other words, C minor up three semitones, E flat minor up three semitones, F sharp minor up three semitones, A minor, and then eventually back to C. Now, you don't have to complete that whole run of chords. You could just have C minor and then maybe down to A minor. Very evil layer sort of sound. You could even try jumping. So C, let's not go to the E flat minor. We're going to jump to the F sharp minor. So C minor, F sharp minor. E flat minor, A minor. And then back to C. So if you like the sound of each of these individually, try mixing them up in different ways. If you're John Williams, you might take minor chords and have them accommodate some sort of a melody. Like from Harry Potter, for example, we have this What if I make this melody note the top note of a minor chord and I move around those minor chords? Now we have something that sounds like one of the classic Harry Potter themes, and we're only using minor chords to accommodate the movement of a melody. Again, back to our Mary Had a Little Lamb example, we're gonna try this with minor chords and major chords. It doesn't always work as well as you'd expect. John Williams is a bit of a master of this, but it's definitely an option that's on the table. Let's try it with minor chords first. It would sound like this. Or major chords. Sounds right. Maybe not the best example using Mary Had a Little Lamb, but you can see we can take our melody and make it the top note of some sort of a major or minor chord. Now, for that last example, this Mary Had a Little Lamb melody was moving by tones, and that actually transitions me well to one of my other favorite film score style chord progressions, which is moving major chords by tones. It gives a very jokey kind of kid like child like sort of sound, but it can work quite well. Let's say I have a whole tone scale like C to D to E to F sharp, to G sharp, to A sharp. Moving chords around through those particular notes can give a very fun sound. At this point, I'm kind of reminded of kids movies from the 90s, like something like old school, like monkey trouble or even, like, Ace Ventura. You're gonna find this sort of sound with some sort of old retro synth. It might sound something kind of like this. It sounds very fun, childlike, wondrous, and it's definitely worth exploring. I'd also recommend trying it with pizzicato strings. That can sound pretty awesome, too. Now, I'm going to show you something that I call good chords. They're pretty crazy. We're going to take the most common chord progression, 151, and we're going to turn it on its head a little bit. If we're in C major, C is our one, G is our five. And then we're back to C. What we're going to do is play a variation of the five chord, either a flat five or a sharp five, and we're going to try both major and minor. So in other words, instead of G, we're going to go to G flat, major and minor, we'll try out both and G sharp. Major and minor, we'll try out both. It sounds like this, CmjorFharp major. This is like jurassic part like really big steps of a dinosaur. Let's try the F sharp minors of C major. It's wondrous, but a little bit evil. Now let's try instead of G flat, we're gonna go to G sharp. We get this sort of sound. This is, like, contemplative hero sort of sound like Spider Man just finding out his abilities. We can go from C major to A flat minor. Sounds like this. Again, kind of evil layer ish, but with a little major twist. Now, some of this stuff ends up becoming borrowed harmony, like C major to A flat major. Well, this is the one chord of C major, and this is the six chord of C minor. So some of these things overlap. Doesn't matter how you find it. If you find that you like this sound from borrowed harmony or if you find this sound from exploring cinematic progressions, the point is, you found the sound, and now it's part of your harmonic palette. So originally we were moving minor chords by minor thirds. Let's try moving major chords by major thirds. And this is sort of like selectively picking some of the chords from the whole tone scale. But instead of minor chords moving up a diminished shape, we're thinking major chords moving up through an augmented shape, like C major, up a major third to E major, up a major third to A flat major. It's a bit of a melody, it might sound something like this. I think of it almost sort of like, yeah, back in that superhero sort of territory, but a whirlwind of maybe they're learning how to fly or I mean, ultimately, you're going to come up with your own version of how you perceive that. But again, as I was mentioning before, the major chords, when you use them exclusively, are going to be more happy, major hero based, whereas when you use the minor chords exclusively, only minor chords, you're going to get the super villain, the sad, the spooky, the dark, mysterious, those sort of sounds. Now, I mentioned a few other examples within borrowed harmony that work well as cinematic sounds. I'll bring back two of those in this class, and then we'll get wrapped up. One of my favorites is this minor one to major four. But as I mentioned, minor one to the flat six major already one of my favorite progressions, and then the major four. Very Marvel esque. And another one would be a major one to a minor five. Again, very Lord of the Rings, very kingly. So at this point, now we're fusing minor major, major chords or major and minor together. We're not thinking exclusively all majors or all minors. That is one trick that you can apply for cinematic progressions, only choosing major chords or only choosing minor chords, but it's not the only progression. Borrowed harmony is also very common. I'd also recommend looking into octatonic harmony. I think it's outside of the context of this class, but I will be covering it in my class that's all about diminished chords, so make sure that you check that out if you're interested. I think I've given you plenty to work with in terms of cinematic or film score style chord progressions. Get playing around with them, choose your favorites, write them in a little notebook, and make sure that they're readily available to you for the next film that you score. I hope you enjoyed that class, and I'll catch you in the next one. 7. Syncopation: Alright, let's get talking about syncopation. So what exactly is syncopation? I mean, it's a very underlying factor of what contributes towards groove. But generally, what's happening with syncopation is you're playing more between the beats than usual. So an example of something not syncopated would be one, two, three, four, where in between each clap, we would have s that are untouched, one and two, and three and four end. Everything is on the main beats. But if I start on beat one and then switch to the s, you'll see things feel a bit groovier and more syncopated. One and two, and three and one and two, and three and four end. So we're playing in between the cracks of the main beats quite often. It doesn't have to be that much, but it's a noticeable amount. Now, one great way to do this is to start to work with odd numbers. For example, threes, fives, and sevens come to mind, but threes are a much easier place to start. Now, as we know in music, we love fours and multiples of four. Great way to break up eight beats is with two threes and two. So one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, same deal. Now, if we take a tip from Latin music, specifically clave patterns, and claves are just those little sticks that they knock together as part of the percussion section. But if we take standard clav patterns of three, three, two, three, two, three, and two, three, three, then we get some really interesting syncopated beats. They would sound like this. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two. Or one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three. Or lastly, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three. But you don't have to play them all blocked and simple like this. You can start to expand and play something a little bit more funky. One, two, three, one, two, three, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two. Or you could break it up more. In the example of three, two, three, you would have one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three. And finally, two, three, three. An example might be one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three. So you can play around with this two groups of threes and a group of two to make up eight. You can play things blocked again, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, choosing to move around the cords within those groupings, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, or play through the full pattern on a chord before switching. One, two, three, one, two, three. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two. The point here is to start with a simple concept that gets you playing more between the beats. As soon as you play that first group of three, one, two, three, it's like you're playing one and two. So in terms of one and two, and three and four, you would have one and two. And now your next group of three or two or whatever you're playing starts on the end two. Simply put, that's a basic version of syncopation. Now, there are so many different ways that we can play syncopation. But for today, I'm going to teach you one of my favorite exercises. This comes from one of my teachers from York University. His name is Casey Sokol. He is the Canadian Keith Jarrett on keys. He's so fantastic at coming up with unique concepts. And when I took his courses on improvisation, this is one of the exercises that really stood out to me. Now, don't forget this is all going to be available to you in a PDF, so do make sure that you check it out so you get the full details. Let's jump in. Your left hand is going to be supplying a basic 44 rhythm with a pinky thumb, hold finger two. So C up an octave C, hold B flat. Sounds like this. One and two N three, and four N one and two N three and four N. Your right hand is going to do some very advanced syncopation patterns. This is an exercise that you might have to come back to later, or if you're like me, break it down bit by bit by bit until it makes sense. So we're going to take some patterns from C minor. We're going to mostly use the notes from C natural minor. We're not really going to play the A flat, and the patterns don't really have to make a whole lot of sense as long as they sound good. So I'll show you the patterns, and then I'll show you how we're going to sort of reshuffle them. Pattern is really simple. It's. We're just moving up through the first five notes of C minor, C, D, E flat, F G. The second pattern is D F, G, B flat, and C. Moving up to F G, B flat, C and D, and the fourth and final pattern, G, B flat, C, E flat, F. This shape here, the second last one, I think of sort of like an old rocket ship from, like, those old shooter games. You can see it kind of has the wings on the side and the tipped front here. And then this shape kind of just looks like an M. It sort of zigzags its way up. The hardest shape, in my opinion, is this one here. It doesn't really have any symmetry to it, but just make sure that you learn that one a bit on the side. So we have one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five. Those are our four patterns of five notes from C natural minor. Next step is to shuffle things up. We're going to apply the fingering one, three, two, four, five. Instead of playing them in succession, we're gonna be playing. 13, two, four, five, next pattern, 132, four, five, next pattern, 132, four, five, next pattern, 13245. Once you have those four shapes and this fingering down pet, then you're ready to start trying the exercise. So because our right hand is only working with five note patterns, you're going to get some very interesting syncopated sounds against the left hand 44 pattern. Let's start things as eighth notes. So in our left hand, we had one and two, and three, and four and two left hand patterns per bar. If we go through each of these different patterns with the fingering that I mentioned, and we consider that every eighth note in the right hand will be played against or with this left hand part. It sounds something 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. I included one extra C pattern like where we started up at the top. Now the next step is to be able to reverse all of this 54, two, three, one. Coming down through each of the patterns that we just talked about. And what happens is you'll notice that at the very top, I had a pinky with my left hand pinky, and at the very bottom, I had a thumb with my left hand pinky. It sort of wraps up nicely by adding that extra pattern. So collectively, it sounds like this. Well. We're not repeating the top note G. If you do, you're gonna throw off the rhythm of it. But you'll notice that we finish back with that pinky and thumb. Things feel finished on, like, a nice beat one. So that's like, step one. If you can play that, I'm already impressed because this was something that took me a little bit of time to really get at my fingertips. You can also just practice, like on a table 1324, five, one, 3245 or 542-315-4231. Just get used to the muscle memory that's ultimately a big part of what's going to help you through this exercise. Step two, try the right hand as 16th notes. One, two E and a three E a, four y and a one anda, two E, and a three E, and a four E and a one E anda, two E, and a three and a four E and a one. Again, you'll be finishing down on a beat one, which is nice, but it's going to feel different with your left hand still on eighth notes. One and two, and one, two, and three, and a four anda, one a, two, and a three anda, 40, one a, two, and three and a four and a one. That's very similar to step one, but with the right hand being at a quicker pace, it's going to take some recalibration to get used to that. So the next step is alternating between eighth notes and 16th notes every time the left hand completes a pattern. You can start with eighths and then do 16th, eighths, and sixteenths. When you get comfortable with that, start with the 16th notes and then flip over to the eighth notes in succession. Let's start with eighth notes. I mean, this might sound confusing, but it'll make more sense as I get playing it. We're going to start with eighth notes in the right hand. Counting overtop might be kind of difficult for me, so I'm just going to kind of go for it. Here it is starting with eighth notes, the full pattern. This is the full exercise. We could also start with 16th notes, which would sound like this. So you can see the muscle memory gets super important to be able to get through this exercise. So the full exercise is alternating eight to 16th and 16th to eighths. But you can see all the steps that are needed to get to that point. If you're watching this video in succession and you're thinking, Wow, that's just too much. Don't overwhelm yourself. Start with step one, play each pattern, each set of five notes, moving higher. See their shapes. You're also welcome to substitute the fingerings for a different set of fingerings. You're also welcome to come up with different shapes. The point is this exercise is meant to get you thinking outside the box and getting comfortable phrasing fives, which is essentially what you're doing. You're doing these little groups of five note phrases, but as a result, you're very much syncopated. So that's it for this class on syncopation. We covered it from a few different angles. I hope that it seems intriguing and it's going to be a challenge. So make sure that you put some time into it because it'll help your contemporary improvs stand. That's it for this class. And the next one, we're going to discuss colors. I'll see you there. 8. Colors: This class is going to be a brief overview of colors that you can add to the harmony that you're playing on piano. Now, even in classical music, colors were already starting to sort of poke out. In terms of we weren't just using major minor and dominant seventh chords, we were starting to add some extra notes to our harmony to color the sound. I think of major and minor chords, sort of like, let's say, pizza, and colors are sort of like toppings, whereas the toppings on pizza change the flavor. Colors that you add to chords change the ear flavor, I guess you could say, or the way that we perceive that particular sound and view its color. Some people do see harmony in color. Some people hear certain tensions or resolutions. It's up to you to ask yourself, how do I perceive these colors, and how can I use them within my improvisations. I do have a whole course on adding color to chords. It really is a full course worth of material, but we're going to briefly overview it because I think it's super important within contemporary improvisation. We're going to be coloring major, minor and dominant seventh chords. I'm going to breeze through a little bit, but don't forget there is an attached PDF as a reference for you, and I'm going to make sure that we go through each color in a bit of detail so it makes sense. Let's start with major chords. Left hand is playing C major. Any of these three notes, C, E or G would not be considered a colorization. Are stable. They are part of our chord, so they are not a color. For now, what we're going to do is mostly pick colors as other notes from our C major scale, which gives us D, F, A and B. Now, B is one of the first colors that we learn. It's the major seventh. C to B is known as a major seventh, and a C major chord plus a B is known as a major seventh chord. The bottom three notes complete a C major chord. The top three notes complete an E minor chord. So we're not necessarily adding more of a major sound to our chord. In fact, we are slightly challenging the tonality, challenging the majorness of that chord by adding the seventh. It doesn't make it sad, but it doesn't make it necessarily more happy. There's a little bit of tension, and you can hear it adds some color. Let's listen. Major Major seventh. Okay, so there's our major seventh. We have other notes from our C major scale that we can add. The ninth or the second, it's the same thing. So the second note in my C major scale, we can pop that up in octave, and now it's one above our octave, one above eight, so it's a nine. You'll hear this D, in this case, referred to as sometimes a two or a nine depending on where you voice it. Is it down here where it's sort of buried within the chord, or is it up here where it floats up above? I actually like the sound of a nine a little bit more than a seven in most cases. There's a little bit of sort of hope. There's like this smoothness to it. It kind of cools down the cord a little bit. But there it is. We're just adding a ray on top of our cord. So Duhay is what we're adding. We could also eliminate the third of this cord and create what's called a sus two cord. This sound floats around a little bit more, and it's generally not considered to be a resolved sound, but it's really great for these sort of meditative, reflective sounds. And it also kind of works well for these sort of intro splashes for old, like videos. So imagine something from the 80s that sounds kind of like this. It's like Virtucon, right? So, again, that's my sort of reference for how I hear these. But again, they're really beautiful and really colored. And these are sus two chords. We see these in major keys and in minor keys whether I'm in C major or C minor, I'm going to have that ray available, C to D, in this case. Now, they're called Sus chords, not because they're suspicious, but because the middle note of the chord, whether it's major or minor, is being suspended. It's being moved to a side note. So we can also take that middle note and suspend it up to the fourth. This is known as a SS four chord. Again, very colorful. It's not necessarily resolved, but it doesn't sound very tense, either. So play around with sus twos and sus fours. You can start with just taking any major or minor shape, let's say, a major, and then play a tone above the bottom note as your two or a tone below the top note as your four. That's something that you can consistently count on a tone above the bottom or a tone below the top gives you SS two or sus four respectively. Now, that's a way that we can add a four to this major sound is moving from major to this sus sound. But what if we take a major chord and just add the four all by itself? This is actually quite tense, and it's happening because of this E and this F conflicting. This is what you call a minor ninth, and it's really generally a sound that we kind of avoid. I mean, there's some times that we can use it, but you can hear it doesn't sound particularly great. So for major chords, quite often, we'll use a sharp four, sometimes called a sharp 11. Now we have this sort of sound. Which kind of reminds me of 90s kids shows, especially one really popular one. So major with the Sharp four, to me, sounds very bright, very happy, very childlike, and it can be a great sound to tap into. We're now left with the six. So if we play a C major chord and add do Remi Faso or the sixth note from our C major scale, we get this extra sort of majory sort of sound. It kind of reminds me of the sort of hokey pokey on the ranch. Very friendly, very inviting sort of color. So to recap, we have C major seven, challenges the tonality a little bit. We had C major six, quite happy. We have C major with a sharp four added, very bright. We have C major with a two or a nine, cools down the sound a little bit, and we have these very colorful cess chords, not resolved, but not particularly dissonant or unresolved. Now we did cover the F sharp, and I didn't cover any of the other black notes. I did cover B flat because that now gives us a dominant sound which we will cover separately. The flat six is very intriguing. It's very mysterious. Highly recommend playing around with that if you're going for a more film score sort of sound, a sort of marvel, contrary motion sort of sound. We wouldn't generally add the flat three because now we have a major chord with the sound of minor as well. Only really going to see added on dominant chords. So that leaves us with this flat tune. And you could play around with it, but generally, it's going to be very tense. And it's not a sound that you hear very often. I think, if anything, it still functions within this dominant seventh environment. Where there's tension intended on this sound to be resolved in a particular way. In other words, the colors that I gave you originally are the ones you're going to see the most. The flat six is also worth considering, but that covers most of the colors for major. Moving to minor, we can skip over the sus chords because it's the same in major and in minor. It's always going to be a tone above the bottom note or a tone below the top note, true for major and also for minor. So on a minor chord, if we follow our minor scale, in this case, natural minor, we have two, four, six and seven to play around with again. The flat seven gives us a C minor seven chord. When I say flat seven, I'm referring to a tone below the octave, also known as a minor seventh. So C to B flat is a minor seventh. Fill it out with the chord, you get the chord called C minor seventh. Same deal as the major, but reverse. It's a minor sound. We're adding on the top three notes a bit of a major influence. So when I'm doing ear tests with students and I play major seventh and minor seventh chords, it's kind of like they get it right 60% of the time when they're first starting it because the bottom three notes really tell us it's minor in this case, but it's challenged a little bit. So they can hear these bottom notes are influencing the tonality. But because of this top note challenging with a bit, in this case, of a major sound, it's easy to get these kind of confused. But again, the seventh is just kind of cutting through the minorness of the C minor chord a little bit. Again, I picture the nine or the two. To just be a really cool sort of sound. It's very velvety. I really love a minor chord with a nine. It's probably one of my favorite sounds. We also have the four, which now we don't have to sharpen. You might remember on the major chord, this F was conflicting by a minor ninth, a semitone above the octave. But since our third has changed, now we just have the E flat to F as a regular ninth, which is much more palatable. So the four is a really great way add a bit of a neutral sort of color. This one I have maybe the hardest time explaining, but more and more of these days, I've really come to appreciate this sound. Now, if you like that sound, you can check it out a lot exclusively in the song, So What by Miles Davis, where Bill Evans came up with this fun voicing for these minor seven chords with an added four. So we still have to explore the six, and in this case, we'll explore both types of sixes, just like we did for the majors. So in a C natural minor scale, we have an A flat so that's the one that we're going to start with. Again, very mysterious, but this time more dark. Think like Spider Man intro sort of sound. But when we have the major sixth, this, to me, I've used so many times that I kind of know how it wants to resolve and where it wants to move to. But quite often, people will say that this sounds very mysterious, as well. We can still apply that contrary motion. There's something just very mysterious, but at the same time, a lingering tension within it. Now, what you'll notice about both of these chords, major or minor, is that the sixth quite often either adds to the tonality or challenges it. C major with a major six, now it's really major. C major with a flat six. Now it's a little bit darker and more mysterious. C minor with a minor six, very dark. But with the major six, little bit more I don't want to say uplifting, but a little less minor than the flat six option. I also find this to be true within scales. If you have a major scale with a major six in it, it'll be more major sounding, in my opinion. But if you have the flat six in it, it'll challenge the major tonality a bit more. Same is true for minor. Minor scale with a minor six, very minor sounding, minor scale with a major six, Dorian, in this case, has a little bit more of an uplifted feel up top and a bit more of a minor sound down on the bottom. And I think that's why jazz musicians use the Dorian mode so much because it sort of cools down the minorness a bit so it doesn't feel so devastating or serious and sort of cuts the difference a little bit in terms of tonality so that it's not quite so serious. So on a minor chord, we also have this idea of adding a flat two again, not something you see very often, so I'm not even really going to cover it, but here's the sound. We have the sharp four. A something you don't really hear too often, minor with the Sharp four. If you like the sound, feel free to play around with it. And the last one is going to be the major seventh. This one's a bit more common. A minor major seventh. It's just very tense. To me, I call it the soap opera chord. It sounds like daytime television from the early 2000s or late 90s, where there's a soap opera on TV and someone says, I was the one that ran over your brother. And then it transitions to another scene of more tension. So, that's all the colors covered for minor chords. Lastly, we're going to cover a dominant seventh chord. Now, a dominant seventh chord on its own, in most genres, except for the blues is going to represent tension already. It wants to fall down a fifth, usually to a major or a minor chord. So what's cool about dominant chords is you can add almost any color over top, because it's already tense, why not make it a bit more tense? It's like when you're watching a film and there's a tense scene, they can add tension layer by layer by layer before they eventually resolve it. The more tension you add, the sweeter the resolution. Now, most of the colorizations that we're adding to this dominant seventh chord have a similar function to when we added colors to a major chord. But now I can also add a couple other colors that we avoided, like, for example, the flat nine. Now that we're in this environment of tension, we can get away with a little bit more. Also, you can try adding multiple colors over top. This is true for major and for minor, but it's especially true for dominant because again, you're functioning around this tension, so why not lean into it? So instead of explaining each of these colors, I'm going to say what they are called, and I'm going to let you determine how you perceive these sounds. Let's go through each type of sound, and then later you can choose to combine them in any way you'd like. Now if you want to learn more about this stuff, again, my course on coloring chords would be very important, but any sort of study within jazz is going to eventually take you deep into this territory. We're going to gloss over it for now so you have the colors available to you. But again, I could rant about this for way too long, and we want to try to stay in the context of contemporary improvisation. Let's go through it. We have a C dominant seven, and I think I glossed over a dominant seven chord, by the way, is a major chord with a flat seven, one tone below the octave. So this is the main chord we're working with. I'm literally going to go up the scale chromatically and explain each note. Starting with C, there's no tension here. There's no extra added color, so we're up to C sharp or D flat. We're calling this a flat nine. Listen to it. You can resolve it. It also reminds me of. At first, I was afraid I was petrified. Right? It has that same dominant seven flat nine cord to start. A regular nine? Mmm. A little bit uplifting. A sharp nine. A little Jimmy Hendrix. The third is already in our cord. We can kind of avoid it. The fourth or 11th. Hm. I don't love it. It's not so bad, but again, it's same as the major chord where it's kind of conflicted. The sharp four or sharp 11, you'll hear this one a bit more. Let's listen to that again. A little bit bright. The fifth, we can just sort of gloss over. It's part of our chord, the flat six or flat 13. This one's quite often added with some type of nine, so flat 13 flat nine or flat 13 sharp nine. And I think part of the reason for that is now we're so separated from our chord that it's nice to kind of fill in something to bridge this gap because at some point, it starts to feel more like a melody note, very separated from the harmony. Same thing goes for the regular 13. This is going to be often paired with some type of a nine, sharp nine, flat nine. You have lots of options. This is where you start to get into something called altered dominant chords out of the context of this particular class, but feel free to look into those. So here's our 13 again, or the six. Again, quite happy sounding. If we add the B flat, that's a note that's already within our chord, and the one note you're most likely never going to add to a dominant is this B is the major seventh. The flat seven is a huge part of what makes this chord sound dominant. So to add a B just sort of contradicts the whole sound of this dominant chord. So I'm going to add in our PDF these colors broken down one by one. I'm going to take the time to put it together for you, so please make sure you download it and keep it as a reference sheet for your colors. For contextual purposes, I'm going to do a very short improv in C minor and explain the colors as I play through. It sounds something like this. C minor. With a four, sort of a sus sound. B flat major with a six, a little more uplifted. A flat major seven, flat five. We're thinking sharp four bit of a mysterious sound. F minor, with a four, resolving to the five. Back to a flat this time with a nine, resolving to the root, seventh, sixth. Here's our five or G dominant seven. Sus four G dominant seven. Be a slash chord, putting the E flat in the base of the C minor sound. Let's get this resolved back to G major with a D in the base, and then resolving back to C minor. You can see that even choosing different base notes on a C minor chord, choosing the E flat or the G can add some fun we'll say color. It just sort of changes the stability of the chord, but there's nothing wrong with adding any of the colors that you really like on the chord. Like on a minor chord, I really like nines and I really like fours. So adding the four in the left hand or the nine in the left hand can give some fun tensions to play around with. Again, you can combine these colors with open voice chords, syncopation, what other sort of improv tricks you like the most, but make sure that these colors are readily available to you by practicing them and really doing some self exploration and ask yourself, how does each color influence me? What emotion does it make me feel? And how can I bring those emotions into my improvs? That's it for this class. The next one's much more simple. We're going to be talking about line cliches and the different variations of I'll catch you in that class. 9. Line Clichés (and Variations): Up next, let's talk about line cliches, three note line cliches, as well as four note line cliches and broken and blocked versions. Let's dive in. So what is a line cliche? It's a fancy name for a chord that is sort of expanding or contracting on the outside notes. You can apply this with major or minor sounds. I prefer the minor sounds, so we're going to start with minor this time. So if I play a C minor chord in my left hand, I can then take the top note and slowly expand it up one semitone at a time. You'll notice the sort of James Bond esque quality, but instead of coming back down like that theme, we can move up one additional time. So to give you an example of that James Bond sort of sound, and then back down. But what's cool about this is if we do go up one, two, three times, we get the shell voicing for a minor seventh chord. We don't have the fifth, but as I've explained before, we don't need the fifth. This tells me it's C. This tells me it's minor. This tells me it's seven, C minor seven, the fifth is just filler. So if you want to go from a C minor shape to a C minor seven shape, possibly to set up a 251 chord progression or something common where you would see a minor seventh chord. This is a great way to take a basic shape and expand it into a different shape. Now, if I take the bottom note and lower it this time, we get another sort of fun sound. Sometimes I'll lower even one extra. And that takes us down to the flat six. So my train of thought here is we have C minor, a sort of C minor major seven sound, even though it's technically B augmented. I'm thinking of it almost like the top note is lowering, but we just have to sacrifice moving that C down. C minor slash B flat. Again, there's no C, so you can also think of it as E flat second inversion. Now, these next two chords for me really determine where I take things. If I just want to go one more note, this is sort of like an A minor seven flat five. This chord sets up a minor 251. In other words, this is the two of G minor 251. Using the appropriate chords we would have a minor seven flat five, D dominant seven, and G minor. You can see why this is not a course for beginners. I want to make sure I'm not re explaining every little piece of harmony through all these classes, but I'm assuming you know what a 251 progression is. In this case, it's a minor 251. A minus seven, flat five, Ddminant to G minor. If I want to keep going, so C minor, lowered, lowered, lowered, lowered again, now it's kind of like an A flat major seven. Now, maybe I don't have the C in it, but that's optional. And that's a flat six, which will quite often take us to a five back to one. So those two versions sound like this. The first one, I'm going to stop it on the A and do a 251. The second time, I'll continue to lower it all the way down to the flat six, five, finish for that progression. Sounds like this. And we've modulated to G minor in that case. Second example. Another great sound, and in this case, we're brought back to C minor. Now, I mentioned that there can be a four note version of a line cliche. This is more appropriate when you're lowering the top note, in this case, the added octave, C minor plus an additional C, lowering that top note, lowering that top note. And then again, you're left with both options of lowering it one more time into a 251, or lowering it yet again into a flat 651. These are just what I like to do with these line cliches. You can ultimately find other variations, but really it's about exploring and seeing what works best for you. What's interesting about the four note version is the top note is falling, but it's the same as the three note version with the bottom note falling. In this case, we have C to B to B flat to A. In this case, we had C to B to B flat to A. So it's kind of the same thing. And if I do a four note version of the chord, I can choose to lower just the top note or lower the top and bottom as octaves together. So there's quite a few variations of how you can treat these minor line cliches with three notes and four notes. Over to the major version, we'd have the top note raising up, just like we do with the minors. It's almost like a Beatles esque sort of sound. And on that last shape we end up getting the shell voicing of a dominant seventh chord. And we don't need the fifth, so we have root, third, flat seven. That's enough. And that dominant chord, C dominant wants to lead to F. Major or minor, you choose, but more often, I think you'll find it goes to major because we started on this major chord. And in the key of C major, Fmajor is one of the chords available. So it sort of leaves a trail of breadcrumbs to help us get back to C major in the end. So let's say you have a small song. It's in C. Okay, very elementary. Now we're sort of working on a bridge into another section. Now I have this F major resolution. Maybe I want to do something kind of fun with it, borrowed harmony to take us back to see. In other words, this is a great thing to put at the end of a section to modulate to the foe chord for another section. And then from there, you can easily find your way back to see. Same thing as the minors. We're now going to lower the bottom note. Semitones, you can see it has this sort of Beatles esque almost Christmasy sort of sound. Again, you can lower the bottom note and stop on the B flat outlining a dominant seventh sort of sound. If you lower it one more time to A, that's like the third of your destination chord. So this is like, C dominant seven voice from the B flat on the bottom. Where does C dominant seven take us? Takes us to F. In this case, major. So I'm going to lower down a semitone to A, which is one of my notes from F major. And then, again, we can do this sort of romantic four to minor four. Continuing to lower that left hand, and then you can go back to C or even C major with G in the left hand. Something like a one with a five in the left, five with the five in the left, and then back to one. You can expand this progression quite a bit, but that whole thing ends up sounding something like this. It's a pretty solid progression. Same as before. If I stop on the A, if I just keep lowering by semitones down to the A, it sort of feels like I have an A minor seventh chord, which could set up a 251 to G major. So there's lots of different ways that you can take these. But for now, all I want you to really explore is a minor chord, raise up the top note or lower the bottom note. Major chord, same deal or lower down the bottom note. Major chord is going to stumble upon some dominant seventh sort of shell voicings. From there, you can choose to modulate from C down a fifth to F once you hit that B flat. The B flat is what's going to make it sound dominant, and that's your opportunity to modulate down a fifth. Now, we can also break these up. They don't have to be blocked. Let's try a couple of examples broken. Let's try it with the top note expanding up. We're using contrary motion pulling the nodes inward. That was C minor to C minor seven. Now we can try F minor to F minor seven as another destination. So it's kind of like each chord. It's just like a 14 chord progression in C minor, but it's like one minor seven version of one, four, minor seven version of four. It has this rising sort of feel. You just keep taking it up if you want, but that's the basic idea. We could also try the major version, but with the bottom note lowering, let's try a sort of back and forth, almost like the Imagine by the Beatles piano part. It would sound something like this. So you get the idea. You can use any sort of broken lineation, both hands moving up, both hands moving down, contrary out, contrary in or semi blocked, semi broken with patterns like this. This gives you three note and four note variations on line cliches for major chords or minor chords with the top note expanding up or the bottom note expanding down. Blocked, broken from here, you can put it together however you wish, but you have lots of options to work with for these line cliches. That's it for this class. And the next one, we're going to do something super unique. We're going to try out a clapping exercise ll see you there. 10. Two Person Clapping Exercise: If you ever want to do improvisations with another pianist or another musician, you're going to need rhythmic independence. You want to make sure you're listening to what they're doing and be able to sort of tap into their rhythms, but you also want to make sure that if you have something that you're developing and they're developing around you, that you're not influenced unless you want to be. In other words, if I'm trying to keep a solid rhythmic foundation of a concept in mind, I don't want to accidentally change it based on their rhythm influencing. Steve Reich has come up with a fun exercise called clapping music for two performers. Now, I've seen this clapping exercise done a couple of different ways, but the main way is that one clapper continues the same pattern throughout, and the other clapper is going to play various phases of that pattern. In other words, the same clapping pattern, but moved one eighth note later, one eighth note later. Since it's a total of 12 eighth notes and rests put together, there are 12 different phases before lining back up and playing the same rhythm between both clappers. Now, the main rhythm for the first clapper is That was the main pattern two times. There's 12 whole bars of this rhythm, and each bar is repeated. So 24 times, you would be clapping, that, that, that, that, that, da da da. The other clapper is going to start with you, and then they're going to start to variate based on what they're reading on the bottom line. I'm going to demonstrate this essentially clapping with myself, and then the second time, I'm going to supply clapping part number one and clapping part number two. Separately, you can choose to do the first clapping part or the second clapping part. But here's the basic idea. Now, this is going to be interesting. I'm going to have to do a little bit of editing to make this work but my job is to play the original clapping part 24 times, and then I'll superimpose the second clapping part. Here we go in. One, two, three, four, five, six. Alright, so now I'm going to clap each of the two parts by myself, and you're going to try to join in with me. This is something where you may have to take note of what's the timestamp when I start this? Because you might get 30 seconds in and then make a mistake. Wind it back, try it again. And you know you've done well when you're able to get through the whole exercise, and we're clapping the same pattern at the very end. So to start, I want you to try clapping pattern number one. This you're just going to keep that going throughout. We're gonna have to set the pace together. There's no metronome or anything like that. So as we're starting together, make sure you're really listening to my clapping as you go. If you feel that you're someone who's kind of rhythmically challenged, you might want to try this with your teacher around to make sure that you're not slowly shifting the phase or slowly finding yourself one note later or earlier when you shouldn't be. All that said, you're going to start with the basic rhythm. This is gonna get tough really quick. You're gonna see, I'm gonna play clapping pattern number two, and then after we do this whole thing, I will do number one, and you'll try the tougher part. Here we go in. One, two, three, four, five, six. Tough, tough. If you got through that, great job. But my guess is it took you maybe ten, 20, 30 times before it finally worked itself out. This is tough. Right around phase nine, I find it gets really tough. There's something about the very end to the final Phase 12. You'll get to see in a moment when you're clapping this one, but this offset of rest, one, two, three, rest, one, two, something about that even took me a few tries. So if you got through it, great job. Now I get the easy roll. I'm going to clap through the main clapping part. You're going to try to clap the bottom or secondary clapping part. I promise you this is not easy. I promise you this will take many tries, but the whole point is to challenge ourselves in different ways. Starting in one, two, three, four, five, six. Five. Seven. Nine. 11. Here we go. So if you were able to get through both of those types clapping Pattern one, clapping Pattern two, consider yourself more rhythmically independent. You're not being so influenced by the rhythm of those around you and the way their rhythms might be changing. This is kind of like if you've ever sung in a choir and someone beside you is supposed to sing a higher note and you're supposed to stay on pitch, you're going to be influenced to want to sing a higher note. And it takes practice to make sure that you stick to your ground and they do their own thing independent. Whether it's pitch or rhythm, being able to have independence or being able to choose in the moment to join what someone else is doing is a very important skill to have. So that's it for this class on Clapping Music by Steve Reich, I'll catch you in the next class where we talk about two handed ostinatos. I'll see you there. 11. Two Handed Ostinatos: Next up, we have a smaller class talking about two handed astonatos. An ostinato is really just a repeated riff, especially found in Latin piano music. But you can almost think of a guitar riff, especially once it gets a little more complex. If it keeps riffing over and over, it's also kind of like an ostinato. So you might think of an ostinato as something like. And notice, in this case, I'm using two hands for it, it's possible to play a left hand only Ostinato and then improvise over top. Now this is getting very advanced. This isn't like the territory of Keith Jarrett and some of those upper tier improvisers. But what we're going to focus on is two handed astonados. Honestly, as long as you're starting on the root of a chord, you usually can't go wrong as long as you're keeping things on beat and staying in key. Let's say for my root, I choose my fifth and my seventh. And then in the right hand, I'm going to choose two, three, four, five. This is my collection of notes. I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet, but I'm going to start on C, and maybe I'll work my way inward. So From here, you can start to develop things by changing the bottom note. And let that continue. You can see already it's the foundation for what could become a pretty interesting improvisation. Now for this class, we're going to keep things in 44, but you can do ostinatos in 68 or 34. You can play around with the time signature that you select for these ostinatos. Let's try another example, but this time, let's move things around so that we're starting on one chord in mind and moving to a different chord in mind. Let's say we're going from A minor to D minor. So we're going to create some sort of an ostinato on A minor and shift things after to D minor. Again, maybe we'll choose one, five, seven in the left hand, and in the right hand, let's choose three, four, five, seven. So we have this collection of notes, very colorful sound. So let's say it's something like The important thing is to make sure that when you shift, you're aiming those starting fingers on the right notes. I know I have a root and a flat seven, and then I'm aiming for that root in flat seven. And then you can create variations as well, once you have that starting ostinato. So like I said, this is kind of a mini class because the concept is quite simple, but there's an infinite amount of possibilities from major to minor to changing time signatures, to changing playstyle or even the sound of the keyboard that you select. Two handed ostinatos are fun, but similar to clapping music, you can find yourself in a little bit of a pickle unless you really keep your concentration on point. When you go to change a base note or go to change your position, you need to make sure you can execute that properly. So keep in mind, while a basic astonato might be a great starting point for improvisations, they aren't necessarily easy to evolve into a full improvisation. So have some fun playing around with the limitless possibilities of two handed ostinatos, and I'll catch you in the next class where we're going to talk about polyrhythms. I'll see you there. 12. Polyrhythms: Oh Let's get talking about polyrhythms. In our class on syncopation, we did something called phrasing fives, where we had this group of five notes playing in phrases over top of a 44 rhythm in the left hand. Polyrhythms are kind of similar in that we're going to have a rhythm in one hand and a rhythm in the other, but they're going to be a little bit more sort of in between the cracks of one another in that the right hand of this phrasing fives, you could think of as eighth notes or 16th notes. But when you're playing polyrhythms, you're going to be thinking more about straight notes in one hand and triplets in the other. So you might have eighth notes or 16th in one hand, and then eighth note or 16th note triplets in the other. We're going to be going over the two most common polyrhythms, which are two against three and three against four. To against three is a little bit more of a simple starting point. So let's start there. The idea is that you're going to have one hand playing these groups of twos, so one, two, one, two. The other hand is going to have one, two, three, one, two, three. In the time that it takes for these two notes to happen evenly, the other hand is going to have the three notes happening evenly. So the three notes will have to be a little bit quicker. It ends up sounding like this. This might be a rhythm you've heard before. You're going to start with this, and a way to do it is to think of the phrase nice cup of tea. Try saying it. Nice cup of tea. Nice cup of tea. We can try this where the left hand has twos and the right hand represents threes, or you can flip it. So let's try it both ways. Whether you're snapping or tapping along on your laps, you can't see my laps, but you can choose either way, whatever works for you, eventually, we apply these to the keys. So an easy way to think of it is both left, right, left. We're doing it this way. We have both left, right, left so that the left hand has a group of three and the right hand has a group of two. Both left right, left, both left, right, left. Let's go through this a few times. Join in with me. Both left, right, left. Both left, right, left. Keep it going. A couple more times. And then a nice final beat one to finish. We could also go both right, left, right, both, right, left, right. Let's try this out. Same idea. A little bit slower. Here we go. Both right, left, right. Both, right, left, right. I'll keep it going. Two more times. And another solid beat one to finish. Now, I think more often than not, you're going to find that the right hand gets the triplets, the group of three, and the left hand is going to have the group of two. You end up getting sounds like this. I'm going to play around more harmonically through a chord progression using this polyrhythms two against three. It sounds like this. You see the rhythm flows quite nicely. You can try it the other way where you have this both left, right, left, both left, right, left. It's not quite as common, but it still sounds great. Let's give it a try. So again, I'm saying it's not as common, but it's still actually quite common. You're going to find both of these interchangeable both ways. So you can have it as a harmonic concept, like I just showed you, but you can also play around with a melody that uses this sort of technique, something like this. And continuing on. In that case, I had both left, right, left, both left, right, left. But again, you could flip it, so it's the other way like this. Okay, you can continue on like that. So whether you're approaching it as a harmonic concept or harmony and melody together, this idea of nice cup of tea or reverse, nice cup of tea, both left, right, left or both right, left, right, you're going to get some fantastic results. Taking the same approach with three against four, let's come up with a new say. Now, I'm going to soften the way that I was taught this. Basically, it's pass the gosh darn butter, pass the gosh darn butter. You can come up with a different saying if you'd like, but that's what I was taught or close to it, and it's worked for me. Both left right, laugh right left. Both left, right, left, right, left. Keep it going. Pass the gosh darn butter. Pass the gosh darn butter, wrap it up. We can go the other way, both, right, left, right, left, right. Both right, left, right, left, right. Sounds like this. Pass the gosh darn butter. Pass the gosh darn butter. Wrap it up. So you see it sounds basically the same either way. But on the piano, it's going to give a different vibe altogether. Let's try it out. Same way we did before starting harmonically and then with a melodic concept. We're going to start with this both left, right, left, right, left, more left than right. So left is four, right is three, in this case. Sounds like this. Let's try it the other way where the right hand is going to have four and the left hand is going to have three. You can see I'm moving around my harmonic no choices, which almost does create a bit of a melody. It almost creates a bit of an ostinato. You can see how all of this stuff starts to bleed together. Next up, let's try a melodic approach. We'll keep the right hand playing four and the left hand playing three. So after your hands together, the right hand will lead, and then you alternate back and forth. It might sound something like this. Again, we can flip it, so it's both, and then the left hand is going to follow. That means the left hand has the group of four and the right hand has the group of three. But I want to give you one last task if you want to really become a master of polyrhythms. And that's being able to switch back and forth between the counting. We're going to go back to two against three for a moment, where we're starting with the left hand as the group of three. So both left, right, left, both left, right, left. I'm going to start by counting my left hand and then switching over in time to counting my right hand. Let me demonstrate, and then you're gonna try it on your own. Sounds like this. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two. Try it with me. It's tough, give it a try. Here we go. And one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two. Once you have that, you flip it. Both right left, right, both right, left, right. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two. Try it with me. Here we go. And one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, one, two, wrap it up. Now, I almost want to apologize. Maybe it's my inner Canadian, but my left hand snaps really well. My right hand not as much, which does help with that sort of feeling of the polyrhythms of two different sort of sounds, but I can't snap louder than this in my right hand. My left hand has much more of a snap. So hopefully, you're still able to hear both hands pretty equal. Now we're over to both versions of counting three against four. We're going to start with the right hand doing the fours. So it's both, right, left, right, left, right. If after both, you lead with the right, you'll have more right hand snaps or claps or taps, whatever you're doing. Let me demonstrate and then you'll join. It sounds like this. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three. Joining with me, here we go, starting with counting four in the right hand and one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three, and wrap. You'll probably find that counting the four is a little bit tougher, but if you practice them enough, you'll find them pretty equal eventually. But just keep in mind, you may have a bit of a bias off the start. Lastly, let's get the left hand doing the fours, the right hand doing the threes. We're going to count the fours first. That's the left hand. And remember now we have both left, right, left, right, left. Fingers are going numb, so hopefully we get through this fine. Here we go. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three, rapid. Join in with me. Here we go. And one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three. I think that's about as many snaps as I can do in a ten minute period. They're getting quieter and quieter and my fingers are kind of going numb. So safe to say, my career as a professional snap musician is probably at an end. But that's it. That's the class on polyrhythms, two against three, three against four, multiple ways to apply it to the piano, and also ways of compartmentalizing how you're thinking of the counting and getting independent in thinking of the twos and threes separately or the threes and fours separately. This way, you can apply them any way you'd like moving forward with confidence. I hope you had fun in this class, and I'll catch you in the wrap up. I'll see you there. 13. OUTRO Contemporary Piano Improvisation (Udemy MS UG): Thank you for taking this course on contemporary piano improvisation one oh one. This course is really designed to be different from a lot of the other piano courses that are out on the Internet, and I hope that you found that a couple of these classes resonated with you on a level that you maybe haven't had within some other courses or instructional videos. Some of the concepts might be fairly familiar, but I'm sure there was at least a couple that you found were kind of abstract and got you thinking outside the box as a pianist. That's a big part of contemporary improvisation, thinking outside the box, coming up with stuff on the fly. But at the end of the day, if we just want to play what we feel, you need to have a lot of tools accessible to you. And my hope is that this particular course gives you some of those tools that you can then develop to the next level as a pianist. So my hope within this course is that you're able to remain flexible as a pianist based on the material provided. Now, don't forget to practice this material many times. Ideally, you should be practicing piano a little bit every day, but don't forget you can review this material as many times as you see fit to make sure that these concepts are really sinking in properly. Be sure to take this material to your private lessons if you're taking some because I'm sure your teacher can help you either take some of these concepts to the next level fuse them together or just generally give you their own perspective on these exercises, and it may just end up getting you a few new exercises that are similar to the ones provided, but specific to your teacher and their interests. Now, if you don't already have a piano teacher, but you're open to taking online lessons, I do run a music school of like minded piano teachers to myself, and you can find out more about my school at cookmusicschool.ca. Now, if you want to learn a little bit more about me personally, you can head over to my personal website, which is Cook hyphen music.ca. There you can check out some of the music I've done for film, video games, audio books, and so much more. So, again, you want to learn more about me, feel free to head over there. Lastly, if you're interested in some of the piano sheet music I've created with original compositions, specifically inspired by film music and French romantic composers, then head over to Cookmusic dot store. Now, my piano compositions are generally at the beginner or intermediate level. They're almost always around one page long, and quite often they challenge the hands in different ways. So whether you're hoping to learn basic stride piano, certain left hand rhythms, French romantic harmonies, I'm sure that some of my own original piano compositions could benefit you. And in that case, again, head over to Cook music dot store. Now, this course is one of many that I've put out. I do a lot of courses on piano theory and music production, and they're all very zoomed into specific niche areas within those fields. So feel free to sift through the courses that I've created, see if any others resonate with you and then slowly improve those building blocks that'll help you stand out as a musician. So thank you again for taking this course. Remember to review it as many times as you need and to properly practice the material within it. If you enjoyed this course, I'm sure I have some other courses that you might like as well, too, so please feel free to explore those. I hope you had a great time, and I'll catch you in the next course.