Funky Piano Rhythms 2 (The Details)

1. Intro: So you're back for this second course on funky piano rhythms, and you might be asking yourself, how do we make things funkier? I know all these rhythms, but what am I supposed to do from here? Well, this course is all about the details. I'm going to be giving you plenty of simple concepts that you can apply over top of the patterns that you've already learned. While they might be simple on their own, in terms of the concept, they can be quite tough sometimes to apply within these patterns, and that's why I'm here is to help you. We're going to be discussing hinging, which sounds like a chord, taking one note and moving it to a neighboring note and then back. We're going to be talking about chordal harmony. Which can be quite chaotic and build a lot of tension. We're also going to be talking about Blues licks and how you can apply those to your patterns. So while those are three examples of some of the topics we'll be covering, there's plenty more, and there's something for everyone within this course. For your project, what we're going to do is have you pick out your three favorite rhythms, as well as your three favorite concepts that you can apply within these rhythms. In other words, your three favorite details as outlined from the classes within this course. So maybe you really like pattern two A. Okay. Something like this. But you also really like the concept of grace notes. Well, take Pattern two A, take the grace notes, and see how you can fuse them together. Something like this. Now, again, the possibilities almost seem endless. You're taking three of your favorite patterns, three of your favorite ways to detail patterns and fusing them together. One pattern will have its own little detail. Second pattern will have its own detail, as well as the third. This is going to show you that the pattern you select and the playing style that you choose to pair with that pattern sometimes works great, and sometimes it can be quite a challenge. So it's going to show you what's comfortable at your hands and help you find your rhythmic style. Now, it is recommended that you do the previous course first because this is going to lay down the ground for you to understand the patterns in their most simple fashion. The notation provided, as well as the step by step guidance within that first course is going to help you really get these patterns under your belt. Now I am going to be supplying a PDF with all of those patterns within the resource section of this course. So if you need a refresher, don't worry, that's available. Now, within this course, I am going to be using a variety of the different patterns available, so you can use some of those. They happen to be some of my favorites. But again, I highly recommend you explore the previous course and the PDF to make sure that the patterns you choose for this project resonate with you. You're going to record yourself playing these three patterns with these three details. You're going to upload it to either YouTube or Video, wherever you prefer, and then you're going to supply a link within the project section of this course. So the example that I just gave you with Pattern two A would be one out of the three clips that you would be submitting for your video. So this course really pulls everything together. You're going to have tons of rhythms from the previous course and plenty of ways to detail those rhythms from this course. I promise you if you go through both of these in great detail, your playing will get funkier. You will be a groovier player for it. Let's go through your project in greater detail. In the next video. I'll see you there. 2. Class Project: For your project, what you're going to be doing is taking your three favorite patterns from the previous course. Step one would be, make sure you go through the previous course, watch all of the patterns available, and rate each pattern out of ten. That includes the variations. If you like one B, but you're not a big fan of one A, maybe one A gets a six out of ten, and maybe one B gets a nine out of ten. Once you've gone through all of the different rhythms and rated them out of ten based on your preference, you're going to take the top three highest rated rhythms, and you're going to be working with those. Next up, within this course, you're going to take again, your three favorite concepts or details that you can apply to those rhythms. The easiest way again is just to go through and rate each concept out of ten, and the three that rank the highest will be the three that you use. So now you have three rhythms that you know you prefer and three details that you know you like the sound of. I want you to try detail number one on all three rhythms, and see which one does it pair the easiest with or which one generally does it sound best with? So let's say the first detail that you selected sounds really good with the second pattern. So now that second pattern is taken care of. You have a pattern, you have a detail, and you've fused them together. Now you have two patterns remaining, two details remaining, same process. For this detail, you're going to try it on both patterns and see which one works best. And then whatever you're left with, hopefully, those two pair well together. If they don't, you might have to explore some other patterns or some other details, but the idea is that you're hitting three different rhythms with three different types of detail. I want you to record a video of yourself playing these three different rhythms with those details. And I'd highly recommend that you don't force yourself to do it all in one go. Record each of the three patterns separately, so you feel that you can do this a little bit more at your leisure. Also, you can choose piano sounds, electric piano sounds, organ sounds, or a clave, whatever you think works well within what you have available to you. And what works really well with the patterns that you've selected. Once you've recorded these videos, I want you to upload them to either YouTube or Video and make sure that you are supplying a public link within the project resource section of this course. Now, don't forget if you get stuck on what patterns to use, maybe it's been a while since you've seen the previous course, there will be a PDF with all of the different rhythms from the first course available within the resource section of this course. Once you've uploaded your project, I will review it. And if I have any notes as to how you can fuse your patterns and details together better. Or maybe there's just a little bit of a note in terms of your playing style or something else that I can say that might help nudge you towards a funkier style of playing. That's why I'm here. You supply the project, I'll supply the feedback. Make sure that you do this project at the end of watching both of these full courses. And if you want to save yourself a little bit of time, after you've watched each class within this course, I want you to make sure that you rate the technique that I've supplied out of ten so that you don't have to come back and do this at a later time. Again, this is to make sure that later you're picking out the details that you like the most to apply within your project. The time you've completed this project, you will have shown yourself some rhythms that you enjoy, some details that you like applying to rhythms, and that's really going to help you feel like you're honing in on your rhythmic style. That's it. For the project details, I'll catch you in the next video. 3. Hinging and Grace Notes: Let's get talking about something called hinging and also grace notes and how they can help make your playing a little bit more funky. First, I want to mention, we're ditching the piano. At this point, we're going to be working with some electric keys. Let's break these down individually. H hinging and grace notes. What exactly is hinging? Let's start off by taking a, something jazzy. Like a minor seven. A minor seven has the notes A, c E and G, and these four notes come from the A minor scale. In this case, we're using the natural minor scale, which is all white notes. Now we can take any of the four notes from our chord, A, C, E, or G. Instead of playing it right away, we're going to sidestep it to one of the notes from that scale. For example, we could have the A down a step to g, and then resolving to the A. Or up to B and then resolving down to the A. We could do the same thing with the third of the chord, C. We could have it down on a B, hinging up to that C. Technically, I guess you would say it's hinging down to the B and then brought back to the C. We could also have it hinging to the D and then back to C. This is also known for classical musicians as neighbor tones. It's the same idea. In a melody, you can have a melody note, you move to a neighbor tone, which is up a step or down a step, and then you return back to that melody note. We're just doing that internally within chords. We're back to this C can move to B and B or D and back. For those of you that are inclined with music theory, you would know this is a A minor seven S two A minor seven, A minor seven S four, A minor seven. That doesn't really matter right now. Just going off the sound and what sounds good to us. You don't need to know all the theoretical terms at this point. We're just taking the four notes from the chord and sidestepping some of the notes up or down and returning them back. In some cases, we're starting on that neighboring note and then resolving it. For example, we can have a minor seven hinging up and then back, or you could just have it hinged from the start and then moving into place. Next would be the E, the fifth of the chord. We take that E, hinge it down to D and back, or hinge it up to F. And back. F doesn't sound as good. It sounds all right. The D sounds quite nice. That sounds quite nice. I take it back. F sounds fine. Where it's going to sound weird as here. We have now the seventh, G. If I hinge down to the F, it's going to sound quite bad because we have this E and F clashing as a semitone, but I could hinge it up to A. And then back to that G. And that sounds relatively fine. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe the only option here for minor seventh chords would be hinging from the flat six up to the flat seven or F to G in this case, doesn't sound quite as good. Now, maybe you like that sound. You could even have a little notebook where you take notes of which of these hinges you prefer the most, and that can ultimately lead to your stylistic sound. So let's take two of those versions of us hinging, and we're going to apply it within a chord progression. We're going to do an A minor seven. To a D minor seven. First, we're going to dance around the C, the third of this chord, and then we'll dance around F third of this next chord, D minor seven. For our first hinge, we're going to hinge down, and this is just randomized. You can come up with your own version of this, but here it is. We have a B hinging to a C. And then on this next chord, we're going to have a G hinging to an F. Let's take that concept and apply it with pattern one A that you would have learned from the previous course. Let's apply these patterns over a funky drumbeat. Here we go in one, two, three, four. Sounds right. So what we have is this A minus seven moving down to D minor seven and A minus seven moving up to D minor seven. You can choose to move to different octaves to help create some variety. Now, ultimately, I had to really restrain myself from making things a little bit more funky. At the end, I wanted to apply a different. I wanted to do some variations within this, so I'm going to show you what that would look like, but it can be as simple as starting with one of the funky patterns that you know and starting very bare bones with the concept in mind. Note do I want to hinge on the first chord, which note do I want to hinge on the second chord? If you have a longer chord progression, for example, four chords, you don't have to hinge everything. And also worth mentioning is that you can do this with inversions as well, too, that way you're not moving around quite so much. The A minor seven, that first hinge might look something like this, whereas the second one, if we were to take something like this. I'm omitting the fifth, but we have ds in the left, D in the right. We've taken these notes from D minor seven. We've gotten rid of the fifth, the fifth is just filler, so there's no A, and then we brought the C down below. So now the cs down here. Now, remember we were hinging g to F. So it looks like this with that pattern. So we end up getting That's the same idea as to what I was just playing, but again, it's like one notch, a little bit more difficult. So I'm going to put the drums back on, and I'm going to show you how I would add a bit of variation to these patterns to spice it up even a little bit more. It's slightly discretionary, but everyone's gonna have their own way of applying their own tactics, their own stylistic flare to these patterns. Let's jump in. Let's try it with some funky drums in one, two, three, four. Variation one. Let's make it spicy. And then coming back. So what I did was I had the basic pattern. At the end, I created some little variation, and I liked the sort of tempo or the rhythmic density of that variation, so I sort of just continued that throughout. Now, ultimately, that pattern in the end was quite a bit different than pattern one A. But what you can see here is that you can start with a basic pattern, explore slightly outside of it, and it might take you to a whole new pattern together. Two other things that I want to mention about hinging. The first is that you can keep your right hand the same while moving your left hand around, and you can get some great results from that. Let's check it out using a minor seven. So I'm on this a minor seven, let's move the left hand down to F down to D back to F. Without me talking? Pretty simple, my right hand is not moving very far. My left hand is outlining the harmony in terms of the basic foundation of each chord, and they're working copacetically with one another. Now, it's also possible to hinge multiple notes at a time. Let's switch keys. We're going to be an F minor for a second for those that don't know the key. It's four flats, FG, A flat flat, C, D flat flat. I digress. We have this F minor seven. And we're going to hinge the two middle notes, A flat and C down one note in the scale to G and B flat. So we get this sound leading up to our F minor seven. We're going to keep our left hand on F that whole time, so we get this sound. And then I'm going to do the same thing I just did where I moved my left hand down to D flat in this case, and then down to B flat, and I'm going to move it back up to that F eventually. Let's put a spicy, fun, funky pattern with it, and here's how it sounds. Pretty simple in terms of the right hand. Just moving back and forth between those two patterns, and we can think of it as this complex harmonic idea, but really we're just hinging two of the middle notes of the chord to neighboring notes and then back and playing around with the left hand to change the context of the harmony. Now, we've talked quite a bit about hinging, but the last note I want to give you is to try to remember what scale you're in. So I'm not saying that every C minor chord needs to use a C minor scale. Or that every f minor chord needs to use an F minor scale. But you need to keep in mind what your home base key is. If my chord progression uses four chords or even eight chords, if I'm playing those chords from the key of C minor, then I'm going to stick with the notes from C minor. For now, if something sounds weird, experiment and see what sounds better, but for the most part, 90% of the time, the notes from your home key are going to give you the best results when you try out hinging. Next, let's talk about grace notes. We're going to talk about them in the exact same way that we talked about hinging, but we're going to speed up the process. For our example, we're going to take a minus seven again, and we're going to play D instead of E, the fourth instead of the fifth. And then we're going to move up to this E. With hinging, we would have had something like this. Which sounds fine. But what we're going to do is play this shape and then this shape back to back like this. This is a grace note, a little tiny note that slides into another note. It has graced the second note with its presence. In some styles of music, you'll hear this called a slip note, but for the most part, you will often hear grace note. So one of the easiest ways to apply this could be demonstrated on a C major. We know the scale C major, or hopefully we do all white notes. Any hinging or any grace notes that we do are going to be from that scale. What we're going to do is play finger two on the D before sliding up into the E or slipping up into the E. We have this sound. We could try this on A minor. We could try this on F or on G. The same concept. Now, if I'm in E flat major, for example, and I want to try one of these, I would have to be cognizant of the fact that F would be sliding up into G. And on my A flat chord, B flat would be sliding up into C. Again, keep in mind what your home based scale is and stick to those notes. So one thing I like to do is after I do a grace note, sometimes I'll come down a couple notes in the scale. So we have this sound, stepping back down to C, A minor. We've done this grace note from B to C, stepping down a couple of notes, F major, stepping down a couple, and then G. So you get this But we haven't really applied it to one of our patterns yet, so let's make sure that we explore that. If we were to go back to pattern one A and try this on an A minor chord, not a minor seven, we'll come back to that, but a minor, would get something like this. Now, that last chord, you can do an A minor or with this B as the variation. C, C in the middle. B. It's a preference more than anything, but that's the idea. So we're doing a couple with the grace, and then a little shot towards the end. You could do all grace. It just gets a bit redundant, and it's not quite as funky in my opinion. Let's do a pattern where we do two A minors, two d minors. Here we go. One, two, three, four, That's the basic idea. What we can also do though, is go back and apply this on minor seven. We're going to take this C major example that we talked about, and we're going to put our left hand down below on A. What we end up getting is the same feeling in the right hand. Which is a beautiful sound. Now instead of the C major going from the two to the three, if we're thinking C major scale one, two, three, four, 567, the second out of the scale was going to the third, or we could say the second of the chord was moving to the third of the chord. Now by putting a in our left hand, we have the fourth of the chord going to the fifth. This sounds very good on minor chords, especially. So we have a beautiful little sound. Let's take a chord progression like A minor seven to F major seven. A CEG to F ACE, and we're going to apply a grace note finger two to finger three, the fourth to the fifth. Now, on this F chord, here's a great example of needing to use the home key. In the scale of F major, B flat is actually the fourth note, and this chord is F major seven. Shouldn't I be using the F major scale? No. We're using F lidian and we don't have to go so far as to y, but the basic reason is that we're trying to stay in our home key. Our home key, A minor, just natural minor, does not have a B flat, it has a regular B natural. Listen to this progression, when I go to the F major seven chord, I'll use that B flat and you'll see it does not sound right. Pretty bad, right? So let's go back again. We're going to try it with the B. Instead of the B five, we're saying true to the A minor scale. Here we go. One, two, three, four. So variation. Let's take this concept of keeping the right hand part the same while we move our left hand to change the context of the harmony. We're going to apply it to pattern one, but we're going to use one of the variations. We end up getting something that sounds like this. Now, notice, I was doing the grace note, but then also doing some hinging to the other side. So you can start to combine these two concepts in nearly an infinite amount of possibilities when you take all the patterns that I've taught you, all the patterns that you've created, and all the patterns that you have yet to explore. So it's a bit of a simple concept, but it's also very v. I highly recommend play around with hinging, play around with grace notes. This can give you a much more professional sound when layered over top of the basic patterns that you. Be sure to try out these two concepts over top of the chords that you prefer, the chord progressions that you enjoy. I hope you enjoyed this class. I hope you got something out of it, and I'll see you in the next one. 4. Chord Stabs: Let's get talking about chord stabs and how they are more simple than what we've been doing up to this point, but almost equally as effective. So what is a chord stab? I want you to think about one of your favorite funk artists and consider what the horn section is doing. With these big butt. With multiple horn players playing at the same time, those chords that are happening between the horn players stabbing the sound or having a sharp attack would be a great example of a chord stab. Now, we can do this on any harmonic instrument, and it happens to sound great on keys. So if we were to take an electric keyboard sound like this, just stab a couple of chords. The most simple concept with shots is just two eighth notes, somewhere within four beats, two eighth notes beside each other. 234. You can offset it to any of the other beats, one, one, two, three, four. Maybe it's beat three, one, two, three, one, two, three. Now notice I'm also using hinging at the same time. D minor seven, but I'm hinging from G, and then for E, the concept. We could also have it on Bat four, one, two, three and one, two, three, four. But also, we can start any of these on the end of a beat. One, two, three, four, one, and two, and three, and four end. In between our main beats, we have this other half of that beats duration. Three, four. The end of Bat two, one and two, three, four, one and two, three, and four. The end of Bat three, one and two, and three, four, one and two, and three. Four. Or the end of Bat four. One and two, and three and four. One, 23 and four. One. That one's one of my favorites. Let's come up with a few patterns that you can start with to get yourself understanding how these stabs can be so funky. Our first pattern is going to use a dotted quarter note followed by an eighth note a few times and then sort of wrap up the pattern at the end. Now, I realize that up to this point I've given you a very specialized version of notation, but we're starting to get into these dotted rhythms, and for me to continue to extrapolate the notation that I've given you so far, might just end up making things more confusing. I would highly recommend that you learn these patterns from trying to copy me and applying them within different chords and chord progressions. But I will be supplying a PDF within the resource section of this course so that you can, if you are someone who's able to read sheet music, have an extra reference for how to play these rhythms. But again, we're just using oral tradition right now. I show you copy. Let's try it out. Your first pattern is going to be a daughter quarter note followed by an eighth. We do this three times, and we kind of wrap it up at the end. To demonstrate, we're going to get a little be going. It sounds like this, and I'm going to choose D minor seven from my chord. Let's add a bit of engine. That's the basic idea. If you're curious as to exactly what I was playing, here it is. In the left hand, I was playing the D octaive with the fifth using finger two, and I'm completing the minor seventh chord in the right hand, choosing the notes A and C. I'm down with my thumb, coming back to the th of that. I can also hinge up sometimes with that th, S on a minor seven, A, CEG, hinging down and then back to that C. Oh. First try it with just some basic chords, and then see if you can apply something similar to what I just did, whether you're using hinging or grace notes or another concept from within this course to see if you can funkify it just a little bit more. Another thing I should mention is the same way that we took our two eighth notes and displace them to start on Bat two, three or four or the ends of Bats one, two, three, or four. You can do the same thing with the rhythm I've just provided for you. Now, doing this with the whole rhythm can be quite tough, but let's just take the concept of a dotted quarter note and an eighth note and try moving that around a little bit. This one and two, one in two, three and four. Let's try that on all the main beats. Let's put a beat to it. Here it goes. One, two, three, four. One and 21 and 23 and four on beat two this time. One and two and four and one and two, and three and four. Now on Bat three, one, two, three and four, two, and three and four. Now on Bat four. One, two, three, Rn, one, two, and three, four, n one, two, three, four. That's the basic concept. But again, you can try this starting on ends of any of those beats. Let's give it a try. One, two, three, four, two, and three, and 412, and three and four. It should be mentioned that because we're starting on an end, now our second shot is going to be on a main beat. Let's try it on the end of Bat two. On. Two, three, four, one and two, three, four, and one and two, and three and four end. The end of beat three, one and two, and three, and four and one and two, and three. One and two, three, and then the end of beat four, two, three, four, one and two, and three and four, one and two, and 31 and two and three, one and two, and three and four n. I will supply the two eighth note shots and its variations, as well as the dotted quarter note and then eighth note shots and their variations as well. I'm not considering those part of the three main patterns that I'm providing within this class. But something to consider is that it's a very good starting point so that you can take more advanced patterns later on and try offsetting them or displacing them so that the pattern starts at a different point within your four beats. For pattern number two, we're going to take the dotted quarter note value, and we're going to do a lot with it. It's going to feel like a lot of subdivisions of threes. In other words, like one and two, and three and four, and, one, two, three, and four, and one, and this sort of idea. We're playing within four, four, four main beats, but we're subdividing a beat and a half, a beat and a half, a beat and a half, or three half beats, three half beats, three half beats. Furthermore, I'm going to not play on Beat one. I'm going to start this on beat two. Let's listen to how it sounds and don't forget you can check it out in terms of its notation within the included PDF. The pattern by itself sounds quite simple. Without me counting, here's how it sounds. It almost just sounds like I'm slamming the chord either consistently or somewhat lop sidedly. But with the context of a beat, two, three, four. There's our main rhythm. So to break it down, we have one end as a rest, two and three, and four and one and two, three, and four, finishing with a very simple one beat quarter note. One, and, two, and three, and four, and one and two, three, and four. A great starting point would be to count just like I did, but over three full bars, one and two, and three and four in, one and two, and three and four in, one and two, and three and four N. You're going to play your chords every three instances of whatever you're saying. One and two, three instances of verbalizing it, and three and another example. It takes three full bars to reset so that your counting on B one lines up with a chord on B one. I'll demonstrate. It sounds something like this. One and two, and three, and four, and one, two, and three and four, one, two, and three, and four, and one. Once you've got that, try changing cords, one and two, and three and four, and one, two, and three and four, and one and two and three, and four, and one Now, that might be a little bit advanced, but take it step by step. Start with being able to phrase these little rhythms of three, and then try changing chords, maybe every four chords, every two chords, or like I did, every single chord, and then try applying this pattern. I think you'll get more out of it that way because you want to understand the basic concept, where it's coming from, and this particular rhythm that I've given you, which I think is a little bit more applicable to different grooves and just generally going to sound a little bit more funky. Again, let's break down that rhythm one more time. We have a rest on one, one, two, and three and four, and one and two, and three and four. Now, unlike the other exercise where you continue with these threes until it lines back up, that exercise gave us a three bar pattern, but 3 bars doesn't work particularly well in music most of the time. We want things to generally be 2 bars long, maybe four. In this case, we've made it 2 bars long by taking the very last beat, and instead of making it a value of three, we just made it a value of two. One. Two and three, and four, one and two, and three and four. That final four end is what allows us to reset, so things feel like they are in 44 in a nice two bar phrase. Let's try it again with our drums. This time with an organ sound just for fun, and these stabs can sound great with different types of organ sounds, so I highly recommend you try it out. Here we go. I one, two, three, four. Four So as playing around with the types of chords that I was using, there was some hinging, there was some grace notes. I'm trying to take all the concepts and apply them together as much as possible. But again, there's almost an infinite number of possibilities as to how you can take these patterns and these concepts and them together. Take your favorites, find out how you enjoy fusing them together, and that can ultimately contribute towards your style. Now let's talk about pattern three. These chord stabs are going to be a little bit more simple, but we're going to take the concept from Pattern two from the previous course where we are rolling into our chord sounds, similar to emulating a strum on guitar. The C chord I'm selecting is D minor seven, DAD in the left hand, root fifth octave, the fifth is optional. And in the right hand, we're completing the chord with the third, fifth and seventh, F A and C. DAD F A C is D minor seven. You're going to start with just two simple one beat stabs. One, two, And then you're going to feel a subdivided one, two, three, one, two, 312. One, two, 1231, two, 3121, two, 123-12-3121. Again, I'm going to notate this properly for you within the included PDF. But for right now, try your best to copy and continue to come back until you've got the copying as immaculate as possible. If you find it quite difficult, do feel free to review this class with your teacher as they might be able to help you fine tune things a little bit further. With a drumbeat, it sounds something like this. Two, three, four, one, two, 121, two, 1212 let's try that again. I'm going to let it roll for a bit. Let's just start with a D minor seven same voicing I gave you with nothing fancy. I'm going to play it for a few patterns, and I want you to try to lock in. Here we go. One, two, three, four. Can you move everything down. On note. Let's try that out. Stay here for a bit. Back up to D. Let's try holding everything. So just stop for a second. You're just going to listen. Let's try holding everything. Down to C. Now, Staccato, short for everything. Very different feel, right? And then you can start to combine the longs and shorts. So everything is short except for that second step. So you can see this is something that you could just try to lock in with on one simple chord. And then from there you can change cords as you go. You can hinge, you can use grace notes, you can put it all together to make it as funky as possible. Now, I haven't got around to how this can work with pattern number two, the s concept from the last course. Let's talk about that. Now, you don't have to strum into every chord, but we can start that way. Same ord Maybe down on C. P P Prara Prara Prapra. It's almost like rolling your tongue. So maybe we want to roll into a few of them, but not all of them. We could have something like. So I'm rolling, rolling, and then rolling. Now I'm stabbing these top notes while still holding my pinky and finger two down in the left. That's just one way you could do it. But the idea is, again, you can or roll into these cords as you see fit. Maybe it's only once. But you can see how rolling into a chord works within this concept of chord stabs. The last thing I want to mention is if we go back to this concept of just playing one and two, three, four, one, two, three, four. These two eighth note stabs, you want to think about the bigger picture. If you're playing with a band, what is the guitarist doing? What is the singer doing, as well as the bassist and drummer. You're going to find your little pocket of space within all of that, and most likely those two chord stabs will work best in that space. In funk, they call this a hocket. A hocket is the idea that a musical phrase is being broken up between multiple instruments. It's still catchy, like a phrase would be, but it's a little bit more abstract. Another genre that does this is dub step. Allow me to demonstrate verbally as embarrassing as it might be. In funk, it might be ca chacha. It Dutta Retro Duta. It's still catchy enough that it gets stuck in your head, but it's not all necessarily melodic. In dubstep, it might be, we get the D, woo, boo boo boo boo boo. We get the D, D D, woo, boo boo boo, using different AFO speeds, on different notes, on different synthesized sounds. But to the point where you can still recognize the song and hear it almost as though it's a regular phrase. So I do digress a bit, but I wanted to explain what a hawk it is. And in terms of that o. Whatever your part is that you're bringing into the hocket, you need to listen to the rest of the band to see where your space lies. If you're not playing within the context of a full band, you have a lot more freedom as to the patterns that you can play. But I did think it was worth mentioning that especially for those double shots, if you're going to try that out as a concept, make sure you're placing it into a spot within the context of the band where there's some space. That's it. We talked about various types of cord stabs. Two eighth notes, back to back on every main beat, as well as the end of each beat. We talked about dotted quarter notes followed by an eighth note on all the main beats, as well as the ends of each of those beats as two very underlying concepts that you want to get to know very well. We also talked about phrasing threes within our rhythms, so 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. Getting comfortable with that, and then applying it within something that feels a little bit more like a two bar phrase version of that exercise. I gave you three main patterns that you can work with. All of this is going to be wrapped up into a nice little PDF. I'm straying in this case from the previous notation because it's just too complex at this point to take those concepts and create dotted rhythms and all this other stuff. So once you have the concept of how that notational system works, and you have those rhythms ingrained within you. These are just variations and little ways that you can expand on those. Again, the hope is that through oral tradition, me showing you and you copying, you can get these rhythms under your belt without having to painstakingly read traditional sheet music. But if that's your atmosphere, if that's what you prefer, I will include a PDF to help you out. That's it for C chord stabs, I'll catch you in the next class. 5. B3 and b7: A. For this next concept, it's quite simple, but quite effective. What we're going to be doing is just taking the third and seventh from our minor chords and playing them either third below seventh above or seventh below third above. Allow me to explain. Here's a C minor seven chord, C E flat, G B flat. If I was to take this root third fifth and seventh and only play the third and the seventh, I would be playing the e flat and the B flat. Now my left hand is still going to stick on C. I have two Cs in my left hand. A third and a seventh in the right hand or alternatively a seventh and a third, the B flat below the E flat. We get and has are two sounds available. Let's try out a pattern with a clav sound. Here's the sound of our clav. Super funky. What we're going to do is start with a simple pattern. Again, we'll choose one A, and we're going to try applying it to these two right hand shapes. The first time, I'm up here, e flat B flat, the second two times B flat E flat, and again, B flat E flat. Now, I can change the left hand while keeping the right hand the same. Let's say the left hand goes down to a flat or we can try F. We'll try both the F to A flat. Simple but effective. Now, at the same time, if I'm choosing a progression like a minor one to a minor four, C minor seven to F minor seven. I can use the same concept on the F minor seven that I did on the C minor seven. That would sound in F like this. Again, F octaves in the left hand, and the right hands playing the third and seventh A flat to e flat or reversed E flat to A flat. So in the context of a progression, two C minor chords, two F minor chords or minor seventh, it would sound like this. You can go up to the F or down to the F. I did speed up a little bit intentionally as I did that to show you how it sounds at slower speeds and also a little bit faster. We can try with the drum beat. Let's give it a shot. One, two, three, four. A little variation at the end. Just staying on that seventh and third pattern on the F minor seven chord. Admittedly, this doesn't work as well on dominant chords or major seventh chords. I'd recommend for now, just trying it out on minor seventh chords. But your jazz teacher, if you have one, would be very happy that you're identifying these thirds and sevenths as they are so fundamental in outlining the totality of each chord. So while these patterns sound phenomenal with a clave sound, you can of course try with electric piano sound, a piano sound, or an organ sound. I'm going to demonstrate those three really quick. You will see the organ is not going to be quite as effective because it's not velocity sensitive in this case, but it still sounds fine. Here's with a piano. Next up with an electric piano. Next with an organ sound. So you can see they all sound fine, but there's nothing that can beat. The funkiness of that clav sound. If you don't have a keyboard with a clav sound, don't worry about it. Like I said, it works just fine with piano. But I did want to mention that the clav for this pattern, especially is one of my favorites. So if you haven't tried a clav sound yet, do make sure that at some point, you get around to trying it. In the next class, we're going to be starting the same way where we're playing around with these thirds and sevenths, but then we're going to introduce chordal harmony. Let's dive into the next class and talk about it. I'll see you in the next class. 6. Quartal Harmony: Next up, let's get talking about quartal harmony and how it can work so well within these funky patterns. So what is quartal harmony? It's the idea of instead of building cords off of skips or thirds, like C, skipping a note, E skipping a note, G, we're going to create these chords off of perfect fourths, which is the distance of five semitones. C, one, two, 345, one, two, 345. Our chord is built off of oars. But first of all, I want to recommend that you know all of these quartal cords that are available. I will include those within the PDF within the resource section for this course, but I'm going to show you them right now so you also have this visual reference as well. C F B flat, C sharp F sharp, B, DGC, E flat, A flat, D flat, EAD, F B flat, E flat, F sharp, B E, GCF, A flat, D flat G flat, ADG, B flat, E flat, A flat, B E A. Here's the chords. You should know these chromatically ascending as well as descending so that you're able to play them quite freely within your patterns. Let's try taking a little bit from our last class where we were working with thirds and sevenths of our minor chords, and at the end of our pattern, we're going to apply a little bit of this quartal harmony sound. Now we're going to be using pattern five A, but before I jump into that, I want to mention how we're going to use the chortal harmony. While we could just move around quartal chords chromatically, moving by semitones with one of our patterns, I'll demonstrate with pattern one A as it's the most simple That's not exactly how we're going to be using it within the context of this class. The specific way that we're going to use quartal harmony within this pattern is as follows. Whatever key you're in, let's say it's C minor, we're going to move to the fourth note of that scale. In this case F. We're going to build a quartal chord off of that note, in this case, F B flat flat, and then we're going to be resolving this somewhat colorful sound where the middle note moves down a semitone. This is used a lot in classic funk bands. It's That's the sound. It's essentially an F dominant seven with no fifth suspended and then resolved. Again, that doesn't really matter. You just need to know the quartal chord and then resolve the middle note down a semitone. So the pattern we're using is five A. If I was to take this concept of the third and sevenths on the C chord, and then I'm going to move to the four F. And my top notes, it still feels like I'm just playing the third and the seventh. But again, you can see this quartal harmony forming. I'm going to resolve the flat down to A. I'm doing quite a bit of talking, why don't I demonstrate? Here's how it sounds. A That's the basic concept. You could even have something like jumping around octaves. So instead of just using two fingers in the right, you can jump up and do that full ortal chord and the resolution. So this sound of building a quartal chord off of the fourth scale degree and resolving it in the way that I showed you can be used in even more simple ways. Like, if we go back to the idea of chord stabs, let's choose an organ sound. Let's say we have something like one, two, three, four, The band is in scene and they're doing something like this. You're just waiting for your part. And then you go Super funky, right? All I'm doing is playing that chordal cord in both hands do tat tat to d d to tt tu ta. Pretty simple in terms of what we're used to from our patterns, there's no sort of breaking up of the left hand. And that's the sound that we end up getting. We Sometimes I'll even just do volume swell, something kind of like just behind the band. All of these can work really well, this sound of this quartal chord resolving is super forgiving. Even if the band is in C, you're not playing a C chord, but it's coloring everything just the right way. That's it. We took pattern five A and we applied part of it to the thirds and sevenths from the last class, and then we resolved it with this idea of taking a quartal or off of the fourth scale degree, and then resolving the middle note down a semitone, so we get two fun little funky shapes. So again, although I wanted to promote this pattern with this particular technique in this particular way, it's still recommended that you try playing around with cortal chords chromatically. So if there's a chaotic section within a jam and you're looking for some way to build a lot of tension, this Technique can sound really cool. So I do highly recommend that you play around with quartal harmony either chromatically or in a more calculated and slightly diatonic way. And by diatonic, I mean, true to a key. So that's a great way for you to be able to apply quartal harmony to pattern five A. Of course, explore this concept on some of the other patterns that have given you and even some of the patterns that you've created yourself. I hope you had fun learning a little bit more about chortal harmony. ICU in the next class. 7. Velocity Sensitivity: Next up, let's get talking about the role of velocity sensitivity within the keyboard sound that you select. Certain electric piano sounds sound different when they're more quiet or more loud. And noticeably. It's to the point where as you get past a certain threshold of how loud you're playing the note, it takes on a very different characteristic. It'll generally have a little bit more attack, possibly a little bit more saturation or distortion, and in the cases of some electric pianos, it may even trigger a different sample altogether. Here's an example of a suitcase roads played quietly versus loud. Again, if you listen, there's a bit of a bite when I play a bit louder. And it's not just the volume that you're hearing. The sound itself does change as it's played louder. Now, within these patterns that I've given you, up to this point, this plays a particularly fun role as it allows you to accent certain notes or chords as opposed to others. Now, this velocity sensitivity can play a pretty unique role within these patterns that you've been playing so far. Generally, within the right hand, the chord or the diads or whatever it is you happen to be playing, that's where you'll see this technique used the most, where we will play some chords, more quiet and some more loud. We're going to select pattern seven A from the previous course to demonstrate this. Here's our sound. I'm going to play the chords, C minor seven, B flat major nine. Here's the pattern with no change in velocity. In other words, the volume that I'm playing these keys, and then afterwards, I'll show you with some velocity sensitivity added to accent certain chords. Here's seven A. There it is. And now with some chords being accented. I threw in one little passing diminished chord there, but you get the idea. Now, what you'll notice is that only one of the chords within the pattern was accent da da da. That sort of idea. You don't really want to overdo these accents. But instead, just choose one or two chords in a pattern that you feel might want to be brought out a little bit more. Now, seven A is one of my favorite patterns, but again, I like going back to pattern one A as it's one of the most simple patterns, and it allows me to demonstrate a lot of these concepts in that simple atmosphere. So here's pattern one A. Same chords Let's try to. Another thing I'm doing is when I'm playing these chords a little bit louder, quite often, they are held, but you could play them short as well, too. Experiment with both options. When you are playing a chord a little bit louder and playing around with that velocity sensitivity, some patterns might benefit from holding that chord and others might benefit from playing it more staccato or short. This technique can sound particularly good when you're playing things quite quickly. Sort of idea. So while the concept is quite simple, it's a very open ended concept. You can take any pattern that you've learned so far, combine it with hinging grace notes, any other technique that you'd like to incorporate it with, and then choose one or possibly a couple different chords that you want to bring out an accent, but you need to make sure that the sound that you're using is velocity sensitive. In other words, when you play quietly and more loud, you're going to notice the sound change quite a bit in terms of its tamber or its texture when you are playing more loudly. Some great examples of how you could apply this would be with a suitcase roads a whirlitzer, or a clavinet if you have some sort of auto wall attached to it. In that case, the wall might be enveloped around the sound only a little bit when you're playing quietly and a lot more when you're playing loudly. So imagine it this way. The wa wa that opens up around the sound that you're playing will open up more as you play more loudly. W, wow. That sort of idea. While the sound itself might not have a change based on the velocity, the effect that you put on it can allow for this. It's also true with certain saturation or distortion plug ins. Again, feel free to play around in the world of when I play quietly, I get sound A, when I play loudly, I get sound B, and how can that apply within the patterns that I'm playing? Give it a try. Continue to add layers of funkiness to your playing, and I'll see you in the next class. 8. Left Hand Movement: What we're about to cover is not the most difficult thing that you'll experience within this course, but you can certainly get a lot of mileage out of it. We've talked about it a little bit in passing up to this point, but I want to put a special highlight or attention onto this particular technique because it's pretty simple and it's also quite effective. Let's talk about it. The idea here is you're going to come up with some pattern, and then you're going to move around your left hand while not changing the right hands part. Let's go back to this idea of hinging. We were on D minor seven, and we were hinging this E to F. If we have a pattern like, We can work with that and play around with our left hand. Now, what I find is that moving the left hand down by skips and staying true to whatever key you're in is very effective. Why? Because let's take a look at this. Let's say I have a C major chord, and now I move my left hand down to skip. Now I have A minor seven. If I move down to skip again, now I have F major seven add nine. If I move down to skip again, now I have D minor seven, add nine and 11 or D minor 11. Basically, it's always going to have the same harmony up above, but as you add skips down below, you're changing the context of what that harmony is. It's never too complex. I mean, sure, D minor seven, add nine and 11, getting a little complex. But this works really well because so many of the notes are in common. C major has CEG. A minor seven has A, CEG. Try moving down that left hand by skips within whatever key you're in. This works particularly well in minor scales. Let's go to A minor because it's one of the most simple playgrounds for us to work with in. Five A minor seven, down a skip, F major nine, down a skip, D minor at 11, and then usually I'll change the last chord. Maybe I'll go to the five chord E and do some sort of like E seven SS E seven, something to that effect. It doesn't matter. You can come back up to the f and keep things really simple. So left hand, A F D F. Let's try both of these examples. I'll do the more simple one first, where we go down a skip, down a skip, a skip, up a skip, and we're back to where we started. There's the F. The back. Let's try it with hinging. Now, I also mentioned that changing the last cord out of a four cord sequence can sound quite nice. It keeps things a little bit more fresh. Let's check it out, something like this. So on and so forth. You don't have to do this left hand technique for all the chords. You can get away with the right hand staying consistent for quite a few, and then maybe a little deviation at the end can add some freshness to the progression. Now, if moving down by a skip keeps a lot of the notes common between cords, this can also be true by moving up by skips. It's not quite as effective in my opinion, but we can try it out. Let's check it out. We're going to start on C minor. We're going to move the left hand up to the E flat. Then we're going to move the left hand up to a G. So essentially, what we have here is slash chords, C minor, C minor slash, E flat, C minor slash, G. But we're going to try it with some hinging to keep things fresh. Let's try it out. Breaking up the chords a bit towards the end there. So one more time, let's try out this technique in the easy atmosphere of A minor, and we're going to use pattern three A from the previous course. Three A sounds like this. And again, it's one of my favorites. So we're going to go in the left hand, A, down to F, down to D, and back to F, using this pattern. Let's give it a try. Now, sometimes I was getting rid of the last thumb of the pattern as a way of transitioning the left hand between notes. So if I was on a D and working my way up to F, I would put an E in between. That's idea. And then from F, stepping back up to get to that A. Again, I know the concept is simple, but it's worth playing around with. You'll end up getting some fun slash chords, some jazzy colorful chords that you may have otherwise not stumbled upon. Again, the concept is, you come up with a pattern and move around the left hand, but keep the right hand static most of the time, sometimes with a little change at the end of these progressions. Definitely make sure you apply that technique. I hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you in the next class. 9. Organ Grinds: Let's talk a little bit about organ grinds. What are organ grinds? It is simply taking an organ sound and sliding up through the notes. Now, there's a couple of ways that you can do this. I just use the back of mostly my middle finger, the nail, and I sort of brace that with the other fingers. Some people will do this with the back of their thumb like this. I find that really weird, but I think the idea is you can sort of place the hand quickly up on the cords. The way I'm doing it, you have to pop up and then reposition the hand to a cord like this. That s idea. Now, before I go and tell you how you can include this within some patterns that you enjoy, I want to first mention the idea of staying down low and grumby for a bit and then sliding up. Very often as you're sliding up or grinding up through these notes, you'll find yourself on some chord up at the top. But as a band is building a section, let's say the end of a bridge, taking you back into a chorus, I'll just literally grumble down some notes like that, and then start to do the organ grind. That's sort of idea. But you can apply these to some of the patterns that you've learned so far. The way this works is you can either grind up into a pattern and then play it as you usually would, or you're going to sacrifice the end of each pattern to throw one of these in each time. Let me demonstrate. I should also mention that this doesn't have to be for organ. It sounds really good with organ because the sound holds, but you can try it with piano. You can try it with electric piano. I can't say I've done it with clave, but I don't think it wouldn't work. I would say it's still worth trying, but you're going to get the best results with organ. One way we could do this is going into let's say pattern two A. I'm going to slide up. That sort of idea. But again, I mentioned you can take the end of a pattern, sacrifice a little bit of it to throw in one of these each time, or possibly every two or every four repetitions of the pattern. I'm going to switch sounds so we can get a little bit more clarity. I'm going to choose pattern one A. Sound. So it would sound like this. That sort of idea. Like I mentioned, you could try every two patterns, giving you a result that sounds something like this. Play around with it. The idea is this should feel very playful. It allows you to occupy a bit more space if you find that the song you're playing on needs a little bit more of age to make it sound a little bit more complex or just something to catch the listener's ear a little bit more. To my first point about sliding up into a chord and not necessarily using a full pattern, we could try something like this. Let's say the chord progression is D minor. A min. Let's just say it's those two back and fourth. You get something like this. Now, I am holding my petal down as I'm starting the next grind. If I don't, we lose a bit of the harmony along the way. You're going to have to go about this on a case by case basis to see when the petal makes sense to hold while you're doing a grind, and when you shouldn't. It's worth mentioning that by holding the petal while you're doing one of these grinds, you're going to get a little bit more chaos and clash between the notes, but sometimes that might be what you want. Here's without the petal. Same idea, you might hear a difference. Now with the petal. Okay. So when you're holding down that pedal, you can connect between the different chords that you're playing a little bit better. You can choose to apply this at the end of any of the patterns that I've shown you so far, have some fun with it. Do make sure that you are using an organ sound to start. But again, if you have to use a piano sound or any other sound, it should still apply just the same. The last thing I want to mention is that I used to play in a Funk rock band, and the keyboard that I would do this on was ad, and Nord have something called waterfall keys, which is perfect for this type of playing. Also works really well on old Hammond organs, for example, because the keys are plastic, very light, and if you're on a weighted keyboard like I am right now, you might find that it's a little bit more difficult. The last last thing I want to mention is that it's really, really tough to do a technique like this fully diatonically. In other words, what if I'm in F minor, a key that has some whites and some blacks, you can't move your hand up and down through the black keys as you're doing this. This technique works better in certain keys, like A minor, on the whites or E flat minor, up on the blacks. So I would say for now, stick to those two keys when you're trying this technique or keys that are very similar. Like D minor has a B flat in it. But because it only has one flat, you can still get away with that sound. You can stretch this to a certain point But it all depends on how much of a perfectionist you are. If I do all white keys as my grind every time in every key technically, it can still work. But it might sound a little bit more true to the key, and just a little bit more pleasing to the listener, if you do consider what keys would work best with this particular technique. Again, I'd recommend black key grinds. Make sure you're an e flat minor, white key grinds, A minor, possibly D minor or D dorian, that sort of idea. Now, get out there, start using your organ grinds and I'll see you in the next class. 10. Chord Voicing Alternation: Let's get talking about chord voicing alternation. In short, what I'm talking about is the idea of using inversions and different voicings for chords to move around within your right hand patterns to create some variety. Let's take a chord like C minor seven. C E flat, G B flat. If I take that C from the bottom and put it up to the top, I have a first inversion, C minor seven, continuing E flat up one octave. So it's up here now. This is a second inversion chord. Then one more time, if I bring the G up to the top, we have a third inversion, C minor seven chord. However, there's also other types of voicings for chords, such as open voice chords, rootless chords from various scale degrees, drop voicings, so on and so forth. If you are curious to learn more about this, I do have plenty of classes on chords and chord progressions that can help you out. For now, we only need to know the basics. A C chord can have the bottom note brought up an octave or top note brought down an octave in order to invert that chord, and you can do this multiple times to go through the different inversions that are available. One of my favorite chord voicings is rootless voicings. If I take a regular C minor chord and get rid of the root, it's now rootless, but it's missing quite a bit. In jazz, we love to add color to chords. I'm going to take the C, the root that we got rid of, move it up one note to the second note to the scale, also known as the ninth and down one tone to the flat seven or minor seventh. In other words, you take a C minor quarter, any minor chord in this case and split the root up a tone, down a tone, and you get the rootless chord. For major chords, you would go down a semitone and up a tone. But the most important thing here is to keep in mind what key you're in. When you do get rid of that root, it's going to essentially be splitting itself one note below, one note above where that root was, one note down in the scale, and one note up in the scale. C major is nice and easy to see. If I get rid of this C, so it's rootless, I'm going to surround it with the two notes come from that C major scale. So most of the patterns that I've given you have multiple instances of chords in the right hand. So for one of the instances of chords, you could use a regular, for example, C minor seven. You could then move it up to the first inversion, and then perhaps down to the rootless voicing of your choice. Let's try playing around with these three different options for our chords within pattern four A. In this most simple form, sounds like this. Let's try it with some different chord voicings. We'll throw a bead on. Here we go. One, two, three, four. But That's the basic idea. So I'm moving around these chord voicings. But what's kind of cool about this is the top note of these voicings ends up becoming a little bit of a melody almost, sort of hidden melody on the top of everything because our ears are quite sensitive to higher pitches. So we often perceive the highest note of a chord as a potential melody note. Now, there's ways that we can make this melody stand out a bit more, but I don't want to get too far off the rails here. So let's see what's going on with the top notes of those three chords. For C minor seven root position, we have B flat on top. C minor seven first inversion, we have a C on top, the root, and for C minor seven rootless voice from this seventh here, we have a G on top. So essentially, when we're playing this, as our chords within that pattern, we're hearing Listen carefully. Do you hear it? So when you're doing these cord variations within these exercises, do keep in mind that you might be bringing out some sort of subtle melody, which is another just added bonus to using this sort of technique. As I have been, I'm going to go back to Pattern one A temporarily. One of the easiest patterns, one of the most versatile patterns, and show you how this technique would work within that pattern. Let's get a drumbe going. Here we go one, two, three, four. So again, you're able to hold certain chords. You're able to go sacado on certain cords, you're able to move these around. So we have plenty of variety in terms of the options for the right hand. Now, because I chose pattern four A with these doubles, this could be Like you could move really quickly between these chords. But I think there's a huge margin for error there, and I don't think the melody is going to be sung out as much with these quick movements between the chords, just because simply it's less singable as a human. You want to keep your melodic ideas singable so that it can get stuck in someone's head, they can sing along, so on, and so forth. So I did want to mention that with these double shots, you could move between chords, but I would caution it. The whole idea here is explore some different options and see what works best within each pattern. For me, doubling on one chord, doubling on the next, and then doubling on the last worked really well. That's a pretty simple concept. You're going to be applying inversions, but also different types of cord voicings, again, rootless and drop voicings come to mind to be able to apply them within the patterns that you've learned so far. You can get a lot of mileage out of this technique, have fun applying it, and I'll see you in the next class. 11. Adding a Melody: So far, up to this point, your right hands main purpose has been to supply the harmony or the chords. But could we allow it to venture into melodic content? Let's get talking about that. So most of the time, a melody is just going to be a single note moving around in some sort of musical phrase, similar to the human voice. We're going to start in that atmosphere and then play around with things a little bit. So the pattern that we're going to select to help supply this melodic content is one of the last patterns from the previous course. It's pattern ten A. It sounds like this. It's a nice little pattern where some instances are being held for four beats or three beats or just single beats as well, too. So to start, you need to know what key you're in. Let's go with D minor. It's mostly white notes, but we do have a B flat that you have to watch out for. This is the D natural minor scale. It's super important to know what key we're in at this point because as you're creating this melody, you're going to want to know what set of notes are available to you when you're creating that melody. Let's hold up our right hand index finger and start it on a D, and you're going to get to move that finger around anytime the right hand would generally have a chord playing, but it's not a chord. It's just a single note. Let's start with just Ds. It would sound like this. Let's move up through the scale every time that right hand plays. We're starting to get the idea. Now we're going to move around, not necessarily in a scale like fashion, but within the same notes from that scale. It doesn't have to be overly complex. You could start with just meandering around through the scale. So maybe we'll try that first, but what I'd recommend is eventually lock in some short and simple phrases. For now, let's just noodle, so we can have our right hand playing any note from the scale. You can leap, you can step. Doesn't matter. No rules for this time. Let's go for it. Sounds something like this. Okay? Now, towards the end, you could hear it was a bit more musical. I was keeping the leaps a little bit less wide, and I was considering, is this singable and how do the notes sound? Let's create a little bit more of a melody this time, and I'm going to simplify it. Check it out. Singable, and I was also applying the left hand technique of moving to different notes down by skips as I had recommended before, but keeping the right hand the same. We could also take this right hand melody and part in octaves in the right hand. An octave always feels like the same stretch, whether you're on white notes or black notes, so get used to what that stretch feels like no different than you have in your left hand for these patterns. Let's try it with octaves. It would sound like this. Not bad. We're also going to try it with skips. The idea is every note that I play in the right hand. We're going to also play one skip above. Now, you could move around with a little piece sign, but I'd recommend trying alternating thirds. This idea of one and three, two and four, three and five. So not always playing your skips with the same fingers, but getting used to playing them with any combo of fingers that are one skip away from one another. So one, three, two, four, or three and five. Let's try it. It sounds like this. To tao. The tao. The tao. The taboo Let's try it with a beat, in, one, two, three, four. That's the general idea. Let's try two more examples of this technique within this pattern. I'm going to switch keys. My next examples are going to be in G minor, and I'm going to create a whole new melody. I'm also going to try some of these different techniques, single notes, octaves, and skips, or thirds, and I'm going to try mixing them up a little bit throughout the pattern. Let's give it a try. It sounds like this. One, two, three, four. Tt. Pt. So we mixed things up. We had octaves. We had diads. We had full chord stabs as well, too, just go back to the basics sometimes. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But in this case, we're just giving ourselves more options to play with. So you can simply add a melody on the top of these patterns, whether it sounds like a melody alternating chord voicings or simply playing single notes or octaves to really help that melody get brought out. This is a concept certainly worth playing around with. I hope you have fun with it, and I'll see you in the next class. 12. Blues Licks: I've been waiting to show you this class because for me, it's one of my favorite concepts, and I've saved it for the very end. We're going to get talking about the blues scale and how we can use that within our patterns and mix that up with all the other concepts and patterns that we've talked about to give you tons of options to be able to play a bit more funky. But believe me when I say this blues scale option, you can take very far and it's super convincing in terms of how funky or groovy it sounds. Let's dive into what a blues scale is. We're going to go back to a friendly key, in this case, A minor. A blue scale, in this case, a minor blue scale, eliminates the second note from a minor scale, as well as the sixth note. It adds a note between the fourth and the fifth scale degree. And this note here that we're adding is known as the blue note. That blue no is generally not meant to be landed on. You can in certain instances on certain chords. But generally, it's meant to scoop up or scoop down, and I really like doing that scoop while pairing the root with either my pinky up above, especially if I'm scooping up, but also sounds great if you're scooping down. When I am scooping down and I want to have something below, I'll generally add A with my thumb. But again, you can scoop up. It's this sound. But there's nothing wrong with keeping the pinky on top, try sliding both ways. The thumb down below, try sliding both ways. We're going to use a fresh pattern in this example, and I'm going to come up with it on the spot. Most likely it'll start as one of our regular patterns, but I will lengthen it so it sounds a little bit fresh. Wish me luck. Within this pattern, when I'm thinking of playing a chord, sometimes I will, but sometimes I'll play some of these sort of scooped diads or the blue note paired with an extra note in this case, A. So it sounds something like this. So what am I playing? I'm playing one scoop up here and one scoop down here. So again, the blue note scooping up with my paired root up above. And then again, I'm doing what we were doing before, where I'm thinking of a minor seventh chord as the left hand supplying the root and the right hand playing the remaining notes, in this case, CE G. And then sort of hinging, we're just moving the top note up a note. I say sort of hinging because these are both notes from the or. G and A both exist. So was I thinking about hinging when I did it? Not really. I was just moving from one chord tone like G up to the next, A, and they happened to be in seventh chords in this case right beside each other. The pattern was Let's see if I can try a different thing within the Blues environment, but within that same pattern. Let's go for it. I think the pattern was a little different, but you get the idea. You're able to start to play around in this blue scale with patterns that either you create or patterns that I've already given you, and it can sound really tasty. So what we're going to do is talk about some of the things you can play within the blue scale that isn't just this, right? The scoop up or scoop down. But diads do sound great. Diads being not triads, three notes, but just in this case two. Some of my favorite diads would be we've talked about this the seventh and the third or the third and the seventh of the chord that you're playing. The scoop up, the scoop down. There's also, if you were to take the pentatonic scale, which is the blue scale with no blue note, so A C D EG A, and just skip notes, like you would if you were playing a C major scale like this. But it's less convenient because in the blue scale or in the pentatonic scale, in this case, we're missing some notes. Here's our collection of notes. A would skip to D. That's a great diad. C skips to E, D skips to G, E skips to A, and then here's that G skipping to C, which we've talked about. So you get some thirds and some oars, This actually sounds quite nice. This little pair here, C skips to E, D skips to G, E skips to A. Let's play around with that. It would sound like this. I put some variation on it, but again, you get the general idea. At this point, we are at the end of the second funky piano rhythms course. The whole idea is to really let the floodgates open, apply a bunch of these concepts. If there's some things that I haven't taught you, let's say you're studying with a jazz teacher and you learn to fund new harmonic technique or melodic technique, try applying it within this atmosphere. Again, you might be able to contribute to your own style in a way that someone else hasn't already. I do find that applying the blue scale works really well within a more basic context of using a lot of chords with some little blues tricks. Let's take that same pattern again or something close to it. I'm going to start with just the thirds and sevenths as we've already covered in a previous class, and I'm going to pair that with some of these little blues tricks. Let's try it out. I had this and I'm playing around that blue note area. You can even have I love that little With my students, I call those slingshots. But again, this is just like a little blues lick, and there could be a whole course that I could put together on blues licks, and I know that those courses do exist out there. I'm going to eventually do one on my own. But the idea is you take some of those licks that you like, those little s, and you apply them within the pattern. It might mean similar to those organ grinds that you have to sacrifice a piece of the pattern. Maybe it's not the very end, maybe it's somewhere in the middle. And by sacrifice, I mean, just not have all of that complexity happening, but a brief moment of maybe you would have a pinky, a thumb and a cord, get rid of all that, and now it's better to you some little tiny lick or riff. So, for example, pattern one A again. If we take this and sacrifice some notes. That's what I'm talking about. You can play around with pentatonic diads, blue scale, licks, or riffs or preferably combine those concepts with some full chords within the patterns that you already know, or the patterns that you've created. Make sure at this point you're comfortable coming up with your own patterns. Again, take the patterns from the previous course, as well as the patterns that we've discussed within this course, and make sure that you know them inside and out first. Don't forget there will be a PDF within the resource section of this course so that you can re learn or brush up all the patterns from the previous course. Although if I'm being honest, some of my favorites from that course, we have covered within Funky Piano rhythms two. That's it for now. I'll catch you in the next class. 13. Outro: So you've made it to the end of this course, and where are you at now with your rhythmic playing? Well, you've learned plenty of patterns up to this point and lots of different ways that you can variate those patterns, adding little convincing details to make them that much funkier. Now I can tell you as someone who is a magician in my past life, there's something called Convincers in Magic. And without those convincers, the trick tends to bomb. And usually it's the smallest, most subtle detail that really pulls the trick together. Well, your trick is funky little rhythmic tricks, and your convincer are the details that I've given you within this course. Sure that you really consider what your favorite patterns are, what your favorite details are, and the different ways that you can combine them and bring them into an atmosphere where you're perhaps playing with a band, singing over top of these rhythms or using them within some sort of musical production setting. I want to thank you for taking this class, and I also want to mention, I'm really proud of you. Not many players are willing to go the length that you have gone to improve their rhythmic playing. I'm curious how many people that take this course actually play in a funk band. Probably not too many. But that's the whole idea of these funky rhythms is that they don't have to just be applied to funk. If you're a keyboardist in a hip hop setting, soul, RMB, pop, jazz, No soul, the list continues. These rhythms will give you some mileage in so many different styles of music. So whatever style of music it is you like to play, I am certain that the details from this course will help you take your rhythmic playing to that next level. Now, don't forget to have some fun with the project for this course, as I will be reviewing it and giving you some information as to how your playing is coming along and perhaps how it could improve. If you have any questions about the project details, do make sure that you check out the class specifically on the project details for this course. If you'd like to connect on social media on Instagram and TikTok, you can find me at Let's Cook Music. On SoundCloud, you can find me at soundcloud.com slash Let's Cook Music. And on YouTube, you can find me at youtube.com slash at Cook Hyphen Music. You need to have the At. You need to have the Hyphen. Make sure you include those. So my project for the next year is to create plenty more courses so that I can take my 20 years of music teaching and compartmentalize it in a way that's available for students like yourself. So to help me on that project, it would be great if you could subscribe to my YouTube channel, as after I've done many of these courses, growing my YouTube following will be the next step. Also, you can find out more about me as a composer and as a teacher at Cook Hyphen music.ca. And I do have a small music school with a group of like minded teachers that are available for private lessons, either virtually or within Tronto where I'm from. So you can find out more about that at Cook Music school.ca. So whether you enjoy learning through a video format, through courses like these, or if you really want to take your musical playing to the next level and sign up for private lessons, either way, I've got you covered. Hope you enjoyed this course. It's one of my favorites because I use these techniques all the time, and I hope that you get to use them a bunch, too. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next course.