Music Composition | Practicing & Arranging With the Piano

1. Promo: The aim of this course is to help composers arrange more fluently at the piano by focusing on practicing the fundamental patterns of arranged. By taking this course, you'll be enhancing your composing and arranging skills as well as becoming a better piano . My name's Jack I'm a composer and online educator and founder of Lean Musicians on My courses have been taken by thousands of students in nearly 100 countries. On my main thing is helping musicians right on practice music more effectively. This is not a beginner's course. This course follows on from my previous course music composition at the aim of that course was to give beginning musicians an amazing foundation in music theory and composition, or to give intermediate musician to catch up on all those things that they often if you haven't taken that course or don't feel totally confident with your level of music theory as it currently stands, then check it out before taking this. However, if you're interested in enhancing your skills as an arranger, then stick around and let me explain what this course is about. In depth performing musicians practice all the time. That's how they get. How do you practice if you're composing, often mastered a good level of music theory on DSA basic keyboard skills How do you really start absorbing new techniques and material and moved from being an intermediate to a professional? In my experience there to conventional bits of wisdom that professional composers usually say in answers, right, loads of music on listen to lots of music. Both of these are absolutely valid and probably the best bits of advice you get. However, my guess is that you're already doing this, and it's not quite answering all of your questions. The fact is, most early stage composers just get stuck when writing quite often, and it's really an issue of vocabulary in language learning. There is a well known hack or trick to pushing through this early stage much quicker than the average learner on its to find the top 300 most used words or patterns in the language , and to learn those first, this is what we're gonna be doing in this course. This course teaches you the fundamental patterns of arranging in music in a practical way at the piano. When you have these patterns under your belt, you can start combining and manipulating them in many different ways. To write your own music, you start hearing these patterns everywhere, which shows you that really music isn't as hard as you thought. You can start deconstructing your favorite music and emulating it with ease, and you can develop your existing musical ideas with ease so you can finally start finishing that pile of sketches that you've been building up. My hope is that at the end of this course, you'll have built up on be continuing to build up a powerful skill set at the piano and have a wealth of arranging principles on which to build. And my hope is that these two pillars will allow you to express your compositional ideas more fluently and more reliable. I hope to see you on the inside. 2. Outline & Goals: as I've mentioned, the goal of this course is to give you the fundamental patterns of arrangements so that you can learn how to practice piano and write music effectively. In the previous video, I gave you a basic idea of how this course is designed in this video. I'm gonna give you an overview of all the different sections and how you can start building up different levels of practice by combining these sections together. The First section Harmony gives you a powerful set of standard harmonic patterns that can be found in countless pieces and across most genres of music. By learning the fundamental patterns in harmony, you know only give yourself the best building blocks for your own progressions. But you make learning new pieces easier as well, because you've seen many of the fundamental patterns before. Although it's relevant to every part of the course, this section has a particular focus on becoming fluent in all keys. This gets us to offer set of practice, goes learn basic progressions in one key and learn basic progressions in all keys. Depending on your level, all keys might be a little bit much at this stage, in which case, you might want to stick to four or five. I'll speak more about this in this section. Having covered some of the most standard fundamental harmonic progressions, the repertoire section gets you started on expanding your knowledge of other people's repertoire. The goal here is to internalize the songs and the pieces that you love and transposed them toe other keys to really absorb the techniques that they employ. This section also looks at how you can start transcribing and absorbing the more subtle and interesting parts of the music that you love on. We talk through how to collect and build all of this into your own composers pattern library. This gets us to our next set of goals. Learn fortunes as outlines in one key and learn fortunes as outlines in all keys. Your long term goal, especially if you're more experienced, is to build up a library of 20 or even 30 songs that you can play simply as outlines in all keys. The next part of the course is where we get to the building blocks of arrangement. If you think about it at its most fundamental level, a song is just an outline with a bass and a melody. What you do in the middle with voicing accompaniment and rhythm is really what defines theory. INGE Mint. So we start off our arranging journey with voicings. Once you know court types. And once you know lots of amazing progressions, that's only really the beginning. Voicings. Take your harmony to new levels of expression and interest In this section of the course. You'll learn eight fundamental concepts invoicing that you canoes and combine to generate endless new ideas. This gets us to our next set of practice goals. Practice voicings over different chords, practice voicings inside standard progressions and practice voicings inside full tunes. If voicings are the first level of arranging, then accompaniment would be the second. A compliment is not just something that someone does for a singer or instrumentalist. It's basically everything that happens in between the base and melody. In this section of the course, you'll learn the most fundamental accompaniment patterns that you can use as a lens to understand all other a compliment patterns and build your own. This gets us to our next set of goals. Practice accompaniment patterns over different chords, then combine accompaniment, patterns and voicings and play these over standard progressions and then combine accompaniment patterns on voicings and play these inside of full tunes. Section five is where we start to look at various melodic patterns and how you can start practicing them to expand the horizons of your phrasing and melody. Writing much of melody Writing can just be an intuitive process where you simply try to hear what the change to be. However, you can take much more control over this process by using standard patterns on by pushing yourself to make new melodic shapes based off of them. By practicing this material, you also build really strong piano technique. This gets us to our next set of goals. Practice melodic patterns in different scales, using both hands separately and together combined melodic patterns in your right hand with a compliment patterns and voicings in your left hand over standard progressions and combined melodic patterns in your right hand. With the compliment patterns and voicing senior left hand over standard repertoire. This will be explained a lot more in the final section of the course. If that doesn't make total sense right now, rhythm really makes genre. If he changed the groove a piece of music, it suddenly sounds better, totally ridiculous or just different. This is a short section of the course, but hopefully it will spark your imagination as to the limitless potential of rhythmic development and groove. When you apply it to all that you've learned so far, this gets us to one of our final goals, where all of the concepts come together. Combined melodic patterns and accompaniment, patterns and voicings with different rhythmical concepts and then practice thes inside of different harmonies. The different goals laid out in this video present an optional path for you to slowly build your practice through. You can start at level one and progress slowly through designing your own practice routines tailored to your tastes and level. The final section will also support you in putting all of these pieces together and helping you practice effectively and to compose new music. My final piece of advice to you is really focus on having fun and share your music with other musicians to get support. Community is the most amazing thing for people who share a love for something. We're super lucky to have a great community at lean musician. The space is all about helping each other to be more productive and to enjoy the music that we create more deeply. You can join our group any time over at facebook dot com slash groups slash lean musician. I'll be on hand to answer any questions you have, and it would be totally awesome if you wanted to share some of the new ideas that you generate and a practicing with the concepts covered in this course. You could drop a video or an audio file in the group and explain it to us. It would get everyone super inspired. I hope to see there and enjoy the course. 3. Resources: As you've heard me mention, this course is a follow on from my previous course, music, composition, the piano. If you haven't taken that course, you can do so by following the link on the screen. Now, much of the feedback from students after taking that course was that they wished I'd gone deeper into some of the concepts to help them practice and integrate it. So that's what we're doing in this course. Some of the concepts will be repeated, but mostly we'll be going more in depth and practical with them to help you with this practice and the integration of some of the concepts. There are a number of resources including backing tracks that you can get by following this link. When you follow that link, you'll be taken to a Google Drive folder with a number of PDFs and backing tracks in it. In here we have an outline of the entire course, which is a kind of guide set of chord progressions, goal-setting document, suggested repertoire, and also a set of backing tracks to help you practice. I'll explain how these work in the harmony section that are backing tracks for a number of the different progressions in this course. But not all of them exist yet because I haven't created them. If you're interested in me creating more of these backing tracks and they help you and your practice, then please let me know. Finally, for all assignments, support, and questions you might have. You can chat with myself and the other musicians in the lean musician community. That's community dot lean musician.com. I'll be there to support you with your goals, your work, and I'm excited to hear what you come up with. Okay, so let's dive in. 4. Intro to harmony: so welcome to the first section of the course, the Harmony section. Harmony is really the bedrock of everything that we do as composers arrangers musicians because whenever you're doing anything in music, you're always doing it inside of harmony. You're always writing into accord or progression or ah, whole piece of music. But the harmony was has to be there. Sometimes it doesn't sound like the harmony is that it might sound really out there, but nearly always, the person has a sense of harmony in the back of their mind. They might just be doing really interesting extensions or whatever to the harmony around it . So, like with all sections in this course, my aim is to give you the most fundamental patterns in this area so that you can really embed the fundamentals on, then draw from them when you're composing, so you don't get stuck on DSO that you're kind of informed and well read. It's very easy for young composers to kind of start out and think that they're going to chance upon good stuff. Sometimes you do, but more often than not, you don't. Actually designing and becoming unique as a composer actually stems from knowing what the fundamentals are. I know you probably know this, but it's worth reminding. And that's what this course is about in ALS sections giving you the fundamentals or the foundations of this particular area. So with harmony, my aim was to find kind of 10. I've actually landed 11 fundamental progressions that I think sum up a huge amount of stuff that you're gonna find in everything that you learn. So my goal is that after you've gone through this section of the course, the next time you learn a new piece, you're gonna be like, Hey, that's part of the room progression. And that's part of the progression. And that makes total sense to me because I've learned that progression. There another scenario is your composing, and you're writing something. Can you like? Okay, I'm stuck here. What do I do? OK, I'm going to try the X Y Z progression or the ABC progression and just see whether that works. And then you try and you're like, That's not quite right. Let me try this progression. And then you put that on your life. That's it. If I use that progression and then change the end of it a little bit. You see what I mean? You've got these modular ideas that you can kind of tack onto your pieces, transform and change on. Then you'll just be off. You won't need to think about these things. So it's kind of Ah, that's really what the aim of a foundation is in all sections of this course. It's kind of like the analogy I always use is, if you are going to a new country and you don't speak the language, maybe you speak five or six words. You're absolutely not gonna have a good conversation with anyone. Similarly, with music. If you know a few fundamental patterns, you're not really gonna get that far. So the more you learn, the more conversation you can have it, the more you can then start being unique, right? Even if you learn a lot of words in a language, you're still not speaking as yourself right. But my goal in this course is to give you alot fundamentals or a huge amount of fundamental so that you can go away and start trying to speak as yourself because you've got this great foundation. So in the next video. What we're gonna do is we're gonna talk you through exactly how to use this section of the courts, all the different things involved. Like the backing tracks, stuff to do with chord symbols written down here. Andi, kind of just a few points that are really important for you to understand when using the rest of this section, so see that? 5. How to use this section: so if you follow the link that's on screen now, you'll be taken to your online Resource is foldaway. You'll be able to download a pdf, which contains all of the progressions used in this section of the course, and the pdf is written in Roman numerals. Or rather, the core depressions are written in Roman numerals. And if you don't understand Roman numerals, you need to have taken, like most things in this course need to have taken my first course music composition at the piano that will really take take you through how to use Roman numerals. The reason they're written in Roman numerals is so we can learn these progressions independent off key. When you learn a new cool progression, you kind of understand that right? But then when you transpose it to a new key, you understand it a little bit more, and when you transpose it to three or more keys, you really start understanding the pattern behind that chord progression on what that does is gives you two things. When you study a new piece of music like a whole song or a whole you know, composition, you can start seeing where they use parts of that fundamental progression or pattern that you've seen before, right? It comes back to that language analogy that we've spoken about. You start seeing the patterns on, then if you are composing and you're getting stuck, whatever key or in you'll be able to go hang on. What if I use this progression or Okay, I'm halfway through this progression that I know off by accident. What if I finish it? What if I change? You know this so many options. But I'm aware that if you're kind of a real beginner, what kind of a riel? Intermediate beginner, Whatever you call it, whatever label you want to say, you might find transposing 11 progressions toe all keys a little bit of welling, which I totally understand. So in which case, you need to think, how can you d scope it a little bit? So at the base level, I would say what you need to do is go through this section and learn all the progressions, right? Maybe you want to learn three. First on, then transpose those into a minimum of three keys, right? Don't try and transpose just one key. You won't get the benefit transpose each progressing, You learn into three keys on, then slowly go through and get all 11 progressions in three different keys. There's no matter what they are, right? If you're kind of a lot more advanced or into media, I would say try and get all progressions in a lot 12 keys and you will be amazed right at the kind of the benefits that you get just from that one activity without even going to the other sections in this course. If you kind of fast forward it to a point now where you can do that in all keys, you a lot of your arranging and composition questions would actually be answered, right? So which is why I put this section of the course up front, but we don't stop there. Right? This this course isn't necessarily a linear thing. After this section of the course, what we start going through is the voicings and it compliment patterns, melodic patterns and then some rhythm, ideas and stuff on The goal of it is to take those ideas right. Say you're learning in a compliment pattern and to bring it back into a progression. Right. So you're learning you know, a strides, a compliment pattern. Okay, great. Go and study the stride progression. Sorry. Go and study destroyed a compliment pattern over the blues progression or the time progression, or the 1564 progression or whatever progression if you're learning the like another company pattern or particular voicing play that voicing in that chord progression that you've learned in all keys and what you'll be doing is you'll be embedding that, voicing much more than if you just went and played that voicing on a few courts, right? So keep coming back to these progressions on playing the material that you learn in the other sections inside of them. Now, in the beginning, you probably won't be able to do that, especially if you're a beginner, right in the beginning, what we wanted to is we want to play really simple root position, simple chords inside off that key on that progression that we're learning, right, and you want to be able to do that in the left hand on the right hand, and that's a little bit boring because it sounds a bit playing right. We just take the blues progression, right? You're just going to three full Teoh possible. You might be doing dominant 7th 2 for one on. The really important thing is to do this over and over again so that it gets into your hands, right? You wanna be able to do it like I'm doing now, being able to talk to you at the same time without having to think too much. You want to do that in all keys, right? You do that that that whilst talking to someone else or doing something house because you haven't internalized it if you could do that. So the point is you need to practice it a lot, but that can get incredibly boring. So what I've done, at least for the 1st 3 progressions, also is create backing track, support you to practice along to now. These backing tracks it kind of funny. I find them funny anyway, because two reasons. One, when I think of a backing track, I think of like karaoke, a pub somewhere which is not what I'm trying to do here. It'll but mainly they're a bit cheesy. Thes backing tracks. They're a bit vanilla and plain. They're not kind of like, well produced or anything like that. There's just a base and some drugs right on. The goal is so that you can have signed on in the background. It's definitely not saying you listen to, but it's something that keeps a structure of harmony for you, For sometimes 20 minute practice sessions on one progression over and over again with breaks right. That that is the goal of the backing track is to force you in a nice way, give you a container to practice that progression over and over again in different ways. So initially, you can kind of just enjoy this backing track. If I put one on now, I can show you what I mean. So way thing is how you do it in the beginning, right on this backing track will then, after four minutes, move up to the next key, right, and then you do it in the next key, right, and then you do it the right hand as well. And then, as you learn later on in the course, what you can start doing is trying other things. You might want to play that progression in all keys, using the backing tracks or in one particular key using that particular backing track, you might want to then practice that in first inversion because you're like, OK, I'm not very good with first inversion cords. I'm gonna play this progression using first inversion chords in all keys, right? So you'd start off you do first inversion, right? And then you do the same with the right hand, right? Okay. And the backing track is aimed to give you this kind of nice background focus to help you do stuff. But as you'll find that as the things that you're learning that voicings and the accompaniment patterns become more complex, you'll really enjoy having these backing tracks a structure because it will just keep you going for a certain amount of time whilst you can really get your head round. One piece of material, one chord progression, one accompanied pattern. One voice, right? No more than that, because it's very easy to not go deep enough when you're practicing. And the aim of these backing tracks is to help you. So the last little thing that I want to say about them is that I've only done three at the time of recording this video or three or four I can't quite remember. The reason is they taking an insane amount of time to make, even though they don't sound particularly good. I have to kind of export them all in, like, different keys and then, like, check that there will Okay, take a huge amount of time. Andi, I'm not gonna do that at this stage until I know that everyone is taking this course is gonna find it really valuable. So if you really like these backing tracks, then let me know. Andi, I can start making more for the course, or it might actually sell them on my website because they take a huge amount of time to make just for a very small amount of money. And you can purchase them if they benefit you. So let me know. Reach out to me, Jack at lean musician dot com And let me know if you want more of these backing tracks and whether they help you. So in summary, used these backing tracks to help you practice for longer and more deeply with the material it that you're learning for beginner or anyone really starting out with this course. What you want to do is learn the fundamental progression in really simple room position voicings on. You want to learn that in as many keys as possible, right? Get really comfortable with it. And then from the later sections of this course what we talk about. Voicing an accompaniment patterns start bringing those concepts back and applying again over this progression in all keys and use the backing tracks to help you practice and get deeper and really embed this on kind of a really powerful level. 6. Keystones: So before you start learning all of these progressions, we want to take a little time to think about how many scales you actually are very comfortable with. Because what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be learning a progression, and then you're gonna be transposing that to other keys. But the keys that you transposed to, you have to already know, right? You don't want to be doing two things. You wanna be transposing into a key that you have to then work out the key. And then what the transposition is that's just too overwhelming, right? So if you don't know the scale of C Sharp Major, don't transpose something into C Sharp Major, I know that sounds obvious, but sometimes people try and do both at once. Okay, so you could kind of take this section of the course in parallel. Say, you know, four keys right at the start of this, this course. Then what you should be doing is learning all of the progressions in those four keys, But then parallel to that, you could be using this lecture and the accompanying tracks, the backing tracks to start learning all keys. Okay, so in your resource is folder, which will see the link to on screen. Now you can download a number of backing tracks called Keystones, and all they are is long drones about 15 minutes long, a small group in the background to help you focus on one key at a time. Right now. Initially, the practice should be something like this. You put the track on. Let me just put on F major one on on. You'll hear this going right on by. It just goes on like this for 15 minutes. There's nothing else that's happening. Nothing interesting. It's just again those plain old vanilla background tracks, and you could start playing the scale and working on your fingering right on. You don't have to play with rhythm or anything like that. Just enjoy the sound in the background, routing you to the harmony of the key. Just get really comfortable knowing you see, I'm not trying to make music here. My goal is actually just to move around the key on. No, ever make mistakes like write. That note isn't in key, okay? And you'll find yourself if you're a complete beginner or kind of really early on, you'll find yourself kind of struggling to see the whole key at once. But what your goal is is to play along with the track and then eventually be able to see the key all at once. So it's almost like all those notes are highlighted. Or if you were playing in C sharp major ALS, those notes would be highlighted right across the keyboard, in your mind, highlighted, and then you can just play them randomly. So for in C sharp major, right, you're just playing random notes in the key and getting comfortable. Then what you can do is you can start learning the other keys and put that on and do the same thing on in my previous course that we covered the wandering hand exercise. And that's really just a way to kind of randomly move around the piano. Andi, just get your hands feeling flexible and making their own finger rings, and that's this is a really good chance to do that again. But you can also use this to explore some of the concepts and materials that we cover later on in the course right voicings and stuff like that, or accompaniment patterns because if I put this on again and explore, I could explore appreciation, a grant major right that I could do with rhythm, and that gives you a way to do it. Non pressure. It allows you to explore that concept rather than over a progression where the court changes every bar. Usually that might be a too much pressure for you. You might be like Hang on. I just want to practice this one concept off. You know this voicing or whatever or this a compliment pattern on. I want to do it for ages over one chord or one note, right? Well, that's when. Then you can use thes thes keystone progressions and the beauty of it. Is that what we're in now? What I was doing there is I was playing F major over this keystone, a backing track of path, right? But I don't have to do F Major because the backing track doesn't have anything that's major in it. I could do with minor. They both work equally well, right? Unequally. I could do something like F diminished or F dominant. Seventh major, seventh minus seven. Minor major. Seventh. It will works because the only drone in the background is right. So once you understand a bit more about the theory, this will seem really powerful to you. You'll be like, Hey, I can do anything over this one drone And it's kind of why I have called this lecture or these backing tracks keystones cause they are amazing moments in your practice because you realize there's so much potential over one note. Let me just kind of improvise and show you what I mean. - Way right. There's so many different things that you can do with just that underlying f note and just expand your kind of horizons of what you can kind of create harmonically over. One note there doesn't have use that you saw there that I was playing chords other than f, right? So I was playing some other chords inside of F Major and then some other chords inside of F minor right? They will work with this underlying F drone Now. The last two things that I said there about different harmonies and stuff like that might be a bit overwhelming if you can't new to all this, in which case, just make sure that the bedrock of your practice with these keystone progressions is getting to know the major scale off that note there. And then also the minor scale of that. They're right. Well, depending on what might have Scout you're playing, you might be playing the harmonic minor or the natural minor as well. 7. 1564: so the 1564 progression is an incredibly common progression. You're probably if you're a little bit like me, a bit sick of it, because it's come up so much. But that's not necessarily reason to not go deep with it. In fact, that's exactly what we're doing in this course. We're taking simple concepts on simple progressions that you think you may know and actually going way deep with them by kind of exploring topics and ideas through all keys in those progressions. So 1.64 is a great place to start because it's probably the most common progression. And actually there are so many other progressions that use 156 and four, but not in that order. An obvious one would be caught for 165 Another common one would be six one. That's a very common compression as well. So the first way to practice it, as I probably explained before, is got your route position cord in your left hand, you play through the progression, do the right hand as well the same route position court on. Then you do that in other keys, right? You could move up a semi tone into it, right? If any of that is hard, it also say you landed on this key there and then you're you're struggling to do it. You want to slow, right? That okay, you want to just just get the feeling of the cord into your hand because it's very easy to think. Oh, I know this core progression if you complain, but that's not the real. That's not an indication of whether you know the core progression. I suppose a good indication would be if you can think about something else at the same time . Like right now I'm talking to you in my hands, kind of pretty comfortable about playing that cold progression. And that's kind of what the backing tracks are about is that you can kind of wack one of these on and just play. Play with the backing track in two hands, and you can explore ideas later on in the course. But really, that's the first start would be able to play in route position in all keys, and once you're good at that, then you can go to the next stage of it, which would be the first inversion at each court. So that's called one in first inversion court five in first inversion six and full right? And then you play that in other kids 156 before and you can go up dramatically like I was just starting to do that. You do that key that keep, or you can go around the circle of 50 or you can have your own order, whatever you want. But the goal is to get as many keys as possible. And once you're clear on that progression in exactly that way that I described, then you can start going to the other parts of this course like the a compliment patterns of voicing patterns, the melodic patterns, then using the backing tracks to take those ideas and pull them back into this progression . So you might be exploring appreciation, in which case you'd be going or the alternating court company pattern something you know, that sort of thing. You could try improvising, not badly like I did just that. You guys, you take ideas from the latter parts of this course and then come back and explore those ideas inside of these progressions, potentially along with the backing tracks. If you enjoy doing that as well 8. Einaudi: So I, an Audi, is a contemporary neoclassical, sometimes described his new Age composer, who's written a lot of music based around the piano. Very simple, minimalist stuff that then gets it used a lot in adverts and films is a very contemporary sound, but very simple. And he uses progression, which, in a minor key, goes 167 right, uses that progression all the time, and so do a lot of people. But I think he's for me at least is someone who really uses that progression. Well, actually, it's very his signature, really, And you get a kind of yearning sound from it. So and then it just carries on, you know? Okay, so you know the drill now, right? The way to learn this progression will be left hand reposition right hand position on starting to explore different keys and then when you're when you're comfortable, different keys start exploring the inversion so called one while seven in all keys on once . You're good at that. Then come to Theo kind of later. Parts of the course. Get some ideas from there and bring it back to this court progression. And if you want, you can also use the backing tracks and explore their those ideas, whether it's kind of broken chords, right, any of the other ideas that we discussed later on? 9. 12 Bar Blues: So we come to 12 Bar Blues. Tobar Blues just uses three primary chords. Then when I say primary, I'm referring to the primary chords of a key. So if we just review in C major, we've got 1234567 cords in a key and three of those was called Primary Chords. We've got C Chord one F four and then g Chord five and there's the primary courts and in a minor key. If we're in C minor chord one would be primary called for would be primary goal 55 would be primary. So it's 14 and five are always primary courts, and blues is made up of 145 except not necessarily in that order. Said 12. Bar blues goes like this one for four bars, then four for to buzz, one for tebas, five for one bar full for one bar, then one for two bars or one, but depending on with your gunnery site. Restart the peace. So let me show you what I mean. So I'm gonna play it. Super simple. So three simple right? 342341234 And then the last bar, the 12 bar. You can go up to Court five and that kind of like restarts the whole thing again. So you got, like wanting, wanting, wanting, wanting, wanting 31234123 Now obviously, it sounds hideous. What implant it? Because the blues does not use simple try addict harmony, right? We use seventh chords on. Hopefully you know about dominant seventh. If you don't, you can watch my first course music composition with piano to kind of get full low down on how to kind of construct these. Understand the theory behind them who won't go over them here. But basically we want dominant seventh on every one of those courts. Eso that's called one dominant seventh, then called four dominant seventh chord $5 7 Right Then you start to get a blues here, sand and again. I'm not doing any voicing here, but want to 34 Want Teoh? All right, so the first thing you should be able to do is play those dominant seventh chords in left hand and right hand in route position in all keys or as many keys is you were deciding toe work on remember, Don't You don't necessarily have to do all keys, if that's totally overwhelming. If you're just deciding, OK, you know what? I'm gonna get through this course and then I tackle four keys that I've decided on. Then that's fine. So that would be the 1st 1 And then you can start doing Obviously we'll explore this more in the arrangement section. But just to give you some examples, we've got the inversions of those quarters. Well, right. And because we've got four notes in the court now, we can do an extra inversion. So usually with like a normal triad court, you've got two inversions before you get back to the original, but an octave higher. But with four notes, you get an extra one single first legal reposition, first inversion, second version, and now third inversion and being able to play all of those voicings or inversions on the cords inside of the blues again, it doesn't sound particularly amazing, but remember, what we're doing here is relaying the kind of like blocks the foundation that you can then kind of build your own stuff out off. Okay, so Thea other thing is well to remember is that we've got a backing track for all of this stuff. So if we take it perhaps in e show you roughly how you should be practicing in the beginning. So if reposition is all you're comfortable with in the beginning, then just stick with that, right? His court for Do you want to do a tiny bit of rhythmical stuff? Just keep yourself interested. That's fine. Really sorry. Hazard talking at the same time. And then as you get more comfortable, obviously eating way more time than I've just given myself there you might explore the first inversion of each chord, right? And then you force yourself to first inversion at the next court. And of course, you did this with the right hand as well on. Then. Once you come with that, you go through the other inversions and then what? You're really comfortable with that? You could mess around with two of them, perhaps, huh? And then you could try and force yourself to use it. All of them. Every time you hear the cord, you won't get around all of them, especially on the buzz that I just won by a long sorry. The cords that just won by along, but you get the idea. So that's the basic idea behind a 12 bar blues on one of the best things you can get doing straight away before we even get to the accompaniment side of things to really unlock the cords in both hands. 10. Time: So the time progression is called the Time aggression because it's from the film Inception with the score by Hans Zimmer. And it's a really interesting progression that kind of keeps unfolding and never really ends, and we're gonna explore exactly why that is so. You can kind of think of it in two different ways. Let me just play it first, okay? And then it just goes around again on then the voicings can change, right? If we were thinking of this diatonic Lee in a traditional way, the way that it starts were in G major or that's what I was playing in. Just then we start on corn, too. We got to court six gets caught one and into court. If I What's quite interesting is we don't start or end on the cord of the key, right? The court of the Key G, called one, is kind of used in passing, and so our ears don't really hear. That is an important court, right? It's kind of like, Oh, this is a temporary place. This suddenly now feels very temporary. If we were to have a key center on, we were to have to decide on one for me personally, it would be this chord here. But even then, it doesn't feel like we're finished. We're on that chord. So that's what's interesting about this progression, because we don't emphasize called one as the main court of key. So that gives us this kind of like, unhinged feeling right, So you could think of it is called 2615 Or, if you think of it, kind of Maurin a motile way. And if you aren't clear on what modes are, there's a covered in my court music composition at the piano way. Think of it like a mode off G major than this becomes note number 11234567 What, and then the core progression sounds like this or rather, is is described like this called one a record five minor. And that's kind of interesting codes called Fighters. Court five has never minor, then called seven and in court for Major Goat's kind of an interesting way of thinking about it. And actually, I invite you to think about it in both ways, the first ones where we're gonna be a lot easier in the beginning. But if you can wrap your head around modes and start thinking about that is the root way. Then that might be quite an interesting thing to explore. So get to know this diatonic Lee First in the simple way where this is called to court six or one. Fine. Get to know that in all keys and then explore the idea of this being actually a motile progression. So you're in Dorian mode. One 57 11. Step Down: so Noel call progressions actually have a name. You have things that are numbered with 1.64 and 251 and things like that. But then you've got all those also things like the blues and stuff like that. But then there are other things that are just established norms that no one's ever really given names, too. And so in this course, I have to call these things. And I call this one the step down sequence because he's got this movement down from the relative major to the minor of AKI. Okay? And it's used in lots and lots of stuff, right? This is quite provocative move. It is kind of where it's where the Einaudi goes up to the minor. This one goes down down to the minor. Okay, so we've got cord one called five in first inversion caught six in reposition called 54 one Every position. I'm doing a second inversion first inversion voicing their and then we go Court five with a suspension in court by result. Okay, I'll go through that again, and I'll just play simply in the right hand. Forward one. Court five first inversion called six Court five court for one court, five suspension on, then resolved on the next bus, and you get sad. So you noticed the kind of way I was playing it. There was no in one hand this one uses. I was using a bass note clearly in the bottom to make it clear what the root note of each court is. So when we play, this'll chord here, you can think of it in two ways. The root note of G major is obviously G, but because we're in first inversion base, No is B, and you have kind of not think of that as the root note, but certainly the basis. But is acting kind of like the root of the court currently? Hopefully, that's not too confusing. You got the root note, which is the actual theoretical route of the cord. And then when you invert accord thing, this is the root note of that inversion. Does that make sense? We have got proper name for it, but you can call it the bass note to make it clear. By doing this in the left hand, you're being very clear to yourself what? The inversions are right and that might help. So that's one way to practice. Practice it in all keys with just the base now in the left hand and then the top you can do courts on when you do chords will cover this a bit more in the voicing section when you'd records over a base. No, it doesn't really matter what inversion there in. So you see here I'm doing like a second inversion. See, Major. But if I do this, the whole court is not a second inversion anymore. Because this is the base now. So basically gives you a bit of freedom because you don't want to always be playing like, you know, an octave apart with the room position called because it sounds really rubbish. You can make a little bit more interesting without us even talking about voicing too much. Okay, so that's the progression. So you'd learn it in all keys like that with based on the left. Then you can also learn it in one hand on this one will need to be a little bit more blocking. Really, really good. One toe 12. The Sequence: Okay, so now we're getting into the car progressions, which contain a little bit more movement on, but perhaps a bit more challenging. So this one I've called the sequence is a bit of a vague name, but it's basically combining quite a few elements that I've seen in different pieces of music, obviously over the years. And I wanted to sort of pull it into one really juicy corporation that you could learn in your kids. So the way that it works is we've got called to were doing in C major chord to Court five. Court three. Could sex called full court one infest inversion called to Court five, Court One. Okay, so let me play it all the way through. Okay? On that last court five. You know, hopefully that I did something quite interesting here. So basically what I was doing in the right hand is basically playing chord four over the top of the bass note five. So we feel called five down, lowers the primary cord, but we've got this nice suspension type thing going over the top. And this is a quite a powerful court that gets used in like soldiers. Hello and you here, and that's what it's doing. So court to seven, five or 4/5, depending on how you think of it. One. So this has a lot of stuff in it. We've got to 51 which is a very common core progression in jazz to 51 on. We also have a first inversion called one as well. So let's go through it one more time. Caught too called five. And instead of going to Court one, which is often what 251 does we go to court three. Kind of. We interrupt that cadence thing to Court six, then to court or called one first inversion. And here the reason we use first inversion is that we don't sound finished. This is quite important thing to think about core progressions, a story arc. And if you start story and someone starting to go on a journey and it's really exciting, and then everything was resolved and then they came back home. This story is incredibly annoying and boring, right, because you expect stories to go on a journey and then return when you feel like you deserve to return and core progressions of kind of the same, right? So if we were to just go Teoh 36 There's something about that where we're like, you're giving me too much home, right? So way. No, there's more to be said here, right? And then way on, then we're like, OK, I deserve to be home now So that's a really powerful one. As usual, you know the drill out guys who want to be playing that in route position and then, if you want, you can start doing slightly expanded voicings, probably still close position until you get to the Voicings chapter, playing that in all keys with bass notes so that you really clear what's going on in the base for this. 13. Lord Chords: So this one's called the Lord Cords. And again, that's a name by yours. Truly, it's not really an official name. It's kind of borrowing and improve elements from Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. So if we get into it now, basically you start in court for then you get too cold one. Then you go to Court three. But you make Court Three major and then quote six. Go over this again. Don't worry. Then we go called for five Court five with a raise route so G sharp diminished six and then four. Okay, so let me play the whole thing, and then we'll break it down. So okay, let's get some real nice movement in it. And there's a couple of principles and in here that's already worth learning. Right? So called for Court one called three Major called six Mine. Okay? And we'll cover this in the secondary dominance thing. But essentially, when we make Cord three really powerful sound when we make it major, it's acting as a powerful Court five to called six that's going to be had. Don't worry. We'll cover this lots in the second. We don't inception. Right? Then we get called for Court five, and then we do an interesting thing to call five. What? We raise the third story, the route, right. Raise the root of a semi tone. And that's acting in the same way. Right? So called five if we raise the route would kind of very similar to Court three when it's major. Okay, Court five, Reposition Normal called five with a raised route is very similar to Court Three, major. Okay, so this chord four Chord five, then raising the roof. Court five is acting like that. Okay, hopefully that makes sense. And then we get to court sex on the court. Uh uh . 14. Minor 4 Soul: So this progressions called the minor for sold progression. And it's called that because it uses called for in a major key but minor, so usually called for his major prime records. One for five in a magic here are always major, but by making it minor, it's a very distinct sounds quite kind of strong flavor, right, and you probably heard it a lot, and it combined with some soulful stuff we've looked at already, like a major chord three and then a 251 with that kind of suspension called We Looked At earlier. This is kind of quiet, soulful section or progression. Let me plan to you. So it's got some fast movement at the end there, and that's something that you want to start getting used to is fast the harmonic rhythm, and that's really quite simple. It's just like a step down sequence, really. So let's go This slowly called one C major chord for F minor. It's a court for liner and back to one and called three Major called six, and this is where the harmony rhythm speeds up. We have a cord twice per bar quarter five for one first inversion and then we go to 51 Sorry. Here we go. Yeah. One more time. Called one major chord for minor called One major called three Major called six, then five and four then called one first inversion than to 51 quite quickly in the end. So you know the drill. Now go is able to play that whole core progression in one hand in both hands, Right in first in. Obviously, when you're playing around with inversions here, you can't just say I'm gonna play it all in route position all in first inversion. Because obviously, the nature of the corporation is it's defined by sometimes Thean versions. Right? So particularly this one. So you could you could mostly do it. You could be like, OK, so first inversion there doesn't work, right. You have to do second inversion of cord one. Right? So you go and court to first inversion five in one first vision. So just bear that in mind If you're kind of like, why isn't that sound quite right? Remember that you've already got an inversion in this court sequence. And then obviously, before you even get to the the arranging or the accompanying patent section, you could be doing it like I was there with, like, different versions in your right hand with a base note in your life. 15. 36251: So if you've been following the progressions so far through the course, you're probably finding now that we're adding these kind of more in depth progressions that you're actually able to bring a lot of what you've learned to this new progression. In other words, many of these progressions contain principles or ideas that you've already covered so far. And this is my hope for all of these progressions and use studying music out in the world. Because so much of music contains the rules and principles and little movements between chords that I put in these progressions here now we've already covered core progression. The sequence, which uses called to six best to 53 and six on What we're gonna do now is we're just gonna highlight another progression, which is made out of those chords. But in a different order. That's very important. And it's gonna lay the foundations for an upcoming video, and it's called the 36251 progression. So 36 to 51 in C major right? And if we didn't see minor B 36251 So this is a progression that's not like the other ones in that you can do it in what you can do most of the other progressions in minor or major, but sometimes they don't sound as good. This one actually sounds good in both of them, so you want to practice that progression in all keys in reposition first inversion second version, etcetera. You know the drill by now, but the reason I wanted to bring in the 3 65 1 now and highlight it is its own video, particularly is that it's kind of laying the foundation for site we're gonna cover in a future video called Secondary Dominance. Now the 3 65 1 isn't true. Secondary dominance, because we're using chords that air entirely inside of a key don't wear it doesn't make sense. You understand it later, but basically what's going on is we. Each court is a dominant to the next court, right? You don't notice it straight away, but when you really kind of unpack the theory, it makes lots of sense. So let's let's unpack the theory. So in C Major, we've got 1234567 when you go from Court five to Court one that's called a dominant relationship. Now don't confuse this with dominant chord types. Dominant seventh chord types, right? That's a slightly different. What kind of a different thing so called five called one is a dominant relationship. But then, if we were to say we're in G major, right? What's called five g major? Well, Dean T is dominant, right? D is dominant to J, but you can think of kind of dominance inside of one key, because what's the note that we're starting was starting on Court six. All right, and then we Sorry Steps starting on court free and then we go toe court sex. We think that Court six. What's dominant of Court six inside of C major, Right? So let's stay entirely inside of C major. We go. 12345 The fifth note or the dominant of Court six is called three right, because 12345 That court. It's actually called three off one. So this can be a little computing if this is not something you've looked at before again, if you're finding this kind of tricky to understand, you should cover my first cause Music composition at the piano on the U to me that or sculpture, and I'll give you a foundation for this sort of thing. Basically, if you look at the 3 65 1 called three is dominant or foe dominant core six. Court six is a faux dominant chord to in court Tuesday, faux dominant or a secondary? Dominant, however you want to think about it, it's called five, and Court Five is definitely a dominant chord. One. So you've got this five relationship all the time. Five to this, five. To that. This is five to this. It's a really powerful thing to understand when we cut a secondary dominance and in particular jazz blues, Then you're gonna really have to understand this sort of thing. 16. Secondary Dominants: Okay, so hopefully you're clear on the 36251 progression that was in the previous lecture on what that was doing was introducing you to the idea off secondary dominance. Now they weren't true. Secondary dominance. They were kind of fake ones. And the reason is, is a dominant. A true dominant court has to be major. The major sound eyes. What gives us the kind of lovely feeling off resolution if I did Cord five to court while in C. Major, but I made court five. Minor kind of seems really wicked. I didn't seem and c minor as well. If I did court fighters minor, it does feel finished, but it's kind of like a pretty apologetic finishes like just like there's nothing exciting about it. Where is when you make it major a eyes? There's a powerful feeling, so dominance, true dominance have to be major on, then also, you can make them into dominant seventh chords, and that makes them even more powerful. So if we take Court five in C Major and then we had the seventh to it, this is a dominant seventh chord, and then we resolved back to see It sounds really powerful. Okay? And similarly with a minor key. Say we're in mine, right? If we go to Court five. Dominant seventh. Okay. So make sure that you understand dominant sevenths and how to play them on every chord, every note. So you do see dominant seventh Deflect on at seven with dawn and with landowners inception . Just go up through the chromatic scale. Make sure that you really clear on all of them so that you can then lay the foundations. So we did 36 to 5. One in a key. Right on. We were doing the diatonic versions of those courts. So called three years. A minor chord. Caught six is minor courtiers. Minor called five major court one is made. So the only true dominant here is a record five. Right, cause it's got that major feeling. And when it's Major thinks no. The third of the court raises one semi tone to result. Okay, so you follow that, Okay, But when you have a minor chord five, you have a step of a tone which is less powerful. It's less the semi tone has this kind of really like if I finish their you know that there's something waiting way need to do that. Okay, so 36 to 5 with true dominance would be this. Okay, three Dominant 767 two donuts, 5.71 Normal will make a seven. Okay. And you'll find this really, really powerful for injecting secondary dominance into your chord progression. So let's take a 1645 progression. Right? Or 6415 actually, Listen right way added a secondary dominant to the next chord F right, So we're going. We're going to that. It was the secondary donut of f. It's see Dawn and seven. Okay, so let's see what that sounds like. Okay, that's that kind of works quite well. And if we do it quickly, So I think I did the wrong side six. Uh uh. We've added in this kind of substitution or a kind of extra cord, which works well, if we added secondary dominance to all of them, it would sound like this. - So that was the 1564 progression, but with secondary dominant before the the 2nd 3rd and fourth courts, right? And it sounds like something completely different, and you wouldn't necessarily do something like that. But the second we don't is just a way of throwing in a bit off kind of more harmonic rhythm you saw, If you remember in this progression here where we went out for, uh, sorry. What were called 67 way did this? I think. The Lord course. Remember when we did the Lord cords progression, We went right. And what that caught there is is a secondary dominant to the court that we're going to, which is caught sex. Right? So we go called, um 17. Jazz Blues: Okay, so now that you know about secondary dominance, we can really tackle the blues again. But this time we're gonna use the jazz blues because it's basically taking them the normal 12 bar blues structure, but adding in lots off extra cords and changes and particularly secondary dominance. So we're going to start with the first court, which is called one on. Then in the second bar, we go to court for immediately. Okay on. Then we go back to Court one. And then, if you remember, the 1st 4 bars of the normal 12 bar blues are simply this way. Go to this. But to approach this chord in the Inbar number five, what we do is what's called a to 51 Okay, so this is kind of like a second redundant type of thing. You know, 251 is essentially secondary. Dolan's. Okay, so now we look at the jazz blues. Andi, with an understanding of secondary dominance, you can really kind of unpack this a lot easier than you might have beforehand. So if we take the normal 12 bar blues, we've got called 14 bars. 22 bars called one to us right, That's the first right. And that's only two courts, right, whereas jazz blues ads in the hole a whole load of new cords to kind of make it move a lot quicker or the harmonic rhythm change a lot quicker. So the first bar we have poured one, and then in the second bar we immediately go to court for and then in the third bar, we come back to Court one. No, the fourth bar is different. We'll skip that for a second in the fifth by, you know, from normal 12 bar blues. What we do is we go to court for but what jazz blues does here is it prepares, called for by using kind of a secondary dominant thing. It uses what's called a to 51 two chord, for that makes sense. So yes, we're in the key of C on DSI is number one. You can kind of thinkers four as another eternal center. So if we're heading to court for in a minute, we can think of doing a to 5124 right, because remember, the 251 is a very powerful sequence to establish gravity, so it makes sense that if we're going to go from here to here, way could do a to 51 is like a secondary dominant type of thing to get us to called for. So hopefully that makes sense. I feel like I'm rambling. It's a very hard thing to describe. Just with audio trying to show some graphics on screen so called one Teoh court one way. Just do court 51 But this is called 251 If we were thinking of f is the route OK, too way make those seventh chords to okay said the whole first full bars go. 12312341 Yeah, okay. And then we arrive in about five. OK, so you hopefully see how it's starting to kind of really expand the normal 12 bar blues structure. So we're landing in bar 51234 instead of just doing court for again jazz blues makes it interesting and raises the route of this. Okay, on you get you get diminished. Seventh, right. Okay, full diminished. Seventh chord. There again. If that's over your head, you can refer to my course music composition at the piano. That will give you a full guidance on exactly what these called on how they made up on We go back to court one in about seven. And now we have this. 36251 structure that we had before, right? But it's not completely diatonic, right? What we do is we do called three as 1/2 diminished seventh court five, Azzan dominant. Seventh called to minus seven, 571 Okay, so let's go from the beginning and put all of that together. 1234343412313 For one, 3412343434 Okay, so we've done all 10 bars there. We got the last few bars to do now for the last two bars, and they go like this. This is kind of cool. A turnaround. We get called six. Wait three. Okay, so this is an incredibly difficult aggression for the first time. So this is a So this is an incredibly difficult progression to learn for the first time. So take your time learning. That's okay. So the way to build up, in my opinion, we're actually not start like this thing is kind of it painful and awkward. And every time you find yourself feeling awkward, but you have to go really slow and slow everything right down. One of the best ways I found t break up on what's quite useful. There's you can mostly do crotch. It's on each of these because most or you could do, you could do semi quavers or you could do Quakers. So let me show you what I mean. So 1230 by doing this, you're taking the pressure off. Old fingers kind of gets a bit tense at the beginning to relax ation. If you want to do that, you see what I'm doing here. I'm shaking my fingers left and right. That's a really good technique, kind of reminding yourself you need to relax because it's very hard to do that shape that what's having tense fingers? It really reminds you to relax all of this stuff up here on the tendons inside of your fingers. I would go through this. Don't worry about that. You know what I did? There is. I just made that one lost. You kind of use. This is like fake time. You don't have to think about the tempo so much in the booth on. Then you could do those with that. And then you start practicing as usual, guys, you know, different first inversions way you get The idea just is a little precursor to something that we're gonna cover in the voicing section by getting really good. All of these like first inversions. But when you come to the section where we start exploring voice leading and comping on all of that really good juicy stuff, you'll be so glad you've done this practice because it lays such strong foundations to be able to do things like, uh so that was the whole cold progression, right? But I pretty much just stayed here in my hand, was thinking about the different inversions of the court so that I basically didn't have to go past these two points here. And that's something we're gonna look at as well. So just a little bit of motivation to keep practicing this 18. Chord Relationships & Bi tonality: So if you've watched my first corpse music, composition, piano, you'll have a good idea off chord relationships. And I'm gonna introduce the concept again here, along with the idea of by tonality, so that you can start enriching your existing chord progressions just like you would if you were to add more secondary dominance. So as a reminder, record progression is really a way of thinking outside of a key. So when you think inside of a key we take a d major here you're the key itself forces you to be playing different types of chords. So you've got major minor. My major major minor diminished always. And you can't play. For example, Accord Teoh Major would be pushing you outside of the key, right? So accord relationship allows you to do that. Just basically, you say Okay, I'm gonna play a chord based on this note and then accord based on this know just which is a try turning away. I'm gonna make them both major right now. I just arbitrarily made that up. I have no idea what those cords gonna be necessarily without thinking about it. Andi, I'm not thinking about certain key. I'm just thinking about two chords and that relationship Try 10 apart. So if I met them both, major, it sounds like it's kind of quite an interesting sound on that. Doesn't those two quarts together don't really speak of a home key? They give us a sense of deers. The home center. It's kind of not finished, right? It would only be finished if we started establishing gravity again. We're doing like, 251 Now we feel like this is the home center. So called relationships pull us out of diatonic harmony on. What you can do is you can take a normal progression, like six for one five and maybe throw in some kind of chord relationships to make things interesting. Right? So this is getting a bit stale. So you've heard that a 1,000,000 times you could say, OK, well, I know I'm on G. Now. I'm gonna go up in mind 1/3. Right on. I'm gonna play. That is a major court, right? That is very much outside of the key. So we go, we owe right on this court relationship. You just throw it in there and you're, like, all interesting, and you don't have to think about the theory about you don't have to think. OK, so this is a flat seven chord major. What does that mean? You don't think about that? You just, you know, throw in a court relationship ship, not sheep, and see whether it works and many of them won't work, right? So, for example, if we did like they were on a mine way, we went down to one tone to an E flat minor. It's kind of like it really is, too. Doesn't really work if I throw that in as well. So doesn't this feels weird, so barren you'll learn more about the types of court relationships that you like. So court relationships and vitality are kind of quite similar when we say do this and then do it try to, in a way, also, Major, you could kind of think of it like you're you're playing d major on. Then you're also playing in a flat major. But that's not really the way that we're approaching it. We're just really thinking of chords, and we're we're not playing the scales of those courts eyes a different thing. What by tonality is is where you think very definitely that you're kind of moving between keys on if we take like a six for 15 aggression and then we decide to do it in D major, right? Right. So we did 6415 in C waded six one fight in D. That kind of works right? There's that. There's a kind of a different emotion. There is a lift up because we've gone up one toe on Bear that in mind as well when you're moving between different keys with this by tonality thing. But the key itself is like a chord progression. So if your key is going from here to here and you play 6415 and then you move up a key. But the whole next chord progression will feel somehow a bit more energetic, whereas the opposite is the case as well. So if we go six for 15 and then we go down to the key of B flat Major, uh, there's something about it. It's like, Oh, is winding down and getting kind of quieter and stuff like that. So that's called relationships and by tonality and really an invitation for you to start transforming your core progressions and making your own ones. That's a particularly like, exotic way to expand your corporations, but I think it's a really good one. It's a way of forcing yourself to not be diatonic, which is not a bad thing. 19. Outlines: So we're past the first day to the course where we're learning these embryonic kind of modular structures of harmony that are applicable to a huge wealth of music and hopefully giving you the great foundations to be able to write your own pieces and understand other people's music, particular. If you're taking them through all keys, what we're gonna start doing in this section of the course is actually taking this a little bit further. By practicing full pieces of music of your choosing, right, we're going to start with some very simple ones from my suggestions. But then I want you to start building up a library of pieces or repertoire pieces that you know that you can kind of really feel like you understand the harmony on and melody off if you imagine the music musician that you are today and you then imagine the musician that you are in, say, six months to a year's time. From now on, do that Musician can play 50 songs, maybe even 100 songs in lots of keys or all keys you can imagine right, how much powerful on more expressive you'd feel as a musician, right? Your craft would just be buzzing. It would just be absent. Amazing. Right on. This is what this practice this section, of course, is about. But we don't learn these tunes. This list of repertoire that you're gonna start building, we don't learn them as full songs because then you're learning about you know, voicings and a compliment and rhythm, and you have to perform it. And there's even more pressure. We're gonna distillate right now to make this purely a learning exercise, but one that is incredibly effective at getting all of this knowledge of new harmony from these pieces that you're learning into your your hands, your bones, whatever you wanna call it. And it's called the outline, right? So when we play a piece of music fully, we might be playing it as an a compliment, like his. Isn't she lovely, right? That's this this stuff from having to think about there in terms of voicing rhythm, etcetera, etcetera. And if I was playing is a like maybe a walking bass line and melody. You see the idea, right? I'm having to think Okay, baseline in the right, and then maybe I'm doing some interesting stuff in the right we don't We don't want toe learn our pieces like that. We want to distill it right down to just base and melody so it would be like on. Then we take that through all keys, right? We take that through different keys than what this does is It gives you a very, very strong foundation that's beneficial to not just learning that tune, but also writing music. So let's have a look at it now with a couple of examples. Let's take something like Happy Birthday and we'll do it in See first. So Okay, so we're just keeping simple bass notes in the left hand. We're not doing anything fancy. The really important thing is to be very clear, what the base now is not at this point to start playing chords or anything like that, because we want to solidify the the harmony in our in our minds the root note of each court . And whilst it doesn't feel like the most amazing musical experience right now, what you're doing is you're embedding the route cords of each sorry, the root of each court, the harmony in your ears and over time this will really start toe give lots of benefits now , then you start taking it through keys. Now, the to kind of primary ways of doing is going practically right. All right, so we're now we started. See, now a c sharp. The way that I kind of like to do is particularly this excited to go around the circle of Fifths because it forces you to think about the numbers. If you do it this way, you can kind of think Oh, well, we go up five. I'm just going up. 5555 Where is actually if you move to an entirely new key So we're now in G major, right? We have to think very carefully about the numbers of the scale again rather than just about moving everything up step like we would if we were to move it dramatically. However, you can come up with your own version. You could just choose around on key. That might be even better. Actually, you could throw a dart at the wall and to switch what you know. So if we're in G major and you know it started the wrong fingering that this is also another another benefit for doing mixing all keys is forces you to think about finger rings for for different situations. And then if you were to go around the circle of Fifths, you'd end up on strange keys, you know, less familiar keys on. If you're finding it really hard, that's a great thing. Just break it right down. You might not be able to do melody and bass at the same time, so just go through. You could just hum the melody, right? You could just do that in the beginning and then do the melody separately and slowly put them together. Another train you could do could be something simple, like my favorite things. Let's do it in C major and transpose it. Just it also show you the way. The way I'm playing in the moment is no. I'm not trying to do a performance. This is really important to not try and their performance. And actually I'm slowing down to allow my brain to have a bit more space to think about the harmony that's coming up. And as you as you can see, I haven't played this gym for Look what so my brain is having to remember even in C major. But actually, as you move through the keys giving yourself these moments of slow down, it's so important, right? I'll pick up where I left off. See, I'm slowing down here, right? If I'm finding it hard and then let's move it to another key, let's move it to be minor. Sorry, d major on. You might not be this first, Of course. Right, But just break it down. You might need to play the piece like this. Uh, and that's completely fine that the goal of this exercise is to just get through the whole thing, you know, eventually don't have to perform it in any way on what this is forcing you to do is to think about the numbers of the scale. You thinking about everything relatively so super careful. So manager out outline library, starting with Happy Birthday. I think it's a fantastic one to be able to do in all keys on. Then start adding tunes based on perhaps some of my suggestions or your own. One of the best ways to actually write down your tunes is in Roman numerals. I'll just show you that now. So this is Happy Birthday and my favorite things in Roman numerals on doing it this way. Thinking about it this way is much, much easier when you're transposing through all keys because you think about things relatively. So Happy Birthday. Just 1551 fun for for for 151 really, really simple progression. My favorite things has a little bit more detail in it. Basically what you start to notice that we have lower case Roman numerals. And when they're lower case, that means it's minor. Okay, so this first court here would be called six minor seventh chords called seven minor Seventh Chord, called one minor seventh, etcetera, etcetera. Right on, when you have just a normal seven after it, that means it's a dominant chord, so that would be called five dominant seventh right and then one major seventh. It's a different type of court, so that's That's the main reason that we write things in Roman numerals, so this will be included underneath this video. Just these two tracks for you to be with download and start practicing in all keys 20. Jamming: So whilst your building, your list off outline repertoire the pieces that you're gonna re really learning fully, there's another practice that you can be doing as well to develop your ears and also to potentially be finding new pieces that you want to put in your outline library of repertoire that you're learning. And that's by jamming along to stuff. Andi, this might sound a bit strange, might be really obvious to you, but I don't mean jamming with other people by all means do that. But that's not necessarily what we're talking about in this course. What I'm talking about is actually putting on Spotify or iTunes or whatever it is and listening to new music on. I use Spotify because I think it's absolutely amazing. I think it's better than any of the other ones for recommending new music, and what I tend to do is I put something on radio so it will start suggesting you stuff for me or I say, play tracks that are like this song, and then I'll just put it on and you can see there's a reason I have my monitors here and not on my computer is because I actually much prefer to sit at the piano and feel and hear the music really, really clearly. So I have these going on at the same time as practicing, and then I'm jamming along with whatever comes up on this helps you learn something we're gonna look at in the next section a bit like transcribing. It's it's not quite transcribing. You're kind of live transcribing. You're jamming along and listening to the key and finding the root notes. But the main goal of it is to have fun, right? This should not turn into a pressure exercise where you're like I can't hear anything was going on. I can't play, You know what we need to do is choose in the beginning really simple music. And this could be potentially music that's like, I don't know, could be nursery rooms. It could be it could be something a bit more fun and cool. Maybe some simple, simple classical neo classical music like I an Audi or anything that you listen to in your repertoire. That's really, really simple could be like maybe a singer songwriter that's just in one key and maybe three chords all the times. Ed Sheeran would be a good example, right? Just jam along to that sort of thing and just pick out a bit of melody, a bit of a bit of baseline bit of harmony, whatever you want. And just use this time to kind of get inside off these new pieces and every time, something that's like or I like what's going on there with the harmony, but you're not sure what's happening. You can then put that into your kind of your outline library. So this is just an invitation for you to start a new type of practice. This is what this course is all about. It's about different practice methods, which is just a little bit more fun. Just try and find yourself a least every other day, jamming along to stuff because it's the most natural part of music, making, just jamming and listening to people on responding to what they're doing. And also it will give you a good indication as to how far you've come. A few jam today, along with some tracks and then in six months after having done lots of outlines in all keys and, you know, practice a compliment pans your ability to follow along with what's going on with the track will be massively changed. So this is kind of like the litmus test jamming along with tracks of how far you've come in your practice. So every now and again, just pop on Spotify. Make sure you're listening to entirely new music on damn along. Of course, you can keep tracks that you love jamming along, too, but distinctly we want a practice that is a new music. 21. Transcribing: So you're using outlines to really develop your understanding of harmony off new tunes in all keys, and that's giving you a huge sense of confidence, saying, Yeah, I can play seven songs in lots of different keys. I mean, that will give you a huge amount of confidence. And then you're also jamming along with stuff, developing your real time kind of intuitive ability to deconstruct the way that music's working. But then the other, more distinct way off. Getting material into your hands that you like is by doing something called transcription. I've written about this on the musician dot com, but it's probably the most powerful way off getting to becoming the kind of player that you want to be. So one of the most common kind of complaints or requests from students of mine is like my chords are quite right, or I can't make my court sound the way that I want, but they don't sound interesting enough or on what they mean, really. Is that the way that I play simple harmony and melody? The piano is not inspired, right, and this course is kind of helping you with the foundations of that. We're looking at harmony and all keys, which is the essential foundation. And then we're looking at a range, a compliment patterns and then voicings, which are the bedrock of arrangement. And that's essentially what people struggle with. It's like coming up with interesting arrangements. But I'm giving you the embryonic kind of classic forms of those. So the typical accompaniment patterns, the typical voicings from that you're gonna then go out to the big well, the big by a big wide world and kind of like draw from those things. You're gonna take the stuff that you're listening to understand it in the way that we've looked at it in this course on. Then put that into your playing on. That's what we're talking about here. We're talking about taking a specific section of a piece of music that's played probably on piano by someone in a way that you absolutely love and really working out how they play, what they play right. They play something, and it's like, Oh, I love that voicing or what are they doing when they go like What is that? You know, because that's not really I can't You can't really describe that in a one chord or, you know, one voicing that they're doing something interesting. And then you understand that in the key and the chord in the moment that they're in. So say they're on a B flat, major chord, right? Just a simple thing like that. You go. OK, I really like what they doing. Okay, they're taking the ninth there, just kind of sliding up to the third. And then you go, Okay, Now I'm gonna play that on all courts, right? And then you can stop playing that everywhere, and this stuff will come out in your practice. So transcription takes a little bit more time because often you have to do entirely by ear , and you can use software to help you do it on Once you Once, you worked it out in that key, taking it into a number of other keys, and that will really embedded in your plane. Let's look at the piece of software that I use to actually do this. So, as I mentioned at the beginning of the course, the piece of software that I use a lot is transcribed and we're looking at it here, and you can see that on my desktop here. I have a number of things. I have my outline library and I also have a folder of transcription. Just a couple of things that I've been working on recently. So I don't keep everything in here. I tend to kind of archive it, But let's look at something like a peg, which is something I'm learning at the moment now. I can't play this actually, in reality, So I'm gonna turn the sound right down because off kind of copyright reasons. But what I tend to do is I'll kind of find a section of the piece of music that I'm listening to, and I'll play that on. Then I'll be like, Oh, I really like this bit right and so kind of work on that bit. So click and drag across it and I'll zoom right in, make sure that it's kind of fully there, and then I'll often start by having that on loop and play over and over again. And then I could also slow it right down. And then there's other things as well that you can do. You can obviously keep learning the rest of peace, but if you want to learn it in another key. And perhaps you don't want to learn the peace initially in this key say this piece was in like I don't know f sharp major, and you're not clear with F Sharp major yet, and you want to learn it in a simpler key. You could take this and move it down one semi tone and actually learn it in a semi tone lower. And then once you're really familiar with that, you can take it back up to after a major. I hope that makes sense. So if you find a pieces in a key that you don't know well, yeah, that's OK. You can use this and change the key that you learn it initially in. Okay, so that's transcribe a really powerful tool for helping you deconstruct hard or tricky or fast moments in music by being able to solo them on, then slow them down. And then, if you want, change the key 22. Pattern Library: So this was a relatively short section of the course because the main onus is on you going out to the world and finding bits of material that you love and you want to absorb in the form of outlines. Obviously, then you're doing your kind of daily or by daily jamming session on. Then you're also doing transcription right, and this is really, really important to start developing because you are absorbing the material that you want to kind of absorb, right? So one of the main things that students say to me is that I don't like the way that I play chords. Andi, I like my progressions or what I'm writing, but I need to make it sound better. And really, you're talking about arrangement right on. This course gives you a huge foundation, an arrangement. That's where I created it, because I started creating an arranging course and realized that actually, most students need a greater foundation of this kind of basic stuff at the piano first. But once you've got those basic a compliment patterns, basic progressions, basic voicings, really, there's not much more I can do or any other teacher can do for you It's about you going out to the world and pulling the material that really inspires you and sort of digesting that and making it your own. So you're doing with the outlines. You're doing it just by osmosis when you're jamming and you're doing it, particularly with transcription on what you can, then kind of sit back and look at over the kind of months and years is you building up this library off material. I tend to call it a pattern library, right, particularly with the transcription side of things, and we'll get into patterns later on. But basically anything like a voicing on a compliment pattern, a melodic pattern and even turn extent like a progression, their oldest patterns right on them or patterns that you can have in your arsenal to draw from, the better you're gonna be is a musician, and also that easier. It is to be able to write music. Now this library could be something that's kind of just in your head, you know that you know roughly 40 tunes and you've transcribed a lot of music, and it's kind of all in your playing. But I what I kind of try and encourage people to do is to actually, um, make a physical or digital place where at least the best of this pattern library can be kept for you. There are a number different tools you could use. You could use simply a book with notes. You could use voice memos. You could use something mawr distinct like Evernote. But either way, you need to find your own way of keeping this library of material that you can draw from. There is one piece of software that I like to use if you're a Mac user, which I'll show you now. But essentially, this library is a place that you can use to kind of whatever format use, whether it's digital, not you can use this library, too. Help you when you get stuck composing or how to develop a piece or you're not sure what to do next or some core progressions. You want a drawing. You can just go to this library and be like, Oh, yeah, I've got loads of stuff here and you can start combining it'll and mixing it up to make your own piece. Let's have a look at that piece of software that I use because I think it's quite cool. So this is a piece of software. It's called Farrago, and it's by a company called Rogue Amoeba who make amazing products for Mac. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a Windows version off this type of product, but hopefully you'll be able to kind of understand how it works and search for your own version. Essentially, what you have is the ability to pull in short sound files or even long sound files on moving around in this really nice interface and then kind of like pre preview them. However you want by just pressing enter, you know, you just click on them and you can kind of move around with the with the keyboard as well. And you can also have different sets. And I use this for a couple of purposes. I use this for building up libraries of composition ideas. Eso If I'm like working on a project that needs inspiration, I can kind of draw in Aiken record kind of snippets from professional tracks, and I can put it in here. But it's also something that you could use to build up your own personal pattern library where you have kind of like your own voicings, which you do. Perhaps these. If you imagine these rule things that you recorded on your on your voice memos off your phone, you can just import them in here and then come back to them any time and label them, you know, voicing one and then voicing to I mean, these are not very imaginative, imaginative names, but you see, you see the idea of it the way that you'd use it and you'd have a sound set that would be like your voicing sound set right. And then down here, you could have, like, you know, melodic patterns. And the reason that this is so important is that we tend to forget these things we tend to forget is that musicians are not like writers or painters or architect's, who tend to kind of like collect these their inspiration in places and revisit them on. I really think that musicians should do that a lot more. Essentially all we have is our our Spotify library, or are CD collection, right? But CD, How old my You get the idea. So using a piece of software like farrago allows you to keep a very obvious pattern library somewhere where you can go back to it. And what's quite cool is you can export these things. You can export a set and just save it to your desktop. And you could have infinite ones of these so really useful piece of software that I've highly recommend if you were a Mac user. 23. Example tunes 1: So in this lecture, I'm gonna give you four example tunes that you might want to get started with when building your outline repertoire. You don't have to do these at all. But if you want my recommendations for some simple, quick, easy wins to start doing in all keys, then I would start with these do number one first, then two, then three and then four. Let's start with number one. So the first is Happy birthday. Let's go through that. Really? Simply I'll just play it first, Okay. Really lovely. Simple tune, but really important for you to learn this in all keys. Okay, so we start with cold one on called five Court one staying on court one and called for 1 to 51 Okay. Really great. Soon done in our case. So in extreme is autumn leaves. It's a standard in the jazz repertoire that all students learn. And the reason is it's made up off to five ones, which is a progression that I mentioned in the harmony section. But we didn't actually sort of cover it specifically, which is why I wanted to include it in your kind of standard repertoire here. So Let's take the core progression. Really, Simply first inside of C major. So we go chord to chord five called one and traditionally in jazzy play these 1/7 chords. Right? But we're just gonna do it. Really, Simply now, 6 to 5, Court one then called for on. Then what we do is, we think, inside of the relative minor. So the relative minor of see is a So now we're thinking inside of a when we do a to 51 in a which goes to 51 So the whole thing's Teoh Sorry. List it simply to 514 relative minor to five ones is basically made up to 51 Okay, so we play the tune really slowly with a baseline as well. And I suggest that you listen to this as well, because ized different ways of playing this right. People do differ slightly different things. Okay, that was the A section. Now we go to the B section and the B section cords go like this. 251 in minor. And then 251 in major. And then a 4 to 51 piece is done. Okay, So let me play the melody for the B section two five cold one Cool to major. Five foot one court to minor court five Minor chord One of mine. I'm sorry that night was wrong. Okay, - right . Cool. Great. Second tune fuse alone in all keys is an outline. So the 3rd June is Stevie Wonder's Isn't she lovely? You know, you've probably heard it before. Yeah, you probably heard it. Theory Reason I chose it is it's using secondary dominance. Really? Well, okay, so let me take you through. The whole progression were in C Major, but we've got some nice stuff going on for secondary dominant. So the first chord that we start on is technically a minor chord. Six. Right. But leading into it, we often have this secondary dominant off e right or cord three. Major Court three of C major. But Major right, that's a secondary dominant called sex. So we go way. It's really, really nice opening and you go, I want to Do you hear that? Kind of It's a really nice push into it. And that's what that secondary dominant this day. So we establish called six with a secondary dominant chord. Three major chord six minor. Then we get to court to court. To is a dominant seventh, right? And that's because it's being a secondary dominant to our cord five, which comes next. OK, so it goes like this. We go called three major or dominant seventh Court six Minor called to Major or dominant seventh. And then the next court is quite interesting as well because it's one of those sussed cords it's called for over chord five in the base. Okay, so the whole things like this on, then we get to court one. Finally. Okay, so now this next bit it goes called three called for back down score 36 24 of the five and on. And you have this run if you want a T end. OK, so that's our 13. Isn't she lovely? So my fourth and final suggestion for you to kind of at least try out a piece for your kind of outline repertoire is my favorite things. Let's just play it through on right, And then that repeats and then you get to the B section. Okay, so let's dive into it a little bit and explain how it works. So we start on Court six, which is minor now. We got called seven, but we don't play the natural diminished seventh. We make it a normal minor. So I gonna move this up a little bit so that we're not in the way. Then we get to court for court to five cold one nice to 51 for very much like autumn leaves back to court, One for seven, normal. Or you could think of this, like, kind of to five in minor and then just does it again. And then this. The B section starts on court Minor, and we do a to five. Back to one called for. If you're thinking in the major again called to major one or four dependence, I think I might have written four there in my score. Okay, so that's the basic idea. Sorry if I'm slightly confusing you there with the the going back to the one. I try and make these chains a little bit simpler that then they're written in there kind of like jazz standards. So maybe a tiny bit discrepancy, sometimes with what I play there. But really, the goal of this is just to give you a rough indication you need to go and listen to it and study it and work it out yourself as well. So that's our fourth on my fourth suggestion for your kind of outline repertoire library for really stand tunes that if you get to play with simple outlines in all keys, you're really, really gonna have a lot under your belt and so much else afterwards is gonna be easier. But, of course, you want to be finding your own outlines that you can start building into this. And the reason I chose these is that they have a really nice melody and a good amount of movement in the cords you don't wanna choose for. You outline a tune where perhaps it's a tune that's like a hip hop June, right? It doesn't really have much in the way of melody. You want to have something that will help you practice melody and kind of interesting court changes 24. Introduction to Voicings: so welcome to the voicing of section of the course. This is the place where you really start getting cords and making them shine on, making them feel nice under your hands and sounds nice. It's incredible to me how, when you're playing chords in simple group position along the time, how limited that world of harmonious on when you start using inversions and then kind of multiple, different voicings and perhaps things like grace notes and other ideas that we're going to explore, how you realize that the simple chord progressions in this world can suddenly come alive and sound totally beautiful. So that's what we're looking at here. What I want to talk about in this video is really how to practice voicings effectively, because I want this course to be applicable to someone who is kind of fairly early on in their kind of practice, the time of playing piano and then also people who kind of are a lot more advanced because these kind of principles apply to all of you. So the basic idea is when you find a voicing that you like that, you actually just play that in all keys, just that one voicing on that one type of cord in all keys. Let me show you what I mean. So let's take a voicing based around D major as an example, okay? Or D dominant. Okay, don't in seventh. Okay, So are voicing goes like this. We have root way, miss out the 3rd 5th way. Leave the seventh in there. Then we take that third and we have a productive and then we add an extra note like 1/9 up at the top. Don't worry. If this is too complex, we're gonna dio slightly easier. Voicing in a minute is a comparison. Okay, so that's the voicing. Let's say that you really like that. Voicing the next stage would be then to take that up dramatically. So there's e flat, dominant seventh, and then we have e dominant seventh F dominant seventh and be able to go all the way up. And this will take you a little while. Never getting You have to go. Okay. Shop seven. And it will take a little while, but once you've got it right Might take you a minute toe. Work out once you've got it, then just stay with that cord for a bill on Just get it into your hands. And the important thing to do is well, with voicings. With everything in this whole chapter is to take your hands off the piano and see if you can get back to me. Oh, okay. Because very often in the beginning, once we've learned something, you know, kind of superficially we we realize, actually, the way that we're learning is by going 1234 And there's a lot of thinking time in constructing the court. What we want to do is get it in our muscle memory to a point where we can just take our hands completely reset off the piano and then just go straight. Oh, yeah. So that's the first way of practicing it. The next way would be to kind of go around several fifths. So you go. OK, fine. So the goes to a goes to e o goes to be okay, and you'll notice with some of these voicings. And this is something that will kind of think about mawr later. Is that you know, voicings sometimes don't work so well in certain registers, right? So, like, really close Nice voicings like vets like right? That works quite nice here. But if I was to play, you know, down here, it's not so good. It's just barricade. But then, certainly here just sounds like a horrible massive notes, because down here it's too crunchy and up here, it's kind of to empty. So that's another consideration. So first way dramatically. Second way circle. If it's and then third ways to kind of give yourself a challenge, just throw yourself a note name. So, like, B flat on you, see how quickly you can play. And if you have to think too much, then you need to work on that one e all right. You need to be able to go to it straight away. So that's the first way of practising. Let's look at it with a more simple called like a kind of inversion, right? Let's say that you're practicing first inversion courts and you're like I'm not gonna demand I want to get really good at them. You can practice them like in the same way. So going up dramatically. Yeah, sorry, I'm getting a piece way being able to get away up. You can also practicing around the circle if If so, c g d a etcetera, etcetera, or you can randomize yourself d flat major a flat major. And then the next step is to take that voicing on play in a piece that you're kind of already familiar with, and you've taken through from your outline library. So you must be already familiar with this tune in basically all keys. But then what we want to do is we're gonna take that, voicing rather slightly artificially and sort of Plunkett through every single court in exactly the same way again. This is a practice method. It's not. The performance, but we're really doing is forcing that voicing into your kind of your repertoire voicings. Now you need to make a few adjustments, obviously, if it's a different type of court. So, for example, let's take out voicing that we looked at Route 7 39 This is the D major version, and let's take it around a core progression like, isn't she lovely? Okay, so we start off three dominant chord six minor to major chord for five slash four four slash five on one. Okay, so our first court e major works fine because it's already a dominant, we can translate it. Roots seventh made 1/3 night. Then when we get to court six Root and minor seventh work. Fine. Still, but our third are major. Third has to be transposed or moved down. Teoh a minor third. Okay, so we've got that's escort. I'd have to work on a bit. So to make it assess cord, I could do, I think, this way back to you. Right. So you see that taking it ran attuned, really forces you to take that voicing out into the wild and apply it somewhere. OK, so that's the basics of how to practice voicing effectively. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna cover some of the fundamental concepts inside of voicing so that you can make sure that you've practiced these elements. So that then when you hear the music that you love, you can kind of really deconstruct it and understand it in terms of these fundamental voicing ideas 25. Inversions: so understanding inversions is really the bedrock are voicing, and it's a great place for us to start. So what you want start doing is taking a simple court. Simple Triads. What would try its first right on player in all of its inversions way? Want to start with the left hand first? If you were to prioritize one hand, it would definitely be the left hand. Because is this kind of weird thing that happens that because we're even if we left handed people at the piano were right hand dominant? Alright, some reason. And if we practice something with our left hand first, the right hand actually gains a lot of knowledge from just what the left hand is done, because it seems a lot easier when you come to play with it with the right hand. But if you practice with the right hand first the left hands like I work with write. So we want to do left hand with all of this stuff until your hand gets tired, in which case you just swap into your right hand for a bit so simple. Closed position triads will get too close an open position in the next lecture. Close vision Triads in 1st 2nd inversions. Right. And you want to do that on major courts on minor chords on diminished chords. And if you're feeling really adventurous, augmented courts, right. So, for example, were to do on minor. We go like this. I don't diminished, right, etcetera, etcetera. And you want to do that on every single group. So you do it then on a flat, right? So, major, a flat minor. I think this is very mind. This can get a little bit boring, so please don't do it for too long, right? It's very easy to feel like I'm gonna nail this. I'm gonna practice this for, like, 40 minutes and then you realize, you know, after two days of that, you're like I hate music. Okay, so just do this, you know, five minutes. Remember, with we're building in ALS, these little things that you could have to build your own perfect practice routine will talk about this at the end of the course. But don't overdo too much of this because it can be very uninspiring and turned music into a kind of very monotonous thing. But you need to understand that This is very foundational, Shukan. I'm sure appreciate this needs to be at the bedrock of stuff. So that's with simple close vision triads. And then once you're good at that, you want to expand to seventh chords. So let's go back to our G chord, right? We would do G major seven way do G dominant seventh on G minus seven. And if you're feeling really kind of out there, you g major minor seventh as well. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend that one because it hardly ever comes up as a court. So those three court types major seventh dominant seventh, minus seven. You want to do those through all of their inversions route 1st 2nd And now because his seventh chord Now, remember, the goal is not speed here, okay? The goal is actually comfort on. What I want you to do is turn this exercise into a really kind of kinesthetic of that. So I would have a really lovely feeling exercise where every time you play a chord you like on it sounds funny, but like you're like, this is a really nice feeling of this court. We've got to enjoy every single thing that we play on will find a way at least to connect to everything that we play right. And if you're playing according It's like a tense hand, I don't like that quick rush past it, then you're absolutely wasting your practice time, right? If you're you shouldn't be. And you're not really at that level yet. Then it's a waste of your time. You're not getting better. Or at least in my opinion, what you should be doing something like right. If you want to break it up, you can I tend to, like kind of floating music. So I said I had a long makes me kind of enjoy it more, and then you kind of break it up and make it into a piece of music if you want. And if you don't get distracted, but you could try playing over the top of it. I mean, we've turned this exercise in something that's a little bit more. You can connect to it. Okay, so we've got that. You then play that obviously in all keys as well. So you play dominant seventh, you know, you see, then that Major sorry, I should say, and then a It's after etcetera and you could go again, you could go up dramatically down dramatically. Like I was doing that all you could go around the circle of fifths on then once you're really good at this, then you can start taking simple inversion ideas through the pieces in your outline library pieces that you're learning, right? So if we take it in, like, let's do it so really simple in, like, Happy Birthday. Right? So say you're wanting to practice first inversion cords. You You do? Happy birthday. You might even play the melody with an easy tune like this, But you go All right. So I'm doing first inversion chords in my left hand. Actually, I need to move Melody up actually messed up. The surprising isn't it is funny. So this is the other thing as well that you'll you'll think that you're doing something simple, like there I was like, I'll now this and then I'm like, No, I totally didn't know. What did I get wrong? That's what I meant to do, right? And it's about finding all these little corners in your playing where you think Yeah, Yeah, I got this, man. It's cool. I can play it. But actually you can't. You need to practice symbol. And then, of course, you then do that in another key, etcetera, etcetera. You get the idea. Remember that The other thing you can do is use the backing tracks along with whatever it is that you're practicing. So So you're trying to get good at first inversion cords. You might then combine that with learning the 1.6 or progression or the blues progression. Right? So you take. So, for example, let's stick with a really simple 11564 right. You do six along with the backing track. And after a few minutes, once it changed to the next key you do, then go. Yeah, and then etcetera, etcetera to the next key, right up and up and up. So that would be the best way to use the backing tracks with this kind of practice for voicings just Loki, non pressured, enjoying letting the kind of the cords and the voicings get into your fingers 26. Closed & Open: so close Position and open position chords are really the next level after inversions when it comes to thinking about voicings. So by practicing our inversions, what we're doing is we're just naturally practicing closed position courts. Okay, The's close position chords can't get any closer together. Hence, while had closed, What I mean by that is f a c in that order from bottom to top. You can't get those notes any closer. You can play them in different places, which is kind of like a different voicing. But we're not thinking of it like that. In this course you can't get there is any closer together in that order. You could play a C in open position, so it's the same notes in the same order, but they're further a partner. So close position, open position. And of course, there are many more open position versions of, of course than there are closed. Right. But how do you start practicing these well by doing the inversion practice that we had in the last one. And with Rick position with them with triads and with seventh chords, you're already practicing a lot of clothes position stuff, so it's kind of like two birds, one stone with the previous chapter. But how do you practice open position voicings? Well, you can go in like we discussed in the previous section of this course. You can go to music and transcribes that find the voicings that you really like and then pull that back into your playing. But you can also generate your own open position. Voicings on. The best way to do this is just, you know, player court. Let's work with D Major, right? So here's your d major chord. OK, so what can we do? We could take out the third That's often done with a kind of root fifth in the left hand. And then we could take that third on. We could move it up right? That's that's one of the most common simple open position voicings of triumph right where you take third and you just move it up an octave on. Then you practice that different places, right? And of course, you Then, like we said in the previous lecture, you can practice it by going up dramatically. You can practice it by going round the second right, or you can practice it by going round a tune, right or a progression With the backing track, you get the idea now, hopefully or you could think of another one like, um, you know, it doesn't have to be root position this voicing Let's take the third. Let's do in e flat, Major chord on Let's take the third in the base, then the roots thing on the fifth again. Okay, so remember, there's a concept will cover in a bit, which is doubling. We'll look at that more closely, but what I'm doing here is I'm doubling 15. We're right hand. It's already nice voicing, first invoked invoicing. Open position, right? So you do the same thing. You take that right and you also go around the circle of Fifths and you also take it round progressions and songs that you like. So that's the basic overview of close position and opposition voicings and how you can start practicing them inside of the material that you're learning 27. Doubling, Dropping & Adding: so doubling notes just happens naturally, right? If we take a voicing like this first inversion d major chord with third on route 50 Route 50 We've got 2/3 2 routes on, then. Okay, this is not this is something that doesn't actually happens. But I kind of wanted to highlight it to you because you might make your own distinctions about for example, you don't like sounds where the third is doubled too much or you don't like sounds where the fifth is double too much or you might like sounds where you really emphasize those ITT's completely up to you. But I wanted to emphasize that this is an area to think about when you're constructing or kind of deconstructing voicings the opposite, then of course, of doubling is dropping. So we take accord that same D major chord, and we take out the firt. We just get this right and that's a classic thing to do on cords is to actually take out the third, and then they kind of like the harmony becomes a bit ambiguous. So say you were writing something or you were performing with someone on. They were already playing the third in their part, right? You could do a kind of voicing, which was kind of like a Oh, because this would already be taken care of by another instrument. So that's another thing to consider as well. That dropping is Justus valid, particularly when you're playing with other people. But you could also dropped the fifth that often gets. That often happens, right? So in another lecture we looked at handsome is time progression correct? So right that voicing, which will look out in a minute, which is to do the tents. That's a dropping, voicing right, because we've got the root and third octave apart with no fifth. But the cords still stand up on their own right. They still work, So dropping is really useful. Combined with dropping is the idea of addition, right? So if we just listen to this core progression, this is if you know Steely Dan's peg this'll Last chord Here is a suspension court and probably covered suspension chords in my previous course. Right, so we've got e minor chord. That's kind of what the court is, but we lose the third and we add on that gives you this really interesting sound right, and that is something to consider. When you're doing voicings right, you can drop some notes and add in other notes, right? So let's try that on our D major court. Again, let's drop the third Andi, add the knife that could what? So if that third was being taken, Care if you imagine this is another instrument. This works really well, is a voicing right here. This is all you need to do, right? Or if we take out the fifth, leave the third in at the ninth, and maybe out of sick as well, we could get something like. So that's third root root. Ninth Heard on Leave the fifth. Okay, that's another voicing. So these are all just ideas to help you explore. You don't need to drop if you add that's not a rule. So you could keep the fifth in a lot of those notes that I had there. But it's just get bit country. Sometimes on DSO principle I like to think about is dropping and adding almost like you're exchanging one kind of standard note for another note. So those are the three concepts, Of course, when you find voicings based on these principles here, then you need to take that voicing through all kind of on all root notes and then perhaps a round circle of fifths and then perhaps around a progression or two. 28. 3rds, 6ths & 10ths: so I wanted to take a bit of time to go a little bit deeper on a topic that's gonna help you think about your voicings in from another angle, basically. So when you start creating cords, you probably are told that you basically take a scale G major and you play the first note. Skip the next note, play the next night, skip the next night, play the next night, and when you are skipping notes, what you're doing is you're going up in thirds, right? So from here to here is a second. But then from here to here is 1/3 from here to here is a second from here to here is 1/3. So we're basically stacking thirds. And it doesn't matter whether it's a minor chord or a major chord, and with these are major thirds or minor thirds were still using thirds right, and then same with seventh chords. If we play a major seventh chord, these two notes are 1/3 apart. If we play dominant seventh chord, these 2/3 sorry these two nights or 1/3 apart right on. Same with a minor seventh chords right now that underlies everything okay in terms of in terms of the raw structure of the court. Of course, if you're playing it like, you know that whatever the relationships or the intervals between this note in this note, there's no there's no are no longer thirds. But underlying it'll there is this third structure, OK, and so thirds kind of you can think of them at the deepest level of our harmonies as really being integral. So if we were to take something like that, the Hunza voicing that we've looked at previously, right? So this is technically attempt right because 123456789 think of like the wrong scale that you get the idea. This is 1/10 interval, but really you and I know it's also 1/3 but an octave apart. OK, so that's one way of thinking about it. So that 10th is it really powerful, voicing not just because, Well, I didn't just because it's actually underlying this idea of thirds, but in a different way. So getting that idea of 1/10 into your voicing somewhere is really powerful. You'll see. See me doing it a lot in a voicing that we covered previously we did a D dominant seventh, voicing it was like this and one of the reasons this works so well play a bit lower because you've got this 10th relationship here, right? That is a really powerful thing to have in accord. Another powerful thing to have in accord is a sick. And if we think about what a sick there's a sick this just 1/3 inverted. Okay, so if I played you a sick above from B thing is a minus sick. If I invert this G and put it down and active, you realize that we're just playing 1/3 right? That's what are sick visits a inverted on. You don't need to worry about the theory too much. But if you are interested in getting ahead, round it. This is a major third here on when you invert a major third, it becomes a minor. Sick on the opposite is true. If you take a mine effort on you inverted, it becomes a major sick. Don't worry about that too much. The reason, though I'm introducing six, is that they're a really powerful voicing to get into your hands, right? So let's have a 10 here in the left hand and then a sick in the right hand. Beautiful. Right. So that's just a G major chord with the 10th on the left and, uh, sick in the right. Okay. Beautiful, beautiful sound to explore. And, of course, then those six on tells don't necessarily. Or let's stick with six. Those six don't necessarily have to be in the court. Oh, right. You can create some beautiful sounds. It's kind of it's just open enough, but not too open and not like 1/4 or 1/4 or 1/5 to sound beautiful. Okay. And you can use that sick anywhere in the court. So if we do this, we've got f sharp to D, which is the major seven. Let's make this a bit simply we'll just play. Excuse me. We'll just play reposition G major court on a sick above. He gives us a F shop, which is the seventh on a D, which is the fifth. Okay. And you can do that in different places. Now we have the ninth on the major seventh, but in the root. Yeah, some don't work. That's okay. That one. And then fifth on third. So thirds, which become 10th and come six are super powerful concepts. Teoh kind of help you understand the voicings that sound beautiful on also to generate voicings that sound beautiful. 29. Grace Notes: so technically think The Grace note is not a voicing as such, but often when people hear great voicing grace notes that contained in it. So I wanted to cover that in this section. So if we take something like a simple D major court, right, and we take root 5th 3rd 5th we can do something like this where we slide from the second up to the third. Okay, so we're just sliding into it, and it gives us this kind of corruption, equality, and you can do that on different courts. So just have a practice now, uh, and you can have what are called diatonic Grayson s. So here's a C major chord, and I'm sliding from a d to me where I can have chromatic great nights. So here I'm sliding from a DIY shop or any flat money on it gives a different sound. Okay, so that's the first type of great in it, and you can explore that on all of your cords. It doesn't have to be the third as well. If we take a first inversion, a major court right here, Route 50 route and we slide from the fourth to the fifth. I could also work and give us our Grace notes. Sound okay? There's another way of doing grace notes, which I don't really have a good name for. It's just something that I've seen and played for a long time. And I call it Grace Note chords, right? It's kind of an oxymoron, really, anyway, that if we were to take an f major chord here, we've got room knows of F and then a second inversion f major chord. If I go up one. Cor play G a team minor chord in second inversion. If I played this ready length of time, right so longer than 1/2 a second, it would start to become like a full chord in itself. We have to call it like a slash court or whatever, but the way people play is they, like, play like this, right? It's a really nice, kind, quick slide up, and it has this really nice excitement. The way that the person is playing the music is still very much f scented, right? But you can see that we're kind of exploring other chords over quickly and combined with like, uh, chromatic Grace notes and that you can get really nice sound with just one court, right that made one F court into something that was actually like a full almost felt like a progression. It was more interesting. So this is something that you can do on vamps. The vamps are where you have, like, one Corbyn Ages, like in the opening of the musical's often do this right. But you can you beginnings of anything roomy instead of just going exploring standard voicings stuffs get very, very boring and tedious. Is the sound right? You could add in these cord passing chords. Right? Okay. So explore the idea of these grace notes and grace chords in your voicings. Inside of the progressions on then. Of course, any other material that you learn 30. Harmonising Melody: So this video is about accompanying or following the melodic line in your voicings on it could actually belong in the compliment section. But actually, we're gonna look at it here in the voicing section, cause by practicing this, you actually really, really force yourself to kind of integrate everything that you've learned so far in the voicing section by trying to follow a melody with your with your voice is so let's let's get into it What I mean So if we take the outline of isn't she lovely? If that's really solid for you, what you'll start to be realizing is that between these two hands here, you could theoretically place some of the court. All right, so there's theseventies of E on the third of a right. We could go. So here we're doing base melody and chords all at once. This is a fantastic practice to be doing on. Then you can think. Okay, so the next court is an a minor chord, right? So how can I? Nice and easily go that court What I'm gonna do Route 50 slide this one down to the seventh , and then this could be my melody line and then you have roof. If seventh a minor. And so the whole thing is okay, you see what's going on here? We're playing it all together at once. And actually, if you're accompanying someone that can be really beneficial, if someone's singing along, you can kind of support their melody. Line County that fast run with the right hand. So that's the That's the concept there. Let's look at it was something like Elton John. You see the idea that it's not quite a full performance of the melody, right? But I'm kind of ghosting it a lot, and that would really enhance what's going on for the singer Now. In the beginning, you were able to necessarily, if you've never done this, be able to play it fully, but I would start. This is why we started with the outline of things. I would start with the outline and then see what notes you can fill in. So whilst it's not always true, it's kind of about playing the melody and bass line with your outer fingers. Maybe these three, and then filling in the courts with the inner fingers. There's lots of exceptions there, obviously, on you don't need to do it all the time with the little fingers. But that's the kind of rough idea. And I would start with that in a very slow way, like we did at the beginning. Just say OK, I'm gonna use my thumb to play one of the other coordinates, that's all in the beginning, and then slowly build this up over time. 31. Rootless: so we've already looked at inversion. So here's a C dominant seventh chord in route position and then first inversion second inversion on third inversion. Right? And you're hopefully really comfortable with that idea now. But what we want to explore in this lecture is the idea off. Ruthless voicing. So let's take a first inversion of that seed on seventh chord and then let's take out the sea. So what we have first appearances is basically just a e diminished chord. But it's not really because if you have the base underneath, right in another instruments a basis was playing that note. There. You're playing up here a route list, voicing right. And if we take another chord like G major seven, right, All right. Similarly, here. If I just played that in my right hand a to moment it looks like B minor, right? But as soon as I do this, it's g major right, because whatever you have in the left determines what the harmony is in the right left, harmony always grows up like a tree. You know, whatever you put here creates the harmony or re contextualize is the harmony that's up here just to kind of explain what I mean. His a c major chord, right? That's really obvious to you. But if I do this, it's no longer see Major. What years are hearing is an a minor chord on. Then this becomes the seventh of a minor. So we're not playing in a minor seventh chords. All right, if I change the base, No, it's a C. Now it's an A minor, but I haven't done anything here. Okay, so that's ruthless voicings, ruthless voicings, A really powerful thing to start practicing, especially if you're arranging music where someone's taking care of the base or another instrument is taking care of the base. And we're gonna cover this in an upcoming lecture with stride. Because if you take something like this, right, right, what I'm doing here, Actually, sorry if I take that, see out what I'm doing In both of those instances, that's a dominant seventh chord, and this is seed on seventh called. Both of those are ruthless voicings. There's no effin that voicing their on there's no see in that, voicing their but because I played the bass beforehand are is here that Aziz, part of the harmony of that F major and that sorry, that dominant seventh in the sea, dominant seventh. So this is an invitation to start getting familiar with ruthless voicings and start playing some of these progressions and just simple chords with ruthless voicings. Now what I've done here so far is I've done rulers voicings where just simply taken out the route, and we just keep the court. But in jazz, particularly with ruthless voicings, what you can do is you can then add more upper structures. So if we look at the upper structure of C donut seventh, we could then at the ninth way the 11th right or the 13 11 whatever you want, right, let's just make a simple now we're gonna at the ninth to the court. So if we play a ruthless voicing of this, we take out the sea. This is now our C dominant seventh chord had nine, right? And that works really well. And if we go around the blues and trying to play basically the 3rd 5th 7th Andi, the nine of each chord, you'll discover something right. You've discovered that it's actually really easy to do. Voice leading. Okay, so now I could go up and do the same here. But again, we don't want to do that. We want to add invoice leading. Look how lovely this sounds. Okay, so what I'm doing is I'm going from a C for their up to an f chord with that ninth in it as well. So let's just break it down a bit more, So we'll see here. 3rd 5th 7th 9th when we got to the air. 7th 9th 3rd fifth. Okay. And then what would it be on court five? You could do something like this. Okay. And we'll discover this. We're gonna work exactly on this progression in the strides lecture. But I just want you, Teoh to introduce the concept to announce that you can start playing around with it, getting familiar with it on understanding that ruthless voicings are a very powerful concept to integrate into your arrangements when the base is being taken. Care off by another instrument 32. Voice Leading: So I've spoken a little bit about voice leading in this course, but I really wanted to take some time to give you some tips on Do some encouragement to really take this on as a zone area of practice for what you do. So the opposite of voice leaving would be taking something like this on. Playing all your course on is a police for that occasionally, right, if you want that. But it's not something that you want to rely upon by default, right? We don't want this blocky sound right. We wanna start doing some different things and the bedrock off good voice leading has to be . You have to have a good foundation in inversion. That's right. So you're inversions need to be really solid before you can really start getting a lot out of voice leaving or making it a bit easier on DSO. What we've done so far in this course is we said okay, right. Well, practice all your inversions, you know, round a chord progression, right? So you might be doing like a chord progression. You playing first inversions of each chord, right? But there's another way of doing as well. There's a way of doing it where you're playing a tune. Let's just dio let's do six for 15 progression, which is a variation of the one fact 64 on you think? OK, right. Well, the next court I'm gonna move to is called for, which looks like that. What's the most minimum amount of movement that I can do to play that chord? And it doesn't matter what inversion it is that in play. Okay, well, the closest court I could do would be a first inversion f major. Okay? Because all I have to do these two notes stay the same. And then this note changes. So the two principles of good voice leading is that well, this three actually notes this is minimal movement as possible. Usually, uh, notes don't always move in the same direction, right? We don't have that parallel thing. And also, sometimes notes stay the same. Right? S so here. We've got to note staying the same and one note going up, right, And then we go to court for and it's okay for those two to move in the same direction there cause that parallel movements kind of okay, but if I was worried about that. I could go. I could kind of do a a slightly bigger jump, right? And maybe do something like that. Right. But we're going to stick with the parallel movement. So 6415 Right. Okay, so that's that's a really a really good practice to do your chord progressions moving between the different inversions. Right? So there's one other exercise which I really like, which involves getting two pens or things and you place them roughly an octave apart, So that so here I've got e e flat is the lowest. No, I can play and then you fly up here, they have Teoh whip ends. It has to be on white notes. If he had blue tack, you could place them. Exactly. I made 1/7 apart, but I'm just doing this for now. And that roughly gives us this octave that we can play in. And then the goal is to play an entire progression or tune only in their active on. That really forces you to not do that because you simply can't move outside of that active . So let's do isn't she lovely? Uh, right. So I'm having to really think about the inversions. If I play the accompanying chords in route position on the right, you'll see what I'm doing. So we've got caught way won't play this chord so I can have Teoh first inversion and then we want to play this chord way do that way won't play this chord. So okay, so you really having to work on inversions in? And then you can move this to different places and work on new voicings that you wouldn't normally play. So if I just put this up here randomly and then I have to think OK, so my first quarters in e and then I'm going to a mine. How would I play? Oh, I've done it wrong here. Haven't given enough. Haven't give myself in a todo right So really forcing you to work on voice leading And then the final practice, which is really good. And obviously, guys, you're doing all of that stuff that I've just shown you there in different keys. This is just an exercise I'm showing you in c major. So everyone who watches this course can understand. The final exercise is something that's quite close to what we call four part harmony on. There's a traditional school off four part harmony where you have lots of rules and stuff like that. I'm not quite talking about that. That's a bit intense. What we're gonna be doing is we're just basically saying, OK, you have two voices in the left hand and two in the right and basically try and do the principles of voice leading, which is that notes don't move all in parallel. Sometimes they stay the same, and it's good if they don't always move in there. They move in opposite directions. They are moving right, so let's just do a simple core progression of 251 But we'll have kind of two notes in the right tune. It left. His eyes are first court. Now I'm going to court five thes two notes can stay the same. These could move up on. Then I could go right, so that would sound like it's quite nice. You can hear that this a nice movement in there or I could go right and you really start getting this lovely movement. You can see my fingers kind of moving independently if you do that in all keys, right working on that. So forces you to have to think. OK, hang on. Where am I? Right. Okay, on Some of those are not good. I need to practice it, obviously. But that's that's a really good exercise to force you to start thinking about how you're different voices move between different notes of the court. 33. Introduction: so welcome to the part, of course, which is all about a company. Mental patterns accompany mental patterns are really the bedrock of arranging. And what I mean by that is, once you've covered a fair amount of harmony on DSA, some voicing soon as you add a few small, simple accompany mental persons, that's really when your compositions in your arrangements start to take off. It's when you feel really like you're legitimately doing something that feels on you. And so what we're gonna be exploring this part, of course, is a number of modular kind of principles or like blocks for a cover mental patterns that you can start pulling together and building your own arrangements. It will also help you understand the music you're listening to and draw from it a lot more beneficially on what I mean by that is say, you hear something bits like I don't know. It's kind of like maybe in the beginning, you might hear that and be like, I don't know what's going on. But learning a few simple principles around complimenting patterns will help you just see that straight away and kind of absorb it so much quicker than you would if you were learning kind of all the notes separately. So let's break that down. What is essentially an e flat line? 1/7 chord, right? But this to a complimented patterns going on, this one in the left and then this one in the right, and it's drawing from a number of different things. But basically the left hand is doing kind of an arpeggio. Hated slash broken chord shape, way right, and it's hitting on the ninth of the cord and sometimes the major sick and stuff like that . And then in the right hand, you just got on alternating chord pattern on the E minor seventh chords, right? Sorry, Flat minus seven, right? And then it just becomes to complimenting patterns with one court and that's it. Where is before? If you weren't thinking like that, you'd be thinking that no followed by, followed by that note and that note and that note, and then it just you don't understand what the composer is doing that right. So this is what this course has been all about is giving these modular parts that you can start understanding the music you love with and also building the music that you want to write with. So in the next lecture, we're going to start with the most basic building block off a camera. Mental patterns there is, which is based on this idea, off voicing inversions. 34. Block Chords 1: Okay, so the block chords don't have to be boring, right? People tend to think of block chords is rich, really are right. But the main thing that block chords rely on is interesting voicing and voice leading. Right. So block chords. Yes, there are in accompaniment pattern there in accompaniment pattern that is basically powered by your good voicings. So if we can unpack and make a lot simpler, why did there were in kind of d major? All right, so what I've got is I got kind of a a really nice voicing here, which I love, right, And I'm adding in some, perhaps 1/9 there as well, and it's a really rich court. Now. It's lovely. But as with all things in music, when things lovely, if you keep doing them, they they become not lovely, right? So what I'm doing there is I'm doing a first inversion in voicing which I absolutely love, which is third route 50 route and you can have these kind of rhythmical ins changes right to just rather than just so. A great way to practice block chords in the beginning is basically getting your inversions good, right, and you'll have done this a lot in the inversions practice section, but you want to think of it a bit more carefully this time like its voice leading. So let's have a look at this now in the iron, Every progression in the world, uh, style inside of D um, de miner or B minor, listed in B minor. So what I'm doing when I'm playing, that is I'm thinking really carefully about, like how the top voices moving through this music right? And if we to expand that to two hands, right, you're thinking it's not just the top voices, all of them. But you're thinking how How, by making a kind of internal melody in this music, - exploring your inversions but still doing in blocks and forcing yourself toe make this internal kind of like current in the harmony that's powered by this blocked shape, right, so use extensions. That's fine. As you saw me doing expand your your voicings really draw from the voicing section of this course on. Then, if you want, you can kind of work a little bit on your rhythm, right? Adding a little bit of stuff. So if we were to go into the hip hop room. - The final thing that you can practice with blocking and we'll talk about this in a kind of camping base. Line one is really expanding a rhythmical vocabulary, right? So if we take it like a cord, right, if we just think scored really sums up this, this court would really sum up the analogy progression in B minor, right? You could really start working on the left hand base patterns that really force you to be difficult challenging with your rhythms. Because the hardest thing about playing Candace doing two things at the same time simple examples off different baselines. We're gonna explore a lot more the camping and the rhythmical side of stuff in another lecture. But I just wanted to show you that that block chords in the right with a baseline in the left is still blocked. Courts, right. You don't have to do block called everything right, because remember the beauty of this whole section, the company mental patterns, is it's like you can combine left hand and right so right hand might be doing one left. I might be do the other. So what we just saw there was block chords. Very simple in the right hand on, then. Interesting. What? That wasn't so interesting, but a simple baseline that kind of disrupts the rhythm in the left. There's another way that you can design your practice and play through these chord progressions. 35. Broken Chord & Arp Pt 1: so welcome to the broken chord on arpeggio practice material lecture where we're gonna give you some core ideas inside of broken chords and arpeggios that you can use to start practicing through all keys and thes progressions on. Then also start expanding upon to make it appropriate to the styles and the kind of material that you want to practice. But this is the core stuff. Basically everything's made of it. So we are going to start with the Einaudi progression in D minor and we're going to start on obviously the first chord, which is called six B flat major now Broken chord. It's simplest form. Is the cord in each of its inversions broken up So that b flat major in reposition first inversion second version and I'm just gonna break it up in a pattern. And apart from that last night, the pattern was up through the cord, right up through the court, up through the court. But you could do other ones you could do down through the court, right? Or you could dio another kind of pattern there, and that's starting to be what's called Alberti bass in classical music. But for now, let's just stick with the upward pattern. Okay, so you're gonna go on, go on the way down. You did a downward pattern on the next court way. Some of you might be wondering, what's this last note that I always do rather than ending? And that's just a personal feeling that I like to end on the beat one, because we're going. 1231231231 I like to end up there, but you don't have to do that. So take that now and you can do it. Obviously, all of these exercises will be in both hands. Always start with the left is it makes you a lot more powerful in the left and then take that through the Einaudi progression in as many keys is you find comfortable. Cool. So once you're familiar with the three pattern, we want to explore the four pattern which uses the the full stretch of the octave. Right. So we've got B flat chord here in first position. Sorry. Root position. But what we can do is weaken any opted out there right to the octave off the bottom up top way to do the same thing. We just inverted like we did before. But we have the active now the activities on the D and then here is on the right. So that sounds like right. Slightly different pattern. You don't have to do that ending. Know that I showed you before. But play with that now, over the progression. So when you start playing these with the backing tracks, you'll realize that actually, there's not enough time to go through all of the inversions, right? You can't be. Oh, by the time you've done all of those, the cords changed. Right? So when you're pulling along with backing tracks, you need to think, OK, how many inversions might gonna dio and how will I make it work? Let me give you an example. So So that on each court I had time to do two inversions, right, So reposition First inversion root position, first inversion root position, first inversion. Because there's two bars of this court. I could go up to the final one, right, so you might do that right? But then you also might decide to start on the right first inversion. So let's try that. And similarly with the four note chord or the four note pattern, right? So there wasn't. By the end, there wasn't a formula. I wasn't going like root. First route, first route First, I was actually kind of starting to do what we call voice leading, right? So if you've covered voice leading in the voice leading section of this course or horse leaving lecture, you know a little bit about it. But basically you can apply it to anything, right? It's about how can I create is minimal movement as possible? So rather than going see at the end of each court, there at my hand has to shift back down. Instead of doing that, I could just be like, Okay, I know what my next quarter is. It's see All right, What's the closest voicing of C in this position? Well, it's this right, so I could go on. The closest voicing of D minor in this vision position is probably here right from It's where you could say it's that, but I could, and this is what you got to start getting into your practices like, you know, get get the backing track on and just be like keep moving up and down the cords. One of the things that one of my teachers told me wants to do, which is I absolutely love doing is just keeping going up the piano, then coming back down the piano and you have to find the right voicing. So let me show you what I mean. - Get the idea that that's a bit uncomfortable. You saw it cheated very briefly on one note. But this is a really good access. It forces you to see where all the inversions are. And this is again the principal, one of the main principles who keep coming back to you, which is just being able to see potential in front of you. You're doing something and you're like I could do this, Do this, activists activites. You could see so many things and this is what this practice is. It's just opening up harmony in your mind in the in front of you. Andi. It's a fantastic practice. Doesn't seem a massively exciting when you're doing it, but actually, after a while, it's incredibly satisfying. So to summarize what we've done so far, it's broken courts in the three position on, then in the four position on on also then exploring voice leading. So when the court changes, not necessarily having to go with a big jump. But moving from something like this to this Teoh this so nice movements and just exploring that up and down the piano. And of course, you doing in both hands first the left, then the right. So the next pattern that we're gonna be looking at is much more to do with appreciation. Or it's much more similar to our education again this crossover. But this one's particularly obviously er vegetation. So I'm sure if you've been playing piano for any length of time, you've done things like this. We've got an F major chord, right? We're going right. Route 50 route. Right. And in the beginning, you probably end up just going like that even worse, just like a really slightly boring voicing right and certainly virtually no accompaniment in there. But the basis of a good left hand pattern actually is based around this octave shape and the route on fifth, right? So instead of going, which sounds pretty elementary, right, what we're gonna do is we're gonna get root. Fifth root knife on back down, Teoh five right It's kind of kind of nice. And especially if you're doing other stuff in the left hand. Okay, so if we look at that in the eye and Audi and let's do it in G minor because I was doing it there, we've got E flat major. Bye bye. Sorry, Major. Major Gene. Okay, so we've got fifth root, ninth fruit, 59 fruit. Fifth night, and you can come back down. This depends on how fast you doing it. So if you're doing encryptions time before some other notes to kind of, like fill in the space before the pattern restarts or if you doing in quavers, right, this is a fantastic bedrock pattern to build stuff out off because it just is this rolling thing underneath, - you know, it could be really dramatic. And it can also just be really suckle in the background, you know, just just a background thing. So let's start with it. Well, I've just shown you in Let's do it in Dimona here. So we've done that already. So And if we were to do it in a minor, we'd go. So you get the idea. So take this pattern, put it through the Einaudi progression in all keys. Or indeed, any of your other progressions get really good at it, particularly in the left hand. You can work it in the right if you want, but it's a very much a left hand pattern on. Don't come back. Of course you can then extend it right. So if we were just doing the night there, we could carry on up so we could go Route 50 Route 9 10 Right on these nights, intense could easily be just Sina's note number two and three of the scale. Right, Because this is our room. We're going to three. So hopefully that makes sense to you again. 9 10 which is also three. Okay, and that's another nice way of doing it. Because instead of just getting this kind of ambiguous cord right, there's nothing inherently major or minor about this court because we don't have the third present in it. Things could be in accompaniment for a major e flat major code, or any of that minor look works fine, either one. But if you want to bring in the third to illustrate the court, you then go 9 10 or if it's a major court. Yeah, So your your progression in Einaudi would be like and you play around with it obviously said that in the final one Is us going up two octaves or the three up tips? So it would sound like this. Okay, Really, really big jumps that we take it on a simpler code like a major. That's the extent that are left hand is going. It's an incredibly large left hand pattern, But if you can practice this and you can do it in most chords in all keys Sorry, most progressions in all keys again. Huge power in your hands. Okay, So again, if there was one thing that was to differentiate AARP education from broken courts for me, it's about going spanning multiple octaves and using this pivot in the left in the hand. Right, Because arpeggios, you have to go like this. Thumb has two fingers, and some have to kind of really cross over each other a lot, whereas broken chords you can just kind of it's kind of all in one block. You could just move your hand round like that rather than these crossovers. So this is a really great work out so you could take this one of doing hideous fingering them, just showing you, actually, that this is a great practice material because, you know, you see, I'm making mistakes on that when I actually need to work on that so that my fingers get much better at climbing over themselves in this case. So we've looked at some interesting patterns so far, but we haven't covered the standard arpeggio pattern like the exact arpeggio pattern we've looked at things that are a bit like, you know, like this. If we looked at the exact arpeggio on E flat Major, it would sound like this on then if we were to go to other courts like the Progression Way . So it sounds a lot like a scale. It's not particularly musical, but as a core pattern for you to build stuff from, it is essential. So we've been looking at broken courts and looking at arpeggios on the core Definition, as I've said, is that this crossover between the hands, right, you've got broken chords or in one position on arpeggios, you pivot, and this is something that we want to practice quite specifically because it's actually very hard if you haven't done much of it before, it's just awkward. Doesn't feel good. And I really encourage you to take this particular one. The arpeggio practice with care because a lot of people find themselves getting very frustrated. I definitely did when I was practicing arpeggios first. So we look a simple C major chord, right? Instead of playing it like that, What going to do is when you're doing finger 123 and that's actually quite stretch already . You just hold that position, you'll you'll feel a tiny bit of discomfort, right? Not bad discomfort just kind of knew discomfort on when we do 123 so that we have the opportunity. Then pivot with the thumb which comes underneath and goes onto the top. See that right on you just repeat it again, and then on the way back down, you're just doing the opposite, right? Okay. And a lot of thes arpeggios will have kind of different finger rings, and you can just look those up online or if it's a black one to start, you won't probably be starting your finger. You'll be doing your one of your other fingers. Explore these first in isolation just one chord at a time if you haven't done them before because that will be quite tricky. And that is a great exercise to be doing in your practice, just like practicing scales as well. But now we're talking about kind of the AARP education practice. We're gonna put it inside of a progression, right? So let's take it in D minor on the 90 progression. So you see what's going on that I'm playing the upper J two actives on. Then I'm changing the cord and doing another. Being able to do this on a low chords in all keys is a really, really powerful exercise, particularly for the left hand. But you also want to practice this in the right you wanted then start exploring in the different inversions because all of these arpeggios that just played then were in route position, right? So I was going room to stop. We're always playing the roots on the beginning beat, right? But actually, you can start up, heard you in an inversion. So second, right, so you wanna be able to get to that in all kids. So if we take the Iannone progression in first inversion, uh, or in for And then in second version. Well, that one needs in practice, right? Okay. So really, really powerful exercise to make sure that you can do that in the progressions in all keys . And then when you're practicing along with the backing track, you can fluidly explore the different inversions with this arpeggio shape. So, for example, we're going first course. I haven't a number of options here, right? So we're on the next courtesy. The principle of voice leading means we go to the nearest note basically as much as possible with minimal movement. So I can do either of these. So if I go to the EU would sound like right, and then I'd be starting off a first inversion C major court, and then we're on the d minor. So my little fingers ready to go down group position. But if I did the other one right, I might have to kind of think about my fingering, See these endless options and this is just something to play around with. The goal is to keep moving your arms down. If you have the clusters like I did, that cold is just keep playing And if this is way too fast for you, they just go down to court. - So everything that we've just covered all of those points there, there's those core ideas. Practice them in both hands pretty much separately, and they can together. That'd be amazing, doing arpeggios like etcetera, etcetera. And then what you can do is you can start combining them together or improvising over the top. That's another one. So with improvising, it would be like, you know, you're going right So that's a improvising over the top. Or you could combine arpeggio patterns, right? So one that you could do would be like, Let's let's keep this going on the left so kind of are extended one on. Then let's have kind of something like that going downwards in the right hand, that's more of a broken chord shape. So now I was just doing kind of like a pedal path in there, which just happened to just kind of repeat over and over again, which is effective, but you could explore actually playing the court itself. So practice on this, you get the idea so all about combinations, guys, really, really powerful stuff. Remember the idea is to take the principles here. Andi, turn them into your own things. So an example off something from my reptile that I use quite a lot is like a broken court. But in the right hand, what I'll do, I'll come in and I'll place an interlocking notes, which are the kind of ninth on the 11th of that court on When you do it quite fast, actually. Sounds quite interesting, right? That's what it's based on. But then inside of it, you know, you expanded upon it way you do. Let's about stuff, right? And the beautiful thing is that if you expand this with melody inside of it, So you like another example of combining these altogether might be using the time progression, right? So we got simple six in our left hand outlining the melody notes right and left hand were using that pattern that we looked at so right, and you could just obviously great variation, just intensive dynamics. You have to change the arrangement, but then you could start bringing in kind of some broken court type stuff. I'm just playing lots of different options there. That's the kind of just one example 36. Broken Chord & Arp Pt 2: so we've looked at some interesting patterns so far, but we haven't covered the standard arpeggio pattern like the exact arpeggio pattern we've looked at things that are a bit like, you know, like this. If we looked at the exact arpeggio on E flat major, it would sound like this on then if we were to go to other courts like The Progression Way . So it sounds a lot like a scale. It's not particularly musical, but as a core pattern for you to build stuff from, it is essential. So we've been looking at broken courts and looking at arpeggios on the core. Definition, as I've said, is that this crossover between the hands right, you've got broken chords or in one position on arpeggios, you pivot. And this is something that we want to practice quite specifically because it's actually very hard. If you haven't done much of it before, it's just awkward, doesn't feel good, and I really encourage you to take this particular one. The arpeggio practice with care because a lot of people find themselves getting very frustrated. I definitely did when I was practicing arpeggios first, so we look a simple C major chord, right? Instead of playing it like that. What going to do is when you're doing finger 123 And that's actually quite stretch already . You just hold that position, you'll you'll feel a tiny bit of discomfort, right? Not bad Discomfort just kind of knew discomfort on when we do 123 so that we have the opportunity. Then pivot with the thumb which comes underneath and goes onto the top. See that right on you just repeat it again. And then on the way back down, you're just doing the opposite, right? Okay. A lot of thes arpeggios will have kind of different finger rings, and you can just look those up online or if it's a black one to start, you won't probably be starting your finger. You'll be doing your one of your other fingers. Explore these first in isolation just one chord at a time if you haven't done them before because that will be quite tricky. And that is a great exercise to be doing in your practice, just like practicing scales as well. But now we're talking about kind of the AARP education practice. We're gonna put it inside of a progression, right. So let's take it in d minor on the I 90 progression. So you see what's going on that I'm playing the up a J two actives and then I'm changing the cord and doing another. Being able to do this on a low chords in all keys is a really, really powerful exercise, particularly for the left hand. But you also want to practice this in the right you wanted then start exploring in the different inversions because all of these videos that we just played then were in route position, right. So I was going room to stop. We're always playing the roots on the beginning beat, right? But actually, you can start up, heard you in an inversion. So second, right, So you wanna be able to get to that in all kids. So if we take the Iannone progression in first inversion, uh or in for and then in second version, well, that one needs in practice, right? Okay. So really, really powerful exercise to make sure that you can do that in the progressions in all keys and then when you're practicing along with the backing track, you can fluidly explore the different inversions with this arpeggio shape. So, for example, we're going first course. I haven't a number of options here, right? So we're on the next courtesy. The principle of voice leading means we go to the nearest note, basically as much as possible with minimal movement so I can do either of these. So if I go to the EU would sound like right and then I'd be starting off a first inversion , see major court, and then we're on the D minor. So my little fingers ready to go down group position. But if I did the other one right, I might have to kind of think about my fingering. You see these endless options, and this is just something to play around with. The goal is to keep moving your arms down. If you have the clusters like I did, that cold is just keep playing on. If this is way too fast for you, they just go down to court. - So everything that we've just covered all of those points there. There's those core ideas. Practice them in both hands pretty much separately, and they can together. That'd be amazing doing arpeggios like it's that etcetera and then what you can do is you can start combining them together or improvising over the top. That's another one. So with improvising, it would be like, you know you're going right. So that's a improvising over the top. Or you could combine arpeggio patterns, right? So one that you could do would be like, Let's let's keep this going on the left so kind of are extended one on. Then let's have kind of something like that going downwards in the right hand, that's more of a broken chord shape. So now I was just doing kind of like a pedal path in there, which just happened to just kind of repeat over and over again, which is effective, but you could explore actually playing the court itself. So practice on this. You get the idea. So all about combinations, guys, really, really powerful stuff. Remember, the idea is to take the principles here. Andi, turn them into your own things. So an example off something from my reptile that I use quite a lot is like a broken chord, but in the right hand, what I'll do, I'll come in and I'll place an interlocking notes, which are the kind of ninth on the 11th of that court on When you do it quite fast, actually sounds quite interesting, right? That's what it's based on. But then inside of it, you know, you expanded upon it way you do. Let's about stuff, right? And the beautiful thing is that if you expand this with melody inside of it, So you like another example of combining these altogether might be using the time progression, right? So we got simple six in our left hand outlining the melody notes right and left hand were using that pattern that we looked at so right, and you could just obviously great variation, just intensive dynamics. You have to change the arrangement, but then you could start bringing in kind of some broken court type stuff. I'm just playing lots of different options there. That's the kind of just one example 37. Alternating: So this is the alternating court pattern where you take a cord and you break it up. But you don't break it up in the way that we break up a Birkin chord, which is one note at a time. What we do with the alternating quarters, we take two notes on, then the other two notes when we play them concurrently. So here I put the roots and 5th 1st and then I put the third on route at the top creates a really lovely pattern, and, of course you can do it in all of the inversions. His first inversion right Here's my full chord, voicing his first inversion D minor and I Just Go and beautiful, beautiful, beautiful pattern used a lot in your intestines music and I have a lovely antics, and if you ever seen the film anally, it's used a lot in that type of piano playing. Now what's beautiful about this is it can be used as kind of a simply as an accompaniment pattern, the left hand right, or you can use it as an accompaniment pattern on top of an existing accompaniment pattern. So let's take that like this. So there's a trustee left hand, which I use the law. What time? That right where you could dio the way. The idea that right to a complimentary patterns that appreciated one here and then alternating court. Beautiful, beautiful thing. So the first practices to be able to play that pattern in all inversions reposition because this is a four note, a compliment pattern because of just the very nature do that Elin versions of those courts minus a swell as majors. Just a single courts. Because what you'll find is that it's really, really kind of stretchy for the hand, and this will take you a long time to get used to. But that's what this course is about giving you practice material to practice for a long time. Don't try and start. I wouldn't. Well, I wouldn't try and start. Yeah, unless you're very good at staying relaxed, playing cool progressions. You can kind of explore it. Yeah, but I would say Just get used to playing one called patents and reset your hand every now and again. You see me do this on camera? Quite a lot. You know, relax those tendons because they'll get really stressed in this one and then hopefully once you're good at that. What you can come back and start doing is taking that through chord progressions. Right? So let's take it through the B flat sort of demon Einaudi and what you don't want to do because essentially, you don't wanna do that, right? Parallel voicing. You don't want todo. It sounds OK, but I'm not too keen on that. So I'd prefer to do something like so there I was in first position on the first chord root position on the second cord and second position on the third court, right? And it creates a kind of nice melded thing where everything fits together. This is really good pattern to use as kind of a right handed compliment pattern or a left handed compliment pattern. And you know the drill by now. Guys, take this through different aggressions in all keys and start expanding in your practice because bear in mind, you can you can do a ton of stuff with this like so that's, like kind of a B flat major corporate ever adopted of change the voicings instead of B flat major. It's kind of ignoring the root and you could think of. This is a lot of things right, but I'm thinking that it's a kind of nice, indie folk kind of peace there rather than a kind of which was like a lot more classical. If you change the voicing on, then if you, you know, if you were doing something, let's try it with some hip hop stuff. So what's is not exactly the exact inversions that we're doing there? You could do something like, essentially, I'm taking back cord there, which is like 1/7 chord with 1/11 in there as well, and I'm doing the alternating cord, and I'm just doing it in a slightly funky way. 38. Comping: So now that you've covered ruthless voicings and inversions, Obviously, Andi, we've had a look at stride, and that's kind of the way I want to go back to something that might seem a bit simpler but is still really, really valuable and can be a lot more sophisticated than you might think. And that's comping. So comping is a word that's used in the jazz tradition, and it's probably just short for a compliment. But comping is just a simple way of saying you kind of filling in stuff, but it's not quite the same when you say the word accompaniment accompaniment can be quite in depth right, that could be a huge amount of thing. Accompaniment can be quite forward, and front and center people can notice it, whereas comping is meant to be sort of in the background and just filling in the harmony. I wouldn't say apologetically, but kind of like really under the radar, but what it does is it gives a huge amount of harmony and death to the peace. What I love doing when I'm listening to a piece of music or production is I love listening to the bits in the arrangement that no one's probably noticing. But if they weren't there, the arrangement would just fall apart and wouldn't work often. If you have like a piano in the background or if you have something like a Rhodes piano, you hardly ever hear that inside of a piece of music, because roads is. Actually, if I put that on like a road sound, see, that's so like unassuming in the background, right? If you had a whole band playing over the top of that, you wouldn't notice the harmony that's going on there. You just sort of feel it on. This kind of comping is a really important thing. So let me show you what I mean in a couple of genres, in a kind of like the rock pop genre on. Then we could do it in jazz as well. - If you imagine that this music playing over the top of this right there's a whole other arrangement on its own, that's just kind of like whatever, right? But that is a great thing to be doing behind the things that a friend incentive, a singer, the guitar, you know, the violins, whatever it is that you want people to notice this is gonna fill stuff out and you've got the base taking care of right? So we're taking this idea of kind of ruthless, a bit of extensions, certainly Inversions on were just filling out the harmony in a nice way. So let's kind of analyze what we're doing there. So we were just doing the I and Addie progression in D Minor writes a B flat major C major d minor, right? And I was doing stuff that was kind of like this. So So that's a kind of a nice, slightly open position voicing of B flat major in second inversion, right? We just listen to that again. I'll play from the start, Okay? It's a nice, unapologetic sorry. A new, intrusive sound. If I was to start like, uh, that's a bit more bold, right? Let's just try it one more time, right? It just kind of comes out at you too much. It's like saying I'm accord right. Whereas if you do something like that, what? Maybe you had some extensions. Let's try it with Atlas. Instead of going up to the third, we'll just let the ninth right, so kind of like a suspension court. Okay, I'm just doing some nice voice leading and some pedal notes on. I can't fully explain what I'm doing here. It's not totally thought out in terms of harmony, but I've got the basic idea of the chord in here, and then I'm sort of just letting my fingers play around in the scale. So we started off there and I started kind of doing stuff like this. And then we go to the C major chord, and I certainly wasn't playing a chord that was very see majorly over it. I was kind of more playing an F chord with some other notes. So this comping idea is is to feel out the inner part of the music you got base, you got melody front and center on. Then what you're doing is you're adding this richness inside of it, so that's the rhythm of a kind of like rock pop, kind of in the sort of thing, whatever. But if we're to do is like blues, perhaps it would feel a little bit different. So if I take top of blues in C major, let's try that. You see, I've got the ruthless voicings that we're doing earlier, so it can be a lot more rhythmical than what was doing there. So the thing that was front and center there for me because I'm imagining a jazz trio like a rhythm section, bass, drums and piano. The goal of that rhythm section is to give a really nice, groovy kind of rhythm, and the piano there is doing these kind of stabs, I think, that sort of thing to fill out the rhythm section. Socom, Pynchon go from something like that all the way down to what we know. Sorry all the way across to what we did just a second ago with rock pop thing, which is this kind of background filling out the home anything so so playing around with the idea of camping doesn't just help you arrange for kind of keyboard based instruments. It also helps you think about other instruments, right, so background comping could work for a horn section. If we go back to that blues thing, you could do something like for our online right? So there's this plenty of things that can come across if we were going back to that rock pop anything that we're doing that could be like a guitar based thing, you know, an acoustic guitar based thing. Or it could be any other incidents, some simple something like that. You could be, like, just thinking arpeggio hated since, uh, you know some interesting stuff that fills out the harmony that isn't necessarily connected to, you know, like a particular accompaniment style or whatever. So use this company idea to really free up the middle part of your arrangements make you kind of gets creative as possible about finding these new ideas for filling out the harmony in interesting ways. 39. Stride: So the next company pattern that we're gonna be going into its stride Piano Stride piano is really a genre in itself on its something that you could do an entire course on study for years. So we're not gonna be going into the genre here. We're gonna introduce the basic idea so that you can kind of start seeing that in the music or things that you're transcribing and also use it in your own ways in different groups. So the basic idea is that you play a bass note down at the bottom here doesn't necessarily need to be the root of the cord, but then you complete that Call it up at the top. So it's kind of like doing the two hands at ones. But you do it and you split it up. So instead of going like this, you go okay, and then you move to different courts. So, over blues, it would be like, see, on the ruthless voicings that we've looked at so far really important here because actually , it's quite nice to know, double up on the route when you play that chord in the middle right, and the strides thing that just goes Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb. That's the thing that you hear a lot, but you don't necessarily need to follow that rhythm. Obviously, as we've said, you take all of these patterns that were covering this course and then you turn them into your own. So the best way to start practicing stride piano is actually not by playing both of them at the same time, right? What we want to start getting used to is playing one note and then doing something else with this same hand. Okay, and actually, the best thing to do is to tap your knee. So we go. 12 34 and you don't have to do with your little finger. You could do one of the other fingers. Usually people do the little finger because it's the furthest one. That way it makes total sense rather than to get like that. All right, you know, it's a bit weird, so it's also good practice to get used to using the little finger so you could use a little and fourth your fifth and four fingers. So you're going tap, and then whatever your chord progression is, you then go to the basement. So we're doing from what blues here. So we do for those four bars of those and then Ugo 4 to 412 around for 1 to 4123123412341 Teoh And you get the idea. Okay. And then you swap around. Right? So we've practiced the one and the three. The ones, right. The one three, the on beats basically. And now we want to practice the kind of the weaker beats of the bar. So we dio one two are confused. That one to play the cord. Yeah, So instead of going 1234 we go. One, 23 full. 131234 2312 And the reason we're doing this off the piano thing right is actually to break up this kind of practice, because doing this first of all, can be a bit overwhelming. You're going around a simple progression, even right, because you're having to think about two things in the left hand and, you know, God forbid, if you do anything, you're right. How important you start doing this, it gets a bit tricky. Okay? so that's the best way to break it up and then you can start putting it together. Now, don't be surprised in the beginning, when you start doing this, that it's gonna be really tricky. It takes a very long time to start learning stride piano. But this simple, bluesy style off stride piano is a really great thing to be putting in your practice like these kind of seeds of ideas, these fundamental ideas and then in Come out and you're playing in a number of kind of Are they genres? Let's have a look at some examples. So this is just a few small examples with Strider compliment pattern using kind of different groups, And this gives you hopefully a sense of just how powerful and versatile it is when you take one of these standard accompaniment patterns and then add groove to it, OK, and this is something that we will be looking at the final part of this section off. We kind of covered a little bit a little bit of ah rhythm. So for now, though, practice your your stride piano in really, really simple core progressions, I would suggest 12 bar blues as well It's a really straightforward one, and you can kind of get that kind of standard textbook bluesy sound on. Just get your right, your left hand working around piano with this kind of this. Move it this movement, this stride movement. 40. Bass Lines: So the beginning of this section of the course, we spoke briefly about group and how important it is to always be thinking about groove when you're writing something just like you would right into harmony. You also right into a kind of sense of group. And that is particularly true with these accompaniment patterns. Because what I've been showing you here are the simple principles, simple patterns of a compliment patterns that you can then apply in different genres. I've been playing him in a very kind of textbook way, but you can adapt them for particular genres and whatever you're in, right. So if you get comfortable with them in a kind of simple genre like we've been doing or no genre, when you're next writing something, can you try and apply on accompaniment pan? You'll naturally or hopefully be able to really play that in the style that you're writing in? Okay on with baselines. This is also true. Okay, Baseline on its own like a simple walking base, which is what we're gonna be studying here, right? So that's kind of like a really textbook, jazzy, simple right? It does sound particularly textbook like right, but It's a great way to practice because it forces your fingers to get to know the sound. Sorry, the harmony notes and be able to move around freely. And then later on, if you're doing something more funky, right, your fingers know where the harmony notes are. Okay, so this is what we're gonna be doing. We're gonna be doing something called the walking bass buildup. Okay, so the walking bass buildup goes like this, that you take a chord progression. I'm just going back to pianos that we can hear it a little bit better. Let's take a really simple progression. Let's take time, Okay? And we're not trying to write music, Remember, we're trying to practice here on will take the time aggression in a minor. Uh, okay. On our baseline is going to start like this. 12341234123412 Really, really simple. Okay, Andi, you then want practice? National keys, obviously. So you get to know aggression, and then you start building up the third right? 12 one to third. 1/3. 1 2/3 Yeah. Okay. And then you build in the 5th 1235 Or you could go. 1235 Whatever rhythm that you want, you know, you have to have to work out, okay? And so you've built up the whole cord there. But we've been doing it upwards each time, which is a bit obvious. So then you can start playing around and moving stuff. So let's go back to the room and third, then. Right? So you're still getting to know rooting. Third, you don't have to go route first, then third. You could do third and then route so you could go. So that baseline was the third of a minor, and then the root of a minor and then the third of e minor on the route of the minor. Okay, that e minor then g major on d minor. Okay. And that would work if you had cords over the top. Right? Okay. And so that baseline starting to kind of fill out the harmony in a slightly different feeling, it gives us that nice inversion quality. Okay, so that's it in a kind of basic kind of simple genre. But I would really recommend that you do this with blues because the blues progression is really, really lends itself to the walking bass. And you can explore things like Chromatis ism. Andi, uh, and just get get hang of moving around with that kind of rhythm. Okay, so that's what we're gonna go over now because there's so many benefits that come from living, walking bass line. Okay, so we do it and see. See, Major? Right? So I first called a seed on its seventh on That allows us then as well by doing the blues, right. What that allows us to do is work on seventh as well, rather than just having three notes toe work with the the root position. Triads, we have 1/7 chord. Okay? And if you want to do extensions as well, so our goal is to be playing the court and go through all coordinates, right? This is the first thing to dio, and then okay. And then you could try those in first inversion. Yeah, on. Then you try that in other keys as well. And then what we want to do is we want to draw on our old friend that we've looked at before, which is this wondering hand. Next size or flowing hands. So right. The beginning, I think. What? Certainly, at the beginning of my first course music composition of the piano, that one we spoke a lot about just getting comfortable moving around the piano with the two principles of fingering, which is you know, you pivot over the the thumb pivots under the fingers on the fingers, pivot over the thumb, and you never pivot on the fifth finger. Those of the cut to rules on with those you can do anything, Really? One note at a time when the piano. So you want to take that and but then apply inside of harmony. And your goal is to move around the cords in whatever way that you want. Okay, so we're gonna start with C dominant seventh chords. So I went third root 5th 7th and now we're gonna go to court four on This is if we're thinking about our voice leading, we're going to go down to the third of court for okay, Let's just do that again. So Okay, let's just do that again. I compromised. I'll do exactly the same notes. In fact, I won't. I can't remember. But roughly the same then we're on the third route. 5th 7th then that seventh on the next court. When we go back to court, one becomes third root. 5th 7th Okay. So altogether, if you get kind of good at this, Sorry. Just try again. Okay, So that's the basic idea of walking bass line to move up and down through the harmony and nicely pivot to the next court whenever you're finding those opportunities. And you saw I did a couple of things like chromatic stuff there, Right? You can throw those things in in there as well. So I'm going route 3rd 5th and I want to end up on this f here. So instead of going route 3rd 5th 7th and then a big jump down to the fourth to the to the root of the next court, I dio sly down into that court on that also works there as well. Okay, sick romanticism. You can explore. So practicing this in all keys on the simple blues And then if you're feeling particularly advanced, doing jazz blues as well is going to give you amazing breath of practice. To really start letting your left hand fly and explore the harmony of each court on. Then next time you're trying to come up with a baseline, whatever genre it's in, your left hand is gonna be like, Hey, I know chords. I know how to move around, right? And it's just gonna be like, you know, whatever the groove is, you know? Yeah, it's just gonna be able to move around a lot easier because it will see the cords. And it will all come from your practice of the walking bass buildup in a kind of standard blues progression. 41. Grooves & Loops: so welcome to the rhythm section of this course. This is a fairly short but concise section where we're gonna be looking at some of the fundamental concepts inside of rhythmic writing or ranging music with rhythm. If you arrange a write music without context, off groove or rhythm, then kind of doesn't make sense. It's a bit like harmony in some ways. So we're gonna be looking at some fundamental concepts, and I'm gonna start with the kind of easiest concept of them all. That's probably obvious to you, but it is worth reminding yourself about which is groove If you don't write music into a certain group. If you haven't got this kind of background idea of what the groove is that you're writing into, things don't really make sense. Now when I say groove, you might think of, like, groovy music or like funk, soul and things like that. I don't mean it like that. I mean it way, way bigger than that. I mean it in the context of like, if you have any piece of music, you could kind of deconstruct and decode the fundamental grooves that you're hearing in that music on, then translate that to another piece could be classical film. Anything right doesn't have to feel groovy and like something that you would dance day and the best place to start with this if you haven't kind of looked at this before, the best place to get inspiration and way too right into group because I really do mean that sentence writing into a group is by writing along or using loops as inspiration. Now there are many places online, which I'll mention in this video where you can get loops so you can purchase loops. People have performed, created, produced loops that you can download and then kind of use in your writing and i some people to use those loops actually in their work. And I'm not necessarily talking about that here. What I'm talking about is actually having them was a starting point for your practice and also for those moments where you're like, I don't know what to write, what should I write? And then you kind of improvised or sort of jam along to one of these loops, and then you kind of get a sense of where your creativity is wanting to go. So if we look here. This is my kind of basic loop library. It's just a folder on my desktop. But actually, there was something that we used earlier on in the course, which is a piece of software called Farago. And if I just open that up here, you'll see that what I've done is I've pulled some of these loops into a kind of a couple of different sets that I have. Andi, there's a couple of things you can do with this one. It's really great for just sort of just previewing right and you can just loot these, you just leave them on right? So sometimes I just sort of play one of these in their head of that the piano. It's a great way to start either a practice routine or a writing session. Or if you're building up a certain kind of compositional idea, you could draw in a number of loops in here for inspiration and say, OK, this is what I'm basing my composition off. It's up to you. But there's one really cool thing that I love about farrago and again. Unfortunately, you can only do this. You can only use this piece of software. If it's on a Mac and that is using the drones that have included in this course, that's kind of your harmonic center, right? The keystones, right. If I go over to that section and I say OK, all right. I want to practice in B flat. So I hit that. Get that going, Make sure the volumes up on. Then I go to another place, right? And then I'm like, OK, I'm gonna play in B flat. Was that the key that we did hear? B flat? Andi. Then I'm gonna play along to this beat. Or maybe this one, is that right? And then I could just head over to a piano and jam along to this on. Then, if I'm kind of not liking that groove, I could be like, OK, the annoying thing about Farago is that you can't easily change tempo here. So in that case, if you don't want to use this and also if you have a PC than what you could do is just to use your workstation and do exactly the same thing, right? You could have some way in your workstation. Let me just turn off this drone. You can have something in your work station like this where you have basically a number of drum tracks. These could be midi. They could be audio and they could be lined up in your session. And then you could sort of trigger different things. So you could sort of unm you one of your drones. Maybe from this course, maybe one that you've made And then just let that go on Fraser's, then trigger one of your loops and then right along to that, and you could have this one session file, which is like your main loop library. And this ties back into this idea that we spoke about before. Which is this this pattern library idea that this could be another place, another library where you draw inspiration from and build up over time, so kind of really useful. The final thing that I wanted to mention is something called superior Drama on. There are a number of different other pieces software that you can get for this. This was pretty expensive. They have another one which is called easy Drummer. I think on its by a company called Tune Track and links will be in this video or below or something like that. They are really, really amazing company on this particular piece of software, easy drummer or superior drumming. What I've got here is incredible on the concept behind it is that they have this immense loop library but the loop library of different grooves, like right across these different genres. Right on those loops on audio, they are midi, and when you have groups grooves midi, that means that you can slow down, speed them up, adapt them, change the kind of like underlying group on, then change the instrument that's actually playing a drum kit that's actually playing. So I recommend that you check out tune, track and perhaps easy drummer or even superior drama might be a bit of overkill, to be honest, that last one, unless you really interested in producing stuff, then find some loops online as well. You can use places like the Loop loft. There's many other places. If you just search loops, you're gonna find many, many different things. I'm sure you already know of them and to start practicing and composing along to thes and considering, really how groove helps inspire you and change the way that you write music. What we're gonna be doing in the next videos is gonna be unpacking group from a very kind of, like, technical perspective to help you really deconstruct stuff in future, we're gonna be looking at from the context off drums, right? I know this is a piano arranging course primarily, but drums is really the best context in which to understand the principles of group on. Then apply that to any other instrument. So let's get started with that now. 42. Introduction to Groove (redo!): So here we're starting our introduction to Groove Siri's, and this will be a number of videos covering the basic building components or the building blocks that are specific to groove, not just arrangement but to groove itself. So when people think of group, they tend to think of something that's groovy, or maybe a disco, a beat or something like that. Really, Groove is the thing that underlies everything, and it doesn't have to be something that's associated with, say, a pop or jazz genre. Groove is universal. It's the totality of all rhythmic material on the way that it's received by the listener. It's more than just the beat that the drum gives. In fact, you don't need to have drums in it. You don't even have to have percussion. It could be the groove that sets the actual accompaniment pattern on the guitar or the accompaniment pattern on the piano or whatever. It could be played by an orchestra. Everything has some kind of group. It's the framework that you right into a za composer. You could think of it like the culture of music in other words, that it's the background thing that the listener might not necessarily be consciously aware off and maybe no, even the musicians. But if it's not there or if it's wrong, everything rhythmically will be out and we'll feel wrong. And also, if you change that groove, then the feeling of the entire thing changes as well. So three short, simple examples of maybe grooves that you know off as someone who may be a drummer on someone who may know a little bit about drums is the 1st 1 would be most obvious. One would be shuffle. The next one would be something like four on the floor and perhaps jazz swing on. What we could do for this course is start giving you the kind of theory behind each of these standard groove types for kits on, we could go through tons of things. I've just thrown in a number of different top level grooves here that I thought off the top of my head, but really, this kind of would be an endless exercise. What I wouldn't be doing is really teaching you how to think about groove, how to really construct and analyse group, because really, where you want to be at the end of this course is somewhere way. You can listen to any style of music and immediately unpack in your mind or actually on paper or in your d a w what it is that makes that music sound the way it does in other words, how it's arranged. What are the components that make it sound like that type of genre? So we're gonna go through the component building blocks of groove, which will empower you to analyze grooves yourself and therefore start creating your own from the stars that you love. So in front of you, here are the components. Just as an introduction, we're going to go over these each in turn in this Siri's. 43. Tempo + Time: So let's start first with tempo. Tempo is obviously pretty straightforward to most of you. If you start with a beat that's quite slow on, then speed it up. What you actually end up with is something that not only is obviously faster but really does feel quite different, and eventually with other instruments, can create and elicit a different emotional reaction. And if you speed it up even more, it's still very different. The next one is time signature. Now this isn't a music theory course, so we can't talk too much about the actual construction of time, signatures and all of that stuff. But suffice it to say you can take a group that has a certain character and push it through a number of different time signatures whilst retaining the original feeling off that group . Let's have a listen to that 44. Strong & Weak: the next component that's really vital when we're analyzing beat structures is strong and weak beats. Let's take an example, be a very simple 44 beat by nature of a groove. Being in four for what we feel as the listener is the strength of beat one every four beats . If that wasn't there, we'd lose sense of where the beginning of each bar is. So beat one is naturally very strong and should always really be emphasized, not overly emphasised, but a little bit inside of time. Signatures like for For you can also emphasize other beats. For example, if we emphasize one very strongly and three slightly strongly, we get something like this. But if we instead emphasize beats two and four, we get a different field. That's a look at strong and weak. Be emphasis inside of four for Let's have a look at it now in 34 It's a very mind that these obviously fairly simple beats going on so that you can really understand the theory behind everything. But any beat has this kind of structure going on behind it, as we'll see later when we analyze stuff and you'll see, particularly when you analyze your stuff that you're interested in. Let's look at a beat in 54 now 54 is an interesting one. You could just emphasize the first beat of everybody, and that would be absolutely fine. But typically what people tend to do is to break the bar into two chunks, either 12345 So a group of two and then a group of three or a 12345 so a group of three and then a group of two. Let's have a listen to each of those in a simple beat, so that's strong and weak beats fairly rudimentary and obvious for most of you. But I wanted to make sure that we went over this as a principle on a concept. So even if it's obvious to you when you realize it when you hear about it that you are clear that it is one of those components that combined with other ones when you put it into a full arrangement, actually really forms the backbone off what groove is 45. Subdivision: the next component of groove that we're going to look at in this section is Subdivision. If we take a simple time signature like 44 and build it right back up again, you'll see that the whole structure off a time signature like 44 is built around this idea off dividing a bar and then dividing what you've divided over and over again. Let's start with a simple one note per bar beat. Now let's divide that in half and added in a note halfway through. Now let's divide the bar. No inter tube it into four and you can see that we've got these numbers up at the top here . We started with one otherwise known as a whole note. Now we have 1/2 note, and now we have quarter notes being at it. Let's divide those in half again. Well, subdivide them and then we get eighths. If we divide those, we get 16th. And if we divide those, we get 32nd notes. So if we go back to this one where we're emphasizing the quarter notes, what you can see is that we have each beat represented in the high hat there and This is a standard beat that you've heard many, many times before, and what it's doing is it's emphasizing the beats of the bar. We consider a bit of 44 toe have four beats in it, obviously, 1234 But if we start dividing each of those beats into two and then into four and then in tow eight. What you start getting is much more complex subdivisions and obviously heard in this way this very, very simplistic way where I just make the high hat play the subdivisions. It's not that interesting, but if you start building beats around those subdivisions not necessarily on every single subdivision like I did here you start to open up the entire world of subdivision on what actually starts constructing a beat. Let's look at something in eighths, so here's a standard beat where the high hat is just on the eighths. But what I'm starting to do, you can hear is that on the bass drum on the kick, we're starting to utilize those eighths to add a bit more interest. Now let's do it with 16. You can see here that we've opened up the 16th subdivision and were able to emphasize that we'll use that on the kick. So this is a really simple beat on DSO. Is this one as well? It's just trial and error on. I'm just messing around, really, just to show you the different options. So let's listen to 32nd notes now. So what you'll hear in this one is that we've got some rolls going on in the high hat on. Then also, towards the end, the snare. It's quite hard to construct a groove around 32nd notes consistently without, it's starting to feel like double time. If you're not sure what double time is done where we were about to cover that in a second, let's just have a quick listen to it, and you'll get a sense that, really the upper subdivisions of 30 seconds and then 64th are much more about grace notes and kind of embellishment off a group rather than being theatrical construction off the feeling of the group. So now let's talk about simple time and compound time. Simple time is really the idea off taking what we've just done where we take a beat on. We subdivide each beat into two into four into a in 16. So what we're doing there is We're doing multiples of two each time, so let's have a listen to that now. Now let's change our subdivision from not a simple time where it's a multiple of two, but three. So now you can see in the diagram above that we've got each beat. Divide into three subdivisions. Let's have a listen to that very simple beat. Let's have a listen now to a slightly better constructed beat. With that same subdivision you can hear it adds a completely different sense of the groove . So when you start creating groups, you want to think yourself a my in simple time or compound time on my subdivisions based on a multiple of to or a multiple off. Three. Let's look now at halftime and double time. It's a very simple concept, which I'll show you first on a diagram, and then we'll look at in a session. So let's say we had a tempo and time signature established with 44 reasonably fast temper on. Then we double that. So what you see above there is the same structure but doubled. So for every two bars at the bottom. We have four up at the top for every four bars. At the bottom. We have eight at the top, and this is something that gets done in pieces to increase the excitement. You're not necessarily increasing the tempo. You're sort of adding this ghost layer in the groove above things to make it more exciting . You immediately double the feeling off the tempo without changing the temper. So the opposite of that would be halftime. We take that same time signature of four for and we halftime it. What we've got now is two bars on the bottom for every four on the top. So we've actually halved the whole thing. Here's an example of this in a session. Here's the original idea in the middle region on that we're gonna do is we're gonna go back to the beginning. We're gonna listen to it a halftime first, then normal time and then double time. And all the while the tempo will stay at 110 beats per minute. It won't speed up, but the feeling will change each time 46. Swing: Let's look at swing now. Swing can be done in eighths or 16th but we're just gonna look at eighths at the moment. Let's look at this simple beat here, where we take a 44 time signature on. We divide it into eighths, so each beat has beat inside of it, subdivided once. Now, if we take each of those subdivisions I e. The red lines, the things that are off each beat on, we move that ever so slightly to the right forward. In time, we get a very supple sense of swing. And if we keep taking those subdivisions and moving them further to the right, what's the red lines moved to the right? We get stronger and stronger without sense of swing. And if we go any further than this, we end up actually hitting 16th notes because you can see that whilst we're on that last swing swing D very, very strong swing. We could push that a tiny bit further, but we're very close to actually hitting 16th notes. Where were simply emphasizing the 4th 16th off every beat. Now, don't worry if some of that has gone over your head, that's completely fine. you can always reach out to me for a bit of extra support on the theory of this, or there are plenty of other courses online that will talk you through the actual rhythmic theory of things. Don't worry too much. All you really need to do if you're someone who works with the D. A. W. Is to go in and work with the grid former the piano roll that you saw there in all those last pictures and start messing around with the grid, thinking about subdivisions and how you place things. 47. Imperfection: so another aspect of imperfection which I really personally like to play with, is that of behind the beat or in front of the beat. Now it's very, very different to changing the tempo, speeding up or slowing down. And sometimes people get confused. The tempo stays exactly the same. But then certain parts of your arrangement that are kind of affecting your groove get moved ever so slightly before where they would be if they were perfectly quanta ized or ever so slightly behind with their contest. And that creates this certain feeling. Sometimes it's a pushing feeling if the notes are before the beat, and sometimes it's a pulling laid back feeling if they're behind the be. So let me explain what I mean. I've got three regions here, the original beat, which is fully Qantas. So everything's matching up perfectly to the grid, so kind of not necessarily doesn't feel massively computerized, but you can tell it's perfectly on time. Then I have this next region where the high, how is relatively stable, but it's got a bit of human error in it, tiny bit on, then the kick and the snare are really falling behind the beat a little bit, so it's really behind the beat sort of vibe. And then in this final region here we've got, if I can find it, we've got the kick and snare coming really quite far before the beat each time on de every other snare hit also pushes head of the beat so that everything's coming just that little bit quicker. It's a very subtle effect, but combined with everything else that you might orchestrate or arrange with it, it's a really powerful tool to get the whole of your arrangement pushing or pulling. Let's have a listen. 48. Grace Notes & Ghost Notes: So Grace notes and ghost notes are fairly simple things, so we'll go through them quite quickly in this first example here. What I have is a beat with one of the parts muted initially, and it's just ever so slightly before the main snare hit and you'll see me mute it and then unmet it and you can hear the difference. And that's essentially what a grace note is. It's a tiny note just before another note, usually the same note in drumming. This is known as kind of a flam, but it applies to all instruments, so I'm actually gonna call it a Grace note for now. And actually, if you remember from previous video early on in this group components course, when we're looking at subdivisions, I said this. Really. The upper subdivisions of 30 seconds and then 64th are much more about grace notes and kind of embellishment off a group rather than being the actual construction off the feeling of the group. So a ghost note is really a quiet note. It's a quiet or low velocity note that's inside of an original kind of track piece part, whatever that still add something but isn't perhaps heard a little bit more unconsciously, usually because it's a lot quieter. So here you'll see me mute and then a Knute snare part, which adds ghost notes into the original group, and you can see that it really does add something good to the grief. 49. Cross Rhythms: so cross rhythms can be a little bit confusing, especially if you've never looked at them before. This video won't be an entirely comprehensive explanation of what they are, because it's not necessarily a music theory course. So I would advise you if you have no idea what I'm talking about, to search elsewhere on YouTube for explanations as to what cross rhythms and poly rhythms are. Essentially, However, what we have is a main pulse here is represented in the kick in for for playing on every beat. And then we have a competing pulse represented another instrument here on the rim shot off the snare on. What you can see is that this is on every single beat in the kick on, then every two beats. So from here to here we have three hits equally spaced on the rim shot. Let's have a listen to that. So if you were to just listen to the kick initially, you your mind is connecting very clearly with the feeling of 44 or you know this equally spaced 248 kind of beat. But then, if we put this over the top your mind, it's ever so slightly confused by the kind of triplet feeling inside and with these both together. What you get is actually a feeling of what's called a composite rhythm rather than you necessarily feeling one of them or the other. You get this interplay between both of them, but there is still a primary time signature, and we are in for four. So if we emphasize the 16th notes off that time signature as well and keep exactly what we had on the bottom there but just bring the high hair in playing on 16th you get really nice into play on a deeper level with the rhythms and the cross rhythms. Now it's been Vanek academic exercise. You wouldn't necessarily create a beat that's like that the whole time. But these are the principles in this region here. I'm just showing you kind of said that when we start analyzing the beats further on, it makes a bit more sense. So that's across rhythm. A genuine cross with them. You can see that this note here is really not aligning with the grid. But if you start to think in 16th notes right, just like we did here, what we can start thinking about is the fact that we can actually just drop out two of thes on two of these and to thes and we end up with this three feeling right? Want? Want want three on this is inside off a ah, an existing 44 time signature, right? So what we have on the top here is a simple 16th rhythm. But then underneath we're emphasizing every 3rd 16th on the snap, and it's matching up perfectly with the grid, and it gives it a slightly different feeling. It's what's called a Hemi. Oh, so that's the other way of thinking about cross rhythms. Another way of thinking about cross rhythms is really harking back to what we were talking about in an earlier lecture with accents. So you keep the 16th but you actually emphasize one of them rather than actually bringing in a part like we did here on every 3rd 16th we actually bring in an accident on the same instrument every 3rd 16 Now, the other thing to remember is that you don't need to keep cross ISMs going on on on and on and on, right? So what you notice in this pattern here if I repeat, it is that actually what's going on here is we have a cross rhythm in the form of a Hemi. Ella going 123! 123! 123! 1231231 123 On. That new one coincides with the new bar, and it means it works quite well. And what's we have this interplay of the kind of hem, your lacrosse rhythm, feeling it matches back up again as soon as we hit the next bar. It creates a really, really nice feel. Cool. So those are the principles. Very, very simple principles behind cross rhythms. Let's look at some actual beats so we can get a sense of what might be going on. So this last cross rhythm in the high hat is quite complex, right? We have a really long rhythm going on here. We can see that these guys, or at least the 1st 1 first five we have sort of five tablet is equally space. Have got five notes and then we have more notes here. Inside of this beats a little bit complex to try and explain now, but essentially it gives us this feeling of speeding up right then the snare hits perfectly on beat three, and then we have some more cross rhythms and it gives us really lovely ending to the phrase . It's quite quirky, but you can still feel that it's actually correct, right? The person is not necessarily just playing badly and moving out of time that there is definitely a cross rhythm going on in there. Let's have a listen to this. Next time I'm gonna turn off the Metro name now. So the main thing that's going on, there's a few things right. We've got a slight kind of humanization and displacement and stuff like that. But the main thing that creates this cross rhythm for me is this triplet feeling in the base. You can see that we've got 1/16 arrest of 1/16 arrest of 1/16 then another 16th rest of 1/16 the rest of the 16th. So we've got this three feeling at the beginning of each bar, which keep creates a really nice fight. Let's have a listen to this next one here, so the ending is clearly across with them. We've got this kind of triplet villa at the end. But the main thing about it is that you don't necessarily need to play every single note off across rhythm because what we've got here in the high hat is the setting up of a cross rhythm. We're expecting to feel Ah, high hat, actually here, right. If I listen to this, we listen to this one more time, right? We're expecting to hear that Third, that that kept that right. But when it's not that it creates this interesting tension from when we moved between this note and then this note we're expecting, as I said, that notes come in there. But when it doesn't, there's a split second where we wait and then we hear the original kind of sink to the actual the grid. Let's have a listen to this next one cross within four. So have a listen to that one more time on DSI. If you can work out, what's going on would be eight of obviously looking here. I'll try and zoom in a little bit more. So what we've got in the high hat is this feeling of a triplet at the beginning and then a resumption to a kind of normal feel in the rest of the bar. We've got a lot displacement in humanization going on here. So if I was to Quantas, those just to make it super clear, that's essentially what's going on there. And it gives you the start of a feeling of compound time, where each beat has three in it, and then it suddenly comes back to this feeling of just normal, simple time. So cross rhythms can actually get quite complex and quite funky and weird. And this is one of those here, so I'll just play this one to finish this section in here. There's a lot of stuff going on there you wouldn't want to much more in your arrangement going on, because the rhythm the groove is really taking center stage with that one. 50. Rhythm Summary: So I hope you guys got a good amount from those introductory lectures to rhythm. My goal in future is to create a kind of dedicated course on this topic, both four kind of arranging purposes, but also for production as well. The idea of making and creating great grooves for many different styles of genres. But for now, I'm just giving you the kind of basic concepts so that you can take those ideas on. Then deconstruct the groups or the piece of music you're listening to rhythmically and then apply those to your own arrangements. So my final goal for you in this section of the course is to take kind of pretty much most of the things we've done so far, with a range with accompaniment, patterns and with voicings. And now combine it with the concepts of rhythm that you've covered and start to create what I call one chord genres. Right. So you take a court often something kind of really simple, like C major. And then you try and perform that chord in a number of different genres. Now, you might do this initially, simply you might try and do classical first and then perhaps something like romantic on. And then perhaps you might listen to something from your library music that you love on trying to emulate that in all cases were totally restricted. We can't write anything outside of that one chord, so we have to focus on the rhythm, their company, mint patterns and the voicings and really trying Teoh express ourselves and say something in that one chord, right? This is a great practice to do. One of the things I like to students is to say, OK, what's your inspiration track? Can you please write me a composition based on one chord? Do not use anything else that's based around or emulating that piece of music that you really love. So I would recommend you to do that to kind of round off this section of the course, right? A piece of music could be kind of 20 seconds long. That's absolutely fine, based around one chord, emulating a genre or two that you really admire. And if you can have some tracks that you're basing this off, then all the better 51. Flowing hands: So before we start this section, of course, where we're looking at melodic patterns and how to get that into your practice and your composing. I want to revisit an exercise that I did in my previous course, and hopefully you've done therefore, which is the flowing hand exercise. And it's a basic warm up routine where you play random notes on the piano, right and you're playing in Ligue Arctic, so you're never coming off the piano. There's never too notes playing anyone time and you're just moving around heavy one, aiming to move up and down the piano in different ways, sometimes of moving in small steps, right? Sometimes I'm moving in large steps on. It's completely random, right? And it's nonmusical now. It would be a little bit more musical if I decided to do it inside of a key. So here I am now, doing inside of C major, right? So if I move my right hand, this is slightly musical. If I play call, it's underneath. But you see the idea. It's kind of random. I'm not composing anything. I'm just letting my fingers move around and you let your fingers move around with two rules , right? Which is that you pivot when you run out of fingers, right? And you bringing some underneath or you bring your fingers over when you hit the thumb like this, thats the first rule. Okay, But you notice that I wasn't pivoting on my fifth finger. And that's the second rule, which is that we never pivot on the fifth finger. Okay, so the two rules are fingers never over fingers. So you use pivots to kind of get to the next thing because you want to avoid doing things like this, right? And then with those pivots, he never pivot on the fifth finger. So you might end up, you know, at the end of a long line, then turning around only to go higher, right doesn't make sense. It does. So that's the flowing hand exercise, in essence. But why I want you to do is not just do small intervals, because in my previous course, that's something that we kind of did. We just did small intervals. Why I want you to explore now is particularly inside of keys, right? So let's do inside of a minor, right? I want you to kind of do the flowing hands Exide the wandering hand exercise eso here I'm doing an interval of a sick right, maybe a seven octaves as well. So what you're building in is thes new shapes. Our hands are usually very used to go in those kind of seconds and thirds intervals, but we want to build in this ability and comfort in the fingers to move. Sorry. Oh, it's just infinitely more interesting when you have a variety of intervals rather than I think across that. Sorry, but you see the idea. It gets a bit boring you want. That's kind of like there's something about that line that's just like it's speaking a lot more than perhaps smaller intervals. So this is an invitation for you to really start doing the flowing hand exercise again. Both ate only so in the chromatic scales. Just a warm up, something I do when I started, you know, because it's like you take away the pressure of having to create good music on, and you just kind of like work on your fingers and how they feel alright and just, you know, in your long cover errors that you're making and you'll do things like that were like, you know, OK, I need to practice that again and then move into a key, right? And you can do it with the Keystone backing tracks as well. There's a perfect things kind of example. You say, Okay, I'm gonna do the flowing hand exercise in G sharp minor right in my left hand because that's kind of awkward rights. And then you be, like, for the track way and you work on some large intervals, right? And then you'll find something that's a bit awkward, Like that little thing is not so strong. So you might just end up practicing that line a few times. Okay? And this just changes every day. Every time you see that under the piano and you try this exercise, you'll find a new area in your fingers and in your musical knowledge in your keys where you'll be like, Oh, this is This is uncomfortable, You know? I need to work on this area. So that's flowing hands. But more advanced 52. Sequences: So, as I've said throughout this course, the whole idea is really that you take patterns and move them to different places. That's the converts. The basic concept of this and by different places, we mean different chords and different keys. Right on. We've had patterns in voicings, accompaniment patterns. We've spoken about rhythm. And now we've got patterns off melody. Right. Okay. On the most basic idea for melodic patterns is that you take a pattern, right? 123 Well, let's do it in a minor. Right? To be really simple forever. So 123 and then you move that pattern up or down. Okay. So I could go. 123123123123123 93. Right. Or I could go down. 123 Okay, on this is remember, a practice material for you, right? This is practice material for you to grow as a composer, right? So if you were to start using that exactly in a composition, it could sound good, but after a while, it sounds boring. Right? Okay, because that pattern is too repetitive, but a little bit of it in your composing is really lovely, right? So if we take that pattern and we kind of base a kind of improvisation composition around it but not do it exactly the same each time, then it's kind of a bit more satisfying. The basic idea really is just That's the sort of thing that will then start coming out in your composing, improvising. But for the practice, you take the idea and you move it up and down the piano. Let's look at another one. Right, So we did there. 123123123123 And remember, when I say 123 I'm not talking. What I'm talking about is from the initial place that you start, it's really about your head. Okay, I know what you're thinking about it. So I'm thinking off this pattern originating from an A. OK, but you could in your mind to be thinking about this pattern originating from, you know, an F. So the key is there for the route? No, underneath your pattern is an F, and therefore you're going three. Shop full. 53 Right. But I wasn't thinking that I was thinking 1231 and therefore I'm moving up. Okay, Hopefully that makes sense. I think in the beginning, if you're making patterns, make sure that your pans always start from a one just because it's going to make it a lot easier for you. But I just wanted to throw that in the essay. You're not confused. So when you take these patterns for the first time round keys, the goal is to find it hard, right? That is the aim. So if we took that pattern that simple into a new key, you know that you perhaps haven't done before so much like F sharp minor, you might be like, no wrong. No. Oh, sorry. Hang on. I mean, I know this one. Okay, so you're having to think about the pattern as well as the key. And this comes back to this principle that I've spoken about a lot, which is you've got to see the key all at once. I quite often do things like that in these lessons. And I say I want view the whole key at once so that you can start playing these patterns over it. And this is what this melodic patterns thing does it not only gets new shapes into your fingers and your melody writing, but it gets you a lot better at seeing the key as a whole. So let's take a key. That might be a bit more tricky and a pattern that it might be a bit more tricky and kind of discuss how you know, some of the things that might come up. So we're gonna take sank in a major. Okay, on, we're going to start instead of on the one I'm gonna think I'm starting on the three. So we're going to go 3451 and then a productive one. So Okay, so that pattern is perhaps a little bit more tricky, because instead of having this night nice, neat sequence that you can go on to 31231 for you. 123123123 You've got these big jumps, so your brain has kind of conceive of a melody line that's a bit bigger and a pattern, and shift that up and down the piano. And again, that's another hurdle you'll get to this point where you're like, Oh, wait, where's the pattern? You'll be like, Oh, hang on. Uh, which no. Is it? And then you'll be confused. But that is good. Okay, So when you find that in your practice, when you find those moments where you're like Ah, this is hard. That's great. Okay, just make sure it's not too hot. Okay? So this is up to you about finding these patterns and, you know, starting from simple things like this, right? And then moving up to things like this in the booth, Okay. And then moving down the piano, Yeah, or good moments like that, you know, have really high standards. When you're playing this, it's it's not enough to just kind of do all the way through. You gotto be very confident with the pattern playing slow so that you can see the future of what you're about to play. One of the main problems with this kind of practice is if you're playing too fast for you and you can't see the future of what you're about to play, maybe one or two nights ahead, then it's not good practice. Yeah, actually, it is much more beneficial to practice like this with a new pattern so that you can really get the feeling of it into your hands on. Actually, you get faster much quicker when you practice much slower. Yeah, this is something. We'll talk about the end of this course. Okay, so that's the basic idea. You take pattern moving through different keys and move it up and down piano, like a sequence. Okay, then the idea is to start taking these patterns on making nice little studies out of them. It's a really short four bar pieces of music that use this melodic pattern and kind of to write something very simple. So we take that one way on. You do. Exactly remember, the idea of this is in a composition. It might be too much repetition. So you could go 34511 then 567 31 writes a slightly different, something simple. That was a nice mistake. Okay, I'm not gonna play around with its too much in front of the camera, cause it would be a kind of boring for you for watching. But, you see, the idea is that you're taking a simple concept and then applying across different chords, but you're varying it slightly, so it sounds a bit more interesting than just a pattern being moved to different places. 53. Pentatonics: so the pentatonic scale is a scale you should absolutely know by now. And I covered in my previous course, so you can watch that there. But I'm gonna want to go into it here because it's ah, it's really something that you should be practicing in your melodic kind of studies. Now there are a number of things that you can do with it. But before we do that, let's just explain what the pentatonic scale is just as a kind of refresher. Okay, so you take a scale, let's take t major on. You take notes. 1235 and six. And you don't play notes full in seven. So you take those out so the whole thing sounds like okay. And it's one of those things that can make really, really satisfying melodies. So that's the major version on the minor version is exactly the same notes. But you just think of the route or the center of gravity is the relative minor beneath. So the relative minor of D is be right. So instead of thinking of this is 1235 and six Now our route is be So we go 13457 Ok, eso for in B minor. Okay, on the blue scale. You know, it is basically the minor pentatonic scale with this note in between. And I covered this in my previous course. If this is all going over your head, don't worry. You can cover it there. Ok, that's the blue scale. Okay, so there are a number of things that you can do with this, right? The first is the wandering hands or the flowing hands exercise where you just say, OK, we're gonna practice in b minor on you. Either put back in track on you're doing a comparable plan in your left hand or, you know, you jam along with people that the idea is to have a long under uninterrupted period with a root note playing underneath so that you can explore this scale and you can just start going like and then you find a moment like that where you stumble and you go, OK? You might not know, but if you're not totally sure, you can just, you know, make sure that you're practicing around the area, really attend to that area where you made the mistake and really try and make that make some kind of a mistake again and then unpack it, you know, and you'll find that. Okay, maybe on you think is going or a finger. Or maybe I'm not thinking ahead enough for you know, you'll find your reason. So the flowing hand exercises, the first things do. So then the next idea is taking sequences what we looked at before on applying them inside of a pentatonic scale. So if we did the 123123 thing and we did it in that be minor pentatonic Ugo or if you I inverted the pattern there to come down but you could go not doing the best fingering there . But that's the other thing about this kind of melodic practices that, you know, there are not doing the best fingering. So let me think about what could be better about it. So So the idea is, I'm trying to cover Mawr in terms of ham positions rather than having Teoh every time I moved down, instead of going thumb from the I'm trying to go, you know, cover to positions with one with one hand position, say Aysel, done in one hand position and then maybe just one movement here on then come down, Teoh. So I'm kind of covering them in blocks. That's that's the kind of thing that will come up. Which is quite important is Teoh work on your fingering with these patents? But that's the foot. That's the next thing to do is to take these sequences that we've been working on in the previous lecture where you've been finding on, then applying them inside of thes thes pentatonic scales and also composed stuff with them . And then the final thing is to explore something which I'll go into Maurin a video right after this lecture, which is pentatonic scales on, layered on top of each other or paired Pentatonix. So the basic idea with a pair pentatonic is that you take we're in C major right and Pentatonix careless. See right if I go up 1/5 from C and then play that pentatonic scale whilst I'm still playing see underneath it sounds different, but also still very good. Ah, OK, it's a different sound, so this is really a It's a harmonic trick, but it's also a mind trick. It's a it's a way of forcing you to see new melodic ideas inside of one court because we haven't changed the court. And yet we're doing a very different thing here in our melody. And then with the pair Pentatonix, we can go up again another fifth. This is This is what you do in major. It's slightly different minor and again it will be covered in the next video. But let's play the D major pentatonic scale over a C major court, right? It's a very modern, open, clear sound, which is great that we're getting from that. And then if you keep going right, it can probably start getting a bit out there. But let's see, you know, So he is a that's really dissonant, obviously, for very clear reasons, really. I tend to only practice pair upon it, Pentatonix up to up to cycles of the fifth. So that's a really a really good one. And again, the idea is to take the sequences and the patterns and apply them inside off the's pentatonic scales 54. Paired Pentatonics: if you're like me and you really like the pentatonic scale, you're gonna love paired Pentatonix, but it's a little tricky to get your head wrapped around it. So we're gonna go over in a presentation and then at the piano, hopefully to help you master this really lovely sound. Let's look first at major pentatonic pairs. We know that if we take a major scale and we filter out notes 1235 and six, that gives us the major pentatonic scale and obviously say a C major pentatonic scale would work over the key of C. Let's talk about the upper pairs. Now if we go back to the circle of Fifths that you know, we can start at sea, our cord or key that we're currently on and go up five notes not gets us to G. So what we can then do is play the G major pentatonic scale that will work over the C major chord or key. And that's what it looks like. Theoretically, let's keep going. Going up another fifth from that G 12345 gets us to D on. We can play the D major pentatonic scale that will also work over C. Major, and that's what it looks like. Theoretically. Next, we can go up another fifth on that text. A. So the a major pentatonic also works over the C major court key any further, unless and stuff starts to sound a little bit weird. So we'll stop now and look at them all together. That's what they look like side by side. But if we take the first column here and we're line all of the notes or rather all of the seas together in that column, it looked like this. You see that there's a lot of overlapping note. In other words, there's a lot of shared notes between the keys. Here's a shared section. The DEA's of those keys are shared. Then all of these easa shared these F sharps thes G's all of these days and then these bees here, so the keys have a lot of similarities to them. This is why, when you're playing, say, the G major pentatonic scale over a court of C major or the D major pentatonic scale over that same C major chord, there's a lot of affinity with that scale or the home key of C Major, and yet it gives it a different sound in a different flavor. Let's look now at minor Pentatonix, and we'll start with an A minor pentatonic. Let's go back to the circle of Fifths and started a here. We go up four notes this time, not 1/5 of fourth that gets us to D, and you can also think of this is going Andy clockwise around the circle of fifths. For example, if we take this a here and we g o anti clockwise one step, it takes us to D so we can play the D pentatonic scale. But here's where it gets a little bit interesting and slightly confusing. I'm afraid we have a home key of a minor or a minor pentatonic central key. When we play the D pentatonic over the top of that, a minor central key. It's a D major pentatonic, so the D major pentatonic also works over the A minor chord, or key. Really be aware that it's the major form over the minor that works. That's what it looks like. Theoretically, let's keep going. If we go up 1/4 from deep anti clockwise around the circle of fifths That gets us the G. And if we play the G major pentatonic over the a minor chord, it will work as well. That's what it looks like, theoretically. Finally, if we go up one more forth from G, that will take us to see. And if we play the C major pentatonic over the a minor chord, it will work. This is what they all look like side by side. Now this has been a little bit complex. I know you might need to watch this video again, but let's look at the piano now. So let's have a look at that piano. Let's take the F major pencil neck scale So way do is we go up 1/5 to see, and then we play the C major pentatonic scale. 1/5 from C would then be the G. So let's do that one on. Then let's go up from that one. Which B. D. This is where it starts to sound a bit more out there. That's about as far as I can go before I can start really noticing kind of a real It's like dissonance. So let's go to this one. Sometimes it works, though, if you've got good phrasing, right? And let's go one more just for the sake of this tutorial up 1/5 from a T o d. On That raises working too far out, but we get back to beginning. We have that pentatonic sound, which is way can apply that with at least three kind of extension. So let's do that now. - It's really, really interesting colors that coming in there with our major pencil necks. Let's look at the minor now. Ondas. It's slightly different this one. Let's do it in demon So D minor pentatonic scale. Let's then go up 1/4 takes us to G and now play the major pentatonic scale. This one's slightly different. If you remember, you can move that between the two scales there I was kind of thinking g and then, uh, move between them both as well. And half of this is actually for your brain to think of things rather than necessarily something that will be directly heard immediately and obvious lead by the by the listener. So once we've got up the fourth week of another fourth and we play that major pentatonic scale, so it will be see on one more fourth BF on one more fourth would be And this is where stuff starts. They're gonna come on down a bit, as we found with the major skill there. If we go out one more, it would be e flat if we play that eyes sound. So we kind of extended this rule a little too much. But as you see with pair Pentatonix, you can keep on enjoying the pentatonic scale in the feeling that it gives with extra colors without becoming monotonous over just simply one chord. 55. Multi scales: It's a really interesting idea for practice is something I call multi scales. Essentially, multi skills is a great way of practicing non diatonic melodic line. So let's kind of unpack what I mean by that So diatonic means inside of a key. So if we're inside of F major, all right, we're only playing. There's no way can't play that or that because we can play that that that that because they're outside of the key. Okay, so diatonic is only inside of a key. And sometimes, if our compositions a purely diatonic, they can sound a bit right. And at the end of the end of my previous course music composition with the piano course, we spoke a little bit about chord relationships, and how powerful they are for film, music and court relationships is where you force yourself to push the harmony outside of AKI Onda. We look to that just purely from a core perspective, but from melodic writing, it can get incredibly interesting. OK, so let's take two chord relationships. Let's take sorry, let's take a court relationship of two chords. So the steak F major on, then a flat major. Okay, so we've got three idea is that what we're gonna be doing is we're doing improvising, composing, flowing hand excites whatever you wanna call it. But then we're gonna change the cord and then the scale. So, like that, we're just moving between the cords, - all right? And the idea is to be able to quickly move between scales. You can do this sometimes with chromatic movement. So it's a really good good practice to do as well, If you know a great thing. I do, actually. Sometimes it's just played the major ski. Oh, wait, Theo, Theo, The idea right? We're just moving between the scales very easily and chord relationships and writing melodies Kenbrell out some amazing sounds. You know, Let's try some more stuff, right? That's that's a melody you wouldn't necessarily come up within. It sounds quite quirky and out there, and all I'm doing is I'm going between two chords that aren't diatonic with each other. They don't live in the same key to be a major in E major. You can hear that strange sound that comes out If we start composing with that, all right, you can start coming up some really lovely ideas. So you can invent your your own ideas with this with in terms of like building on what we've done with sequences and stuff of that. But the essential idea is take a beating. The first thing to do is just take a really slow bar for and then on a new court to three full and improvised. You could even do sequences if you want, but really just just have a flow around the piano and get good at moving between these different non diatonic courts. 56. Practice & Composing Tips Pt 1: so well done, you've made it to the end of the course. There has been a fair amount of material in here, so thanks for sticking through. I hope you found it useful and enjoyable, and you are able to kind of use it because that's really the important thing. It's not by watching this course that you'll improve, but by applying the principles in your practice and your composing. So with that in mind, what I wanted to leave you with is a set of principles that have really helped me and some of my students as well for their practice and their composing, because it's not always the easiest thing. And sometimes we need to not just think about the technicals, which is what we've covered in this course, but also the mindset. So let's have a look at the first principle, so the 1st 1 is the practice versus performance spectrum. When you sit down at the piano to practice, your goal should be to absorb new material and get better. When you sit down at the piano to perform, your goal should be to perform. However, it's very easy when you're practicing to try and perform In other words, you're trying to make everything that you do sound great or fully finished, and therefore that puts a big expectation on your shoulders. And when stuff doesn't sound amazing or great or finished a polished, you start to feel frustrated, and this could be a very unconscious thing when you're practicing, but it's really important to get right. So that's why I have included things like the backing tracks and the keystones for you to kind of explore just that nice feeling of moving through harmony and trying out material the same bit material for, like, four minutes over and over again. There is no goal of performance here. The goal is just to let the music on the material absorb into your brain or your hands, or have you want to think about it. So practice versus performance is very, very important, right? And sometimes you can think of it as a spectrum right. So if you're practicing, you could maybe slightly move towards performance, right? So maybe with the wandering hand exercise, you might start out just doing it dramatically. It's purely an exercise, and then you might start moving that freedom and that kind of relax ation, that non pressured environment towards performance and the golden is for performance to feel as relaxing as this state at the piano when you're practicing. So Principle Number two is similar to principle number one, but it's about writing music, and it's called the study versus composing spectrum similarly to the 1st 1 A study is something you do purely to get better at composing. You might take a certain principle that we've covered in the accompaniment pattern section and combine it with something in the harmony section on. Write something that's eight bars along, and then you can shelf that and never see again. It's actually for you just to get better as being composer. But then, when you're in the composing side of things, you can kind of let go of all of these things. I'd really encourage that to kind of let go of all these thoughts of rules or patterns and stuff like that and just let your unconscious come out and write properly. If you, however, get a bit stuck, you can come back along that spectrum and kind of see it as a study for a minute. You go okay, I'm stuck at bar number 90. What do I do at this point? OK, I'm gonna go back to my kind of pattern library of all these different things that I've got . What could I do? I'm gonna create a study, and then you get inspired again in that study, and then that pushes you into the flow again and you're back into the composing journey. Principle number three is to practise material over and over again to really master it and let it go in. Sometimes we think we can play something until we get it right and then move on. But it's not true. We need to play something until we can't get it wrong, and then we can move on to other material. So this is really important with the material that we're really trying to absorb here it's very easy to look up after one minute and think, Yeah, I'm done now, but actually, four minutes is probably the best amount of time to practice something. So we use the four minute practice technique a lot in kind of my studio, and I would suggest that you do exactly the same thing. And that's why I love the backing tracks that have included in this course based around this four minute idea paws four minutes. So make sure that you're practicing things over and over. Theater thing about doing this is really embed what you're doing into your ears, right? So you might think that playing it gets into your hands. But just cause you can play it doesn't mean you've absorbed that material. Actually, there's a lot more beyond playing it, which is more about letting it go into the back of your mind as a composer, and so that when you next here it like that cord type or that progression. You're like, so familiar with that sound, because you've played it so much in your practice that you'll be like, Yeah, that's that and it'll just fit. So remember to practice things enough. If you're practicing things a lot, you need to take breaks, and this is why we do spaced repetition. I mentioned four minutes, then a break four minutes than a break. This also applies not just to the micro four minutes sessions at a time, but also the macro. You might do a session of sort of 30 minutes in the morning and inside of that 30 minutes, that's kind of form in it sessions. And then in the afternoon, you do another session and then even bigger than that. You remember. If you're composing or you're trying to perform something, you're not gonna get it done in one sessional one day Often you have to think. Okay, I'm gonna tackle this thing over 234 days or sometimes longer. This is a really important thing to remember. Is spaced repetition on the micro level on the macro level. 57. Practice & Composing Tips Pt 2: principle number five is record yourself. Record yourself all the time on what I mean by that is if you're practicing, then put on a voice memo on your phone. Just leave it there for the whole session. If at the end of the session nothing worthy of notice happened, then just delete it. That's absolutely fine. But more from no, I'll find myself playing and then I'll play something and I'd be like, Whoa, what was that? And I can't quite remember what it was that I was playing. So I have to kind of like pause, go back, listen, transcribe it, working out. And then I could be like OK, because actually, sometimes we can get inspired by ourselves. I sometimes listen to my old sketches and I'm like, Wow, who wrote that? That was really good? No, all the time. And then I have to kind of work out. Why did Right? So this is a really important thing. Use your kind of not just your pattern library, but also your own library of your kind of sketches and stuff like that to re inspire you in the future, because often, if you've written something and it's getting to like five oclock six clock in the evening, your bit tired and you're like everything. I'm doing something rubbish. I'm a rubbish composer. Then Actually, you come back the next day. You've had coffee and a good night's sleep. Maybe you've been to the gym and then you listen to it and you're like, you know, it's not bad, actually, like I could use that So, you know, member to record stuff so that all of this can inspire you in future. We said it in the repertoire section, but you must be transcribing music, transcribe music all the time. Now when I say transcription, people sometimes think I must transcribe the whole of this piece of music and then I will have transcribed. Doesn't have to be that Atal transcription can be simply a few notes from a solo or just one chord from that little bit there. It's anything that really inspires you and that you might want to put into a pattern library either a really one that you're actually storing somewhere or just the back of your head. You think I might use that one day, Who knows? Remember to be transcribing all the time. It's the way that you feed what you do as a composer always practice with groove or always composed with groove in mind. And remember, I'm not talking about groovy music doesn't have to have drums or anything like that in it. But be aware off the rhythmical content that's driving this section of the peace or the peace in total. Be really clear on what your groove is and if you need to use existing sources. Other inspiration to help you decide what that group is, or things like loops or arpeggio haters to help you. So we've mentioned practicing a lot, and we've mentioned practicing with space repetition. But we haven't mentioned practicing slowly. This is so important. It's unreal. When you practice slowly or you write slowly, you actually get better much quicker. It's very easy to have this little voice in our shoulders that saying You must write faster or you should be better than this or the composition should be finished by now. And actually that really, really does not help what you're doing in the moment. So instead of that, decide to go more into this kind of practice relaxed mode where you're just enjoying every single thing that you're doing because the composition requires that you write every single note. And if you're looking at a can note, that's kind of like less important than the other ones, which isn't true. And you're thinking I shouldn't be writing this? No, I need to be right in the big bit that goes. But right then, that's gonna just ruin your whole mindset. So go slowly and enjoy all the slow moments of everything that you do in practice, performance and then writing. So I've kind of said this already, but I want to make it really clear that you must let go of the rule book. Of all the things that you've learned quite regularly, I'm an online course, crear. So I teach people rules or principles off how to do things right, but you must ignore them. You must throw them away at times and just do your own thing. That's where genius comes from. And also, if we're writing and what practicing all from a place of like trying to do things the proper way, we're never gonna be creative. However, you do need to study the rules before you can break them properly. A rather practical one for Number 10 which is Be careful with your hands. If you're not studying to be a professional piano player or classical pianist, it's very easy to get into what you're playing. Quite a lot of the piano on. Do not follow great technique. I've got a very short section in my previous course music composition with piano about that , But you could seek advice elsewhere and learn how to use the piano properly so that you don't accidentally damage your fingers because thes muscles are very small and sometimes we can get very into our piano playing and then damage ourselves. Principle number 10 is practice without the pedal often, so the pedal on the piano is a wonderful thing. I'm sure you're aware of it, and you're kind of using it a lot. It sustains notes right so that you don't have to do anything. But after a while, lots of Penis, particularly composes, end up using it all the time, and I'm guilty of this as well. The problem with that is it's kind of a crutch in lots of scenarios, right? So it forces you to not have to do Lo Gatto. For example, if you're doing a kind of line, you can kind of just do that and everything will fit together and you can just do terrible piano technique, and it will all just kind of work and mashed together. It's really important to be like without the piano without the pedal, so that if you take your finger off, the sound dies and this is the same with cords as well. If you're doing sort of stride piano, it's very It's kind of a lot easier to use the pedal with stride, right, because I'm able to keep that note going from here to here on. It's kind of really, really easy, and that is kind of the best way to do stride. But sometimes it's great to practice without that crutch kind of forces you to be like, a lot more clear and aware of what you're doing. So that's that principle principle. Number 12 is to swap material between the hands often not just from a practice perspective but also for composing. It's very normal to have accompaniment patterns in the left on, then melody in the right, but actually it's very good to practice doing the opposite, and sometimes it can yield great results in your composing if you kind of invert the melody and it's sort of becomes a melodic bassline, right? So principle number 13 kind of pulls a number of the things that I've already said together into another thing to remind yourself about which is play in your ability. Don't try and over stretch yourself too much. But also don't be playing things that are really easy. It's really important to kind of be aware of this because sometimes will be trying to do stuff that is just way too hard for us on. We think that okay, if I slow it down enough, If I do space repetition, if I try and enjoy it and see its practice, it'll work and I'll be able to do it. It's just kind of not true if you're doing some crazy thing with, like Stride Piano and then this really interesting accompaniment or like, you know, wandering hands something in your right hand. It's gonna be really hard if you're kind of intermediate, so don't do it. Just leave it. Break the exercise down to something that feels a lot more manageable for you and have patience 58. Practice & Composing Tips Pt 3: principle Number 14 is free writing. If you haven't heard about free writing before, it's basically where you turn off your internal editor and just write whatever you don't say, whether it's bad or good, you just right. It's kind of like throwing out the rule book, but looked at from a slightly different angle. And this is a really good thing to do. If you have writer's block Writer's block is basically you blocking yourself with your internal editor to put it really simply so. Actually, we want to take that person. If you imagine it as a separate person and just say, Go away, sit over there, come back tomorrow and of it. So you'd sit here this afternoon and you'd write whatever you want. Just be like a kid who has, like, no taste in music on. Just enjoy anything that you enjoy, right? And then the next day you'd come back and listen to that has the editor on. Then you can add it. Principle number 15 is to use your voice more often now. You might not want to do this if you're specifically a piano player and composer, and you might not wanna be doing any singing. But this is something that you can do in the privacy of your own studio or home wherever you compose, when no one can hear. And it's a great way to make quick sketches. If you're trying to do something and you're not quite sure one what the notes are or to what the rhythm is, then you can just do a voice memo, which kind of really approximate sit like a very quick kind of pencil sketch off something but an artist might do on. Then you transcribe that later and work out how it works. So use your voice, particularly on voicemail, moves to help you write things quicker or plan them out and then transcribe it later. Sometimes we need to change what our goal is when we're writing music very often, we're kind of following the directive in our heads off. I must write an amazing piece, which suits this context, right? Or I must write music that impresses people, and we're kind of not aware that we're thinking that, and actually, sometimes that's not helpful. Just kind of puts pressure on us. Sometimes it's good to decide to solve a problem or kind of follow a pattern through, and this is why this course, hopefully will be quite useful for you. Instead of trying to write an amazing piece of music, decide to play around with some arranging components and see what happens and leave it up to fate or whatever, to see whether you'll come up with anything that's good. And if you don't find it was just a study, shelve it. If it's good, great, you can keep going. That's a really important thing. Change. The goal related to that last point is, How do you want to feel? Music is a very emotional thing, whether you're performing, listening or writing it. But sometimes it's very easy to be detached from emotion when you're doing those things, and actually to kind of connect with it again is very beneficial. Now. You don't have to be practicing or writing and be feeling incredible emotions or like just euphoria. It's perhaps worth asking the question, though. When you're doing something, particularly when composing, it's like what is this music saying What's the emotional landscape that I want to be in to help me write this piece of music rather than just be from a purely like, technical standpoint. So connect with emotion and ask yourself, How do I want to feel? Principle number 18 is to go with the flow. Now, that's a bit of a cliche. So let me explain what I mean. Say you're in a practice session and you start out thinking I'm gonna start this practice session on lying in a work on this on. Then suddenly you come across something else that you can't do, which you need to be able to do to practice that first thing. And so you kind of annoyed. You're like, Damn it, this is really annoying. I can't do that first thing I was trying. Well, that's a great moment to realize that you should go with the flow. You've discovered another thing that you didn't know beforehand, and that's good on. Therefore, your practice session on the goals will change. And this is saying that music does. It's fluid changes. So if you're writing a piece of music, you might start out thinking I'm going to write this section and it's gonna go here on. Then you kind of writing it and maybe it's not working. You might need to be open to the fact that it's not working because it doesn't need to go there or it shouldn't go there and try and listen to perhaps what the music is telling you . Number 19 is to journal now. This is completely optional. Like all of the principles and all of the things in this course, I'm not saying you have to do it, but it can be really beneficial to write about what you're doing in music. This could be the smallest little thing. You could have a notebook, which you could say, you know, at the end of the day, like what you did musically to help you remember it and embed in your head on. Maybe you could set goals for the next day. If you listen to a new artist, you could write it down on, then the joy that you can get from going back through the year and seeing everything or last week even, and you can go. Oh yeah, all of this stuff starts to embed, and you can write whatever you want. In your journal. It could be your practice diary. You could say, you know, did this exercise or remember to practice this type of thing. It's a way for you to keep speaking to yourself in the future and remembering who you were in the past as a musician. So whilst there are many more principles, I could go into the last one. Number 20 is to work with humans is very easy as a piano player Andi composer to think that you could just do it all on your own. But there were really important reasons to work with other people. From a kind of like practical standpoint, you're going to get much better sounds into what you're producing if you are producing it, getting kind of real live musicians to perform the parts rather than using orchestral samples or like since and stuff like that will Justin's is gonna just breathe life into your piece, you know, and at the very least, you should be recording. If you're producing stuff, you should be recording live instruments with yourself at home, but certainly work with musicians. It will just just break your kind of composing world wide open, and the other reason is for inspiration. It's very important to write four people if you've kind of you know you're gonna write your composition tomorrow, and then you're gonna put it on a synth, which is gonna or an instrument which is gonna perform a like a fake cello. That's much less inspiring than thinking. Tomorrow at four o'clock, I've got a workshop with a cellist, and then they're gonna record that performance. You are so much more motivated. And actually, your writing is so much better and then they'll perform it way better than any kind of synth or whatever could. So that is the final principle work with humans. 59. Roundup: so well done on finishing the course. There has been a ton of content in here, and I hope that you're practicing it and getting a lot of useful stuff from it. If you come up with any distinctions, ideas or music that you want to share that's been generated from watching this course, I'd love to hear it and I'd love it if you would share it with our community on Facebook, you can go there and posted idea either an audio, former or a video. Or you could just write some ideas and just share with us how you've experienced the course and some distinctions you might have made. The lean musician Facebook group is also a really great resource for any other questions that you have about being a musician, composer, songwriter, producer, anything. So ask away rural friendly and they're for other Resource is and see my full list of courses. You can head of Italy musician dot com. I'll see you there