Piano Concepts for Beginners

1. Intro: Welcome to my course on piano Concepts for Absolute Beginners. This course is really designed to take some of the stress off of being introduced to a new instrument like the piano. There's lots of terms that we have to know. We aren't sure if our ears are going to do what they need to do at the instrument, let alone our fingers. So my hope is to alleviate some of the initial stresses that we might have coming into an instrument like piano and getting rid of those entirely so that you can approach the instrument with confidence. We're going to work on fine tuning your ears so that you can better hear pitches. We're going to discuss the basics of chords, scales, and even a bit of playing around within a key so that you can start to create melodies all on your own. I'm not going to burden you with sight reading. This is not a class on sight reading. It's really just to get all the basic concepts so that if you want to start jumping into lessons or other self study, you have the fundamentals really taken care of so that you can hit the ground running. We will discuss various chord progressions, combining melody with harmony, and also how to approach pop music so that after this course, you can continue to work on self study all on your own, or again, jump into a lesson with more confidence. The end, we're going to talk about how you can summarize a style on piano. Whether you want to learn French romantic music, reggae piano, rock piano, jazz piano, piano for hip hop production, there are certain traits that you're going to want to listen to within those styles so that you can start to deconstruct and re engineer those styles at your own fingertips. There is going to be a project for this course, and it's going to be relatively simple, but it is going to challenge you at the same time. Once you've learned a pop song on your own, I want you to take the melodic and harmonic concepts that we've talked about within this course to create your own small song. And it doesn't have to be anything super flashy or fancy, and I will take you through the steps so that you can do this on your own. So that's it. If you want to learn the basics of piano so that you can hyper accelerate your learning from a really confident starting point, then this is the course for you. I'm looking forward to being your instructor, and I'll catch you in the first class. 2. Class Project: Now, this is a class project that you might want to come back to a bit down the line. Here's why. Basically, what you're going to do is once you've gone over the material within this course, I'm going to encourage you to learn a couple of songs, preferably just some pop songs, something that you find relatively simple. If you want to go the classical route, that's okay or whatever other style, but try to start with something simple within that genre. Once you've learned those chords and you're kind of seeing how the melody connects with the harmony, then it's going to be time to come back and do this class project. You're going to do is create a simple song. It doesn't need a fancy structure of verse chorus, bridge, whatever, some simple little song where you're putting some chords and a melody together and something that you're happy with. If you're usually playing instrumental music, then keep things instrumental. But if you're a singer and pianist and you want to add some lyrics, it's highly encouraged to take it to that next level. Keep in mind, this does not have to be a masterpiece. This is just really something to get the ball rolling, so you feel a deeper connection with your own musicianship. Once you've learned a couple of pop songs on your own, you'll have a pretty good idea as to how these chords move around, how the melody connects with the harmony, and generally what goes into making a pop song. Of course, I'm going to recommend that you start with a couple of simple pop songs. At the end of the day, something doesn't have to be complex to be catchy. And if you want to make catchy music yourself down the line, it's important to remind yourself that you don't have to be prolific in a virtuoso, keep it simple, keep it catchy. Now, once you've created your song, I want you to either do an audio recording or more preferably a video recording of you playing through the song. If you want to take a more produced angle, take many attempts, stitch it together, and put it together as an audio recording that you're comfortable with, of course, that's fine, as well, too. But if you're aiming to be someone that does public performances, of course, I would highly recommend that you tried to do this in one take within a video recording. Once you've done that recording, you can upload it to either SoundCloud. YouTube, depending if you've done audio or video, you can also upload to Vmeo whatever makes sense for you, but you're going to be supplying me with a public link so that I can access the song, whether it be again, just audio or video, and you'll upload that link through the Skillshare platform. Once I have the link, I'll review your material. I'll give you some feedback. I'll let you know what you did well and areas of improvement. So it's a relatively simple project. But again, before you dive straight into it, make sure that you've learned a couple of pop songs already that you're feeling influenced by the process that they so that you can emulate a pop song that you like and fuse it with the techniques I've given you within this course. Now, at the end of the day, this is not a course on creating pop music, but quite often pop is relatively simple. So if you want to take a similar approach to pop music, but apply it in a classical setting or maybe some sort of hip hop or EDM piano part, that's fine, as well, too, but I want to make sure that you're combining melody and harmony together. Again, the ways that you can take this to the next level would be to apply lyrics and possibly sing yourself or also add more song structure. So a verse into a course. But again, it's not necessary. We're just trying to get the ball rolling. So that's it for this course project. I hope you have some fun with it, and I'll catch you in the next class. 3. All About Pitch: Oh. Alright, let's get talking about pitch. Now, as many of you may already know, in music, we have an assortment of low pitches, middle pitches, and high pitches that are delegated between all the different instruments in a band or orchestra or whatever medium you're listening to. So, for example, a violin might have a much higher pitch than something like a tuba, or a guitar might have a higher pitch than a bass guitar or the kick drum on a drum set. But to break things down scientifically in a really basic form, sound in any form is waves traveling through the air. When the waves are oscillating slower, we're going to have lower pitch. But when the waves are traveling much faster, in other words, the hertz or frequency is higher, we have a higher pitch. Now, I find that it's helpful to picture sound kind of like laser beams. If I told you one of these laser beams is thin and one of these laser beams is thick, which one would you say is the thin one? Would you say this is thin or this is thin? I think a lot of people would agree that this higher pitch translates to the visualization of a sort of thinner beam if we're talking about lasers. Now, that's why when we're playing chords, an assortment of notes up high, all these thin lasers don't really feel close to each other. There's big gaps in between, and even still the overall sound is quite thin. On the other end of the spectrum, if I play some chords, again, just a series of notes that work well with each other. If I play it down low, you can see the thickness of these laser beams starts to overlap. If you picture each laser beam as having its own color, then it would end up just becoming this brown mush between all the different colors overlapping. So harmony works really well in the middle of the piano. Here's these sort of medium thick laser beams. Up high, we have lots of room for detail, and down low, we have a solid foundation. Now, that's sort of the general rule for how these low, medium and high pitches get assigned to instruments. It's also a simple breakdown in terms of how sound oscillates through the air and how that relates to low pitches and high pitches. But if we break it down in a really simple form, the low notes is a lion growling, the high notes, are birds chirping. In the next class, we're going to play a game where I'm playing some high pitches and some low pitches, and you're going to have to guess whether they're high or low. And we'll follow that up within the same class with a second game where the pitches are moving higher or moving lower. They might start high, but then they might move down, or they might start low and then they might move. But I first wanted to explain a little bit about pitch so that you have a good idea as to how low pitches and high pitches sound, but also what their general role is going to be moving forward musically. Now, there's no exact definition for where middle notes become low notes or where middle notes become high notes. So when we're playing the game in the next class, I'll try to be extra clear about which area of the piano I'm in. If I'm up in this area here, it might kind of sound medium high or this area might sound kind of medium low. So I'll really try to stay middle low or high when I'm giving those examples. So whether you're relating pitch to animals like lions and birds or thinking of these as little tiny laser beams as a visual sort of approach to hearing pitch, I encourage you to either use one of those two or come up with your own way of hearing pitch so that we can hit the ground running for this game in the next class. Now, if you're totally new to piano, another thing I should mention is that the piano is associated. On the left side, we have low pitches, and on the right side, we have high pitches. And as we move more right bound, we're going to get pitches that are generally moving higher and higher. Again, you can sort of think of it like the sound thinning out a little bit. Or when we reach these extremely high notes, thinning out a lot. Now, this left to right orientation on the piano is not quite as forgiving when we're reading sheet music. Left to right in sheet music is going to be the duration of time, whereas pitch is actually going to be shown vertically bottom up. Now, I believe that bottom up makes more sense. It's how we feel the sound in the room. And literally we have resonating chambers within us. Low sounds resonate our chest. Higher sounds might resonate our skull and really high sounds might even resonate some small cavities up in the nasal passage in the ears, et cetera. So to me, it would make sense to have the piano laid out bottom to top vertically, but playing it like this would be a bit of a nightmare. So in terms of the ergonomics and the layout of the piano, this makes sense, but I also want you to consider that this left to right orientation on the piano is a bottom to top orientation in sheet music. This isn't a class where we're going to be working with a lot of sheet music at all, but I just wanted to mention that. So down the line, if you do start reading music, you can take a class like this as a bit of a springboard for understanding how those pitches work. For those of you in music production, it's the same sort of thing where an EQ is oriented left to right, with the low sounds being oriented on the left and the high sounds being oriented on the right. Just like a piano. But as you're mixing music, if you have two speakers in front of you or even if you're wearing headphones, you'll notice the low sounds feel quite literally low and the high sounds start to move up higher. Whether it's piano or EQ, pitch is low on the left, high on the right. But in terms of how we experience sound in terms of listening to music or listening to pitch or even singing and experiencing the vibrations of our own voice, we're thinking of it more in a vertical orientation. Now, I've given you a lot of ways to think about pitch, but ultimately, I'm just prepping you for the next class where we're going to play some ear games, exploring pitch as low and high sounds or sounds that are literally moving high or lower. Hope you're ready to play some games in the next class, and I'll see you there. 4. Pitch Games: Alright, let's jump into some pitch ear games. Now, I've decided to keep the keyboard here visually available to you so that if you're really bad at hearing pitch, you can at least use a visual orientation to start to match what you're hearing and what you're seeing. But of course, I'd recommend, as soon as you can, ditch the visual guide, make sure you're literally turning off your screen or looking away and just listening to each example. Now, you can do these games multiple times. But what I would recommend is that if you've done it a couple of times already, might start to memorize that the first couple of answers are this, this, this. And then for the moving higher or lower game, the first couple examples are this, this, this. In other words, you've kind of memorized some of the answers. So what I would recommend is that you jump around quite a bit. So for the first half of this video, we're going to test you on hearing low, middle, and high pitches. And for the second half, we're going to test you on hearing if pitches are moving higher or lower. So without more delay, we're going to jump right in whether you need the visual or not, consider that before you start because here we go. Your first pitch is this. Uh Answer would be low. Next one. Quite a bit different. The answer is high. Next one. Somewhere in between, that would be a middle pitch. I'm not going to explain quite so much as I go. I'll just be saying low, middle or high. We're going to pick up the pace and feel free to pause the video as needed. Let's go for it. High. Low. Middle. Middle. Low. High. Middle. High. High. Low. Middle. Middle. Low. High. Low. Middle. Middle. And low. So you see what I mean? You can feel free to jump around that a little bit, but that's the basic idea, getting you to hear low, middle, and high pitches. Now we're going to play our second game where the pitches either move higher or move lower. You're not telling me what the first note pitch is. If I start here, the answer is not necessarily high. You would say either higher or lower based on where it moves. So if it becomes that would be lower or then it would be higher. So just listen for the direction that the node is moving. Again, the first couple, I might give some subtle explanations, but then we're going to pick up the pace a bit, and I'll make it more difficult as we go. So without more delay, let's jump in. Here's your first example. So for this one, we're moving up higher. Next one. We've moved considerably lower. Next one. Moving up higher. Next one. That one's also lower. And you can almost picture a cartoon character walking down a set of stairs. From now on, I'm just going to say higher or lower. I'll make them more difficult as we go. Let's jump in. Higher. Higher? Lower. Higher. Higher. Higher. Higher. Lower. I'll play that one again. Higher. One more time. Lower. I'm going to start doing these smaller little segments like the last two examples. But this time instead of playing them twice, I'm just gonna play them once. Let's get difficult. Here we go. Higher. Lower. Higher. Lower. Higher? Lower? Lower and higher. By the end, I made them about as difficult as they can be. If you are working with a private instructor, I would recommend that you play this game so that every lesson they can make it a little bit more difficult. You can even go as low as two notes. So just playing a semitone, which is two notes closest together, either up or down, especially when you're on the extremes of the piano, that can be very difficult. So if you did well with that, congratulations. If you didn't your hopes down, just make sure that you're reviewing this class many times. Pitch is not something we learn in a moment's notice. It's something that we need to hear a lot, and we need to be listening active. Sure, you've heard lots of pitches. You've heard your grandpa's voice versus your grandma's voice, versus your sister's voice, versus a particular type of song with high pitches, versus a particular type of song with low pitches or all pitches. That doesn't necessarily mean you were actively listening for what types of sounds you were hearing. So that's what we're trying to get started with this game is to really help you actively listen so you can differentiate low, middle and high pitches. That's it for this class slash GAMES. I hope you had some fun. Review this class as many times as you need to, and I'll catch you in the next class. 5. Naming Notes: And next up, let's dive into note naming on the piano. As you can see, we have a lot of keys. We have 88 keys total. Most of them are white, and quite a few of them are black. As with any piano lesson, we're going to start with talking about the white notes first and then dive into the black notes, which are known as sharps and flats, but we'll get around to that in a moment. Now, you might notice that these keys and their patterns, two black notes, three black notes, two black notes, three black notes. The same pattern keeps repeating. In fact, if I just start on any note, let's say this one here, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, I get seven different notes before I'm back to that same note that is one left of the group of three Blacks. In other words, we are back in the same pattern one, in this case, octave higher or one full pattern higher. So fun fact, that is called an octave when we move up eight nodes, or if we're moving to what looks like the same visual orientation based on these black notes. So because we have seven different white notes, we're going to use the English alphabet, ABCDEFG for our seven notes. Now, A kind of starts in a bit of a random spot, I think. So a lot of people end up learning C first, specifically a note called middle C. If we take a look at, in this case, you can't see it, but I have my little Yamaha logo here right around this part of the piano. Wherever that middle logo is on your piano is going to get you really close to middle C. Or just think of it as the orientation being close to your belly button. So this is middle C, but I haven't explained yet what a C is. To find Cs, you play a group of two black keys, and you can just slide one note to the left side. That white note is C. So that means that this is a C. This is a C. This is a C. In fact, this high note is a C, but we don't get to see the black notes up above it as an orientation, but CDEF, G, and then we're back to ABC brings us up there just the same. So I kind of just gave something away, which is that we have these seven letters looping and looping and looping. So if this is C, let's just say ABC backwards. Before I say it, can you say it? C B A. Some people get that very easily, some people, it's a challenge. So if going left on the piano is going lower, like we discussed two classes prior, then this C is going to go down in the alphabet to a B and then down again to A. So if we find the middle note from the group of three black notes and slide to the right, that's an A. That's an A. That's an A. That's an A. So we have A, B, C. We know our C quite well, DEF G, and then we're back to what is this one here? We're back to A, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Now, fun fact, if you look very low on the piano, we have a C down here, and if I go down to notes, B A, the note that is lowest on the piano is an A. So I want you to try this with me. You're going to play your lowest note on the piano. You're going to say A, and we're going to go all the way up to the very highest note saying A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and then repeating each time. Let's give it a try. ABCD, EFG. ABCDEFG, ABCDEFG, ABCDEFG. Keep it going, ABCDEFG ABCDEFG, ABCB EFG, ABC. And again, there's our top C. Now, I am going to supply a PDF for this class outlining the different notes on the piano keyboard. It's not sheet music. It's just going to show a keyboard, and I will outline all the different notes of the keyboard. I'm also going to include the sharps and flats, which we will be talking about soon. But I just wanted to mention that if this is already feeling like it's moving quick or you're a visual learner, that will be available to you as well. That being said, hopefully, this isn't moving too fast, but you should review this material many times. It might be one of those things where it's like, Yeah, I'm getting it in the moment, but I don't feel like it's internalized. Well, of course, it's not. It might be very new information for you. So, again, review the class as many times as you need to. Now, in terms of sharps and flats, these black notes, I want you to ask yourself, if you sit on something sharp, which way do you jump? You jump up. If your bike gets a flat tire, which way does it move? Moves down, it deflates. So when we hear sharp, we want to be thinking up, which on the piano is to the right. And when we hear flat, we want to be thinking down, which on the piano is to the left. Now, what this ends up meaning is that each black note is going to have a sharp name and a flat name. I'll give you an example. Let's start off with this note here. Do you know what this note is based on before? We said this was a C. So this is A, D. We're going to take this D. We're going to move it a little to the right. Remember, right is up and up is sharp. Something sharp, you jump up. So if I take this D and move a little to the right, I now have D sharp. If I take this D and move it to the left side or down, it's now D flat. So you can split a white note either direction to create either a sharp on the right side or flat on the left side. Now, if you are curious about the sharp and flat symbols, I'm going to show you them right here. So that's how they look. The sharp is sort of like a hash flat sign is, like, half of a heart with a stem or a stick. So that's how they look. Again, visually, if you do want to dive into reading sheet music, I just want to give you some light advice along the way, just so you can springboard into learning that stuff a little bit quicker. But there's a bit of an issue here. It's not an issue. It's just something we need to know, which is that if this D moving to the left is a D flat, now let's move to the C for a moment. Now, there's no black note on the left side, so we're going to ignore that side for now. We're going to move to the right side. So if C has moved a bit up, it becomes C sharp. So this note here is C moving to the right, C sharp. This note here is also D moving to the left or down. D flat. So this note is C sharp D flat. We get D sharp E flat, F sharp, G flat, G sharp, A flat, and A sharp B flat. Now, some of these notes are going to come up quite a bit more than others. You'll see E flat quite a bit in music, but you won't see A sharp quite as much. There's some very detailed reasons for that. But off the start, you really want to make sure that you understand all these notes equally. It's really important that no sharp or flat makes you scratch your head and then do the letter math to figure out where it is. Just kind of plunk around and ask yourself, What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? Get your teacher to do it if you're in lessons. Just a note naming game where they play some notes, and then you say the note as quick as you can. In fact, why don't we do that right now? I'll give you about ten, and I'm going to pause after each one. Take your time if you need to pause the video, feel free, but let's just do a few. Let's see if you can catch these. What is this first note here? That would be C. And in this case, that is middle C. How about this note here? Also a C, but higher up on the piano. How about this note here? Well, there's two names for it. We were coming from C moving higher, so C sharp is maybe the first answer you might have had, but you might also know it's a D flat. So C sharp or D flat. Let's pick maybe a tougher one, this one here. CDEF G sharp, and then recycling the alphabet to A, A flat. Now, I say this is tougher because this area of the piano confuses people a bit more. For a couple of good reasons. One, the three black notes is a bit more of a complex pattern. Two, the alphabet loops itself at this point. G going to A, is not a couple of letters you would usually think of side by side. But on the piano, that's where our alphabet re loops. So there's just something about these white notes where the letters loop. They're in this sort of more nested area of the three black notes that it might be a bit more difficult. So you might want to challenge yourself a bit more around this area if you're playing this game with your teacher. Let's do three more notes. What about this one here? This would be CD. So here's our D, D sharp or E flat. How about this one here? A bit more simple, a white note, CD, E, F. And the last one I'll give you is this one here. Let's play it really high. Doesn't matter where I play it on the piano, if I play it here, here, here, here, or here, it's the same note. So this one here, CD, E FGA Sharp. Or B flat. Now you'll notice when I'm going up through the alphabet, I usually start with C. And I do this with my students a lot. It's not how I think I have the letters all very much memorized. But instead of starting from A every time, which is a more disorienting space on the piano, it's great to start with C. You'll also note later that the C major scale is the first scale we learn. Quite often, the C major chord is the first chord we learn. Piano is a very C based instrument, which is tough to explain at this stage of things. But what I would say is get comfortable with C, make it your friend, and make it available to you to help you find your other notes. Think of this class as a reference if you forget how to name the black notes or you just need to be challenged a little bit with someone plunking away at some notes and then you're guessing them. This class is really meant to be just a broad overview of what the notes on the piano are from their letters to their letters combined with sharps and flats. In other words, the white notes or the black notes. One last time, let's go through this time, starting on we're going to work our way up every single note. And these are called semitones, by the way, when we move up the smallest distance, this is going to come back later. And then this smallest distance. And then this smallest distance, right? And then we even get some whites to whites if there's no black in between. So we're going to move up by semitones, and we're going to name each note as we go. The black notes, we'll name sharp first and then flat second. So let's give it a go, starting on C, moving up to C sharp. D flat takes us up to D. Next one, D sharp, E flat, taking us up to E. Next one is F. It's right beside it in terms of two white notes being beside each other. Next up, F sharp, G flat, moving higher, G, up to, G sharp, A flat, moving higher up to, A. Next note is a sharp, B flat, moving up to B, and then we arrive back to C. Now, the last thing I want to mention before we wrap up this class is that these white notes that have another white note right beside them with no black in between, this is a bit more advanced, so it's something you might not run into for quite some time, but I do feel like it's worth mentioning at this stage, just to be very thorough with this explanation of note naming. What I'm getting at is a C is beside a B, for example. A C does not have a C flat. There's no black note here to move to. So this white note B can also be called C flat. It works the opposite way. B has no black note to move up to. So B, moving up to C, sure, we could call it a C, but you can also call it a B sharp. So this is true in two areas on the piano, B and C and E and F. E has no black note sharp. So this is E sharp. F has no black note flat. So this is F flat. Now, B sharps, C flats, E sharps and F flats, you're not going to see them for a long time. But I just wanted to let you know, in case you're learning alongside with a friend and they're like, I found out that there's white note sharps and flats, and you're like, What, that's craziness. That doesn't exist. Technically, it does. It comes up in more advanced music down the line. You see it more in, like, advanced classical and romantic and baroque music, more than like pop music, but it does pop up in pretty much every style. So just be aware that's a thing, and it will come up at some point. That's it for this class on naming the notes on the piano, white keys being basic letters, black keys being sharps and flats also with letters. And don't forget there's going to be a PDF for you. If you're a visual learner or you just want another angle of learning this stuff, it'll be available within the downloadable section of this class. I hope you had fun in this class, and I'll catch you in the next one. 6. Tones & Semitones: In the last class, I mentioned this term semitone. This idea that two notes closest together are known as a semitone, and they are essentially the most small building blocks that we have as musicians. If we're talking lego pieces, it's like the small circular one piece lego block. And of course, we have bigger lego blocks that we can work with later, but it's important to start with something simple and then expand from there. So in this class, we're going to talk about semitones and tones. Semitones being two notes closest together with no note in between. So we have C to C sharp, and hopefully note naming is getting a bit easier for you because I will be using note names moving forward. If it's tough, I would say between each of the next videos, go back to the note naming video and rewatch it. So by the time you get to the end of this whole course, you've seen it like ten times. So C to C sharp is the semitone or C sharp to D, D flat to D, whatever we're calling this black notes the same thing. This smallest distance. Now, these might be a little bit easier to see if you just sort of cover up the thick, chunky parts of the white keys. And with your other hand, you're just going to move whether it's white or black, you're not skipping any nope. Sometimes we have white to white. Sometimes we have white to black or black to white, but you'll notice a semitone is never black to black because there's always whites in between the black keys. So it takes a bit of time, but I'd recommend if you want to get good with semitones, start at the very bottom of the piano and just start working your way up through every possible note. Now, again, if you stay up closer, to the sort of wood of the piano where the note connects. Then you're going to find it a little bit easier, but as you get better, I want you sort of feeling like you can move your arm in and out to play these semitones. So I'll speed things up a little bit. You're going to take this at your own pace ultimately. But the idea of moving up the piano one semitone at a time until you reach the very top, that is every single note, all 88 keys, moving up by semitones. The same thing can be true moving down the piano later as you get more advanced as a pianist, you can use these fancy fingerings to be able to move a bit quicker. It's a bit hard in a spinny chair, but you get the idea. You can move down one finger at a time or work with your teacher to figure out the exact fingerings. This is not a class on piano technique at this point, so I'm not going to dive too far into the details of that, but I want you to be able to make sure that you can visually see a semitone, whether it's white to white, white to black or black to white. And again, never black to black. There's always white keys in between. So that now leaves us with tones, and tones are a little bit tougher to see. Now we get all four combinations of white to white where there's a black note in between. Again, if I slide up here, you can see it a little bit easier that I'm skipping over this black note here. There's black to black as discussed, there's going to be a white key in between. We have black up to white with a white in between. This is like what I call a diagonal tone. You don't need to make a diagonal. You could play it up like this, but usually more comfortably, it's played on a bit of a diagonal. So that's black up to white. You could also have white up to black. And these more advanced looking tones happen in these gaps B to C and E to F, B to C and E to F. So you end up getting all of these sort of tones. So we're going to go through in one octave, we're going to go through all 12 semitones because there's 12 different keys, and any one of those keys can have a note above it, and there's 12 different tones. We're going to go through those as well. Let's start with the white to black semitones. So C to C sharp, we bump it up D to D sharp, F to F sharp, G to G sharp, and A to A sharp. If we now flip it, so starting on the C sharp up to a D, let's say D flat to D. So you're starting to orientate these notes being beside black notes as having similar letters. So we have D flat to D, E flat to E, G flat to G, A flat to A and B flat to B. So that was five white to black, five black to white. That's ten out of 12. And you might have guessed the last two are B to C and E to F, the white white semitones. Up next, we're going to play the 12 tones. What I want you to do in your right hand is just play through these five black notes, starting with the group of two up to the group of three. So starting out as a C sharp, and you're going to move out so you have five blacks total. Now you're going to do it again, but you're just going to tap each black key and not press it. So this is the path that we're going to follow. With your right hand, I want you to play or not play, but rather tap lightly on that first black key, don't press it. Your left hand is going to play a little piece sign and surround that black note. To the next black note, we do the same thing. We're surrounding. Again, if we slide in, it's a little bit easier to see, but we're surrounding that black note. Next one, this is the third tone, fourth tone. Then the fifth tone. Now, we can also have a black to black tone. This is the easiest one to see. It's the group of two. We now have to jump over to the full group of this area here and play the next two. So we had six, seven and eight tones total, so one, two, three, four, five, the first ones we started with, six, seven and eight. Now keep in mind this is not a tone. Why is it not a tone? It's because there's two notes in between. So that's a different interval. And I think I glossed over this term interval. So semitones are intervals, tones are intervals. Any distance between two notes is an interval. In other words, we have names for these distances, minor thirds, augmented fourths, octaves, elevenths. It doesn't go infinitely large. You don't have to worry about playing an 88th on the piano. I mean, that one might be a bit easy to figure out. But if I say, play the interval of a 67. I bet you almost no piano player would know what that distance really is. It would take a bit of time, but it wouldn't be instantaneous. So these intervals are simply the distance between two notes, and we're working with the two intervals, semitones and tones. Going back to what I was saying. So we had up to eight different tones. We had the white whites. That's five. Black blacks. That's up to eight. Again, we're not concerned with this black to black where there's two white notes in between or this black to black, where there's two white notes in between. The last four, we're at eight out of 12. The last four happen in these gappy areas. I explained before there's these diagonal tones, where we're playing black to white or white to black. These ones are a bit tougher. Again, if you slide in a little bit and start on this B flat, we're not going to play B, but rather C. But this is awkward playing up this far on the keys. So usually they're played a little bit more diagonally. So think of it like a crisscross X happening in this area, and then again, E to F in this area here. So we had one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, the black blacks, and then nine, ten, there's our crisscross 11, 12. So that's all the semitones and all the tones on the piano. You can repeat this pattern as many times as you want and play anywhere on the piano. It doesn't change because the piano pattern keeps repeating itself exactly. In the next class, we're going to group together tones and semitones to create scales. If you've heard of scales before, practice your scales. We're kind of getting into that, but rather just the creation of scales, what a scale is and how they can benefit us as a piano player. Now that we've gone over all of these semitones and tones, let's gamify things a little bit. In the next class, I'm going to challenge you on identifying tones and semitones, so I'll catch you in the next class. 7. Tones & Semitones (GAME): We're actually going to play a very short little game revolving around tones and semitones. I'm going to give around 20 examples where I play a tone or a semitone, and you're going to say what you think it is. Now, one thing I didn't mention in the last class is that you can play any interval. So again, distance between two notes. You can play any interval, whether it's a tone or a semitone. You can play blocked, in other words, at the same time or broken separately, which you can do moving up, ascending, we're moving down descending. So I'll start with some examples with blocked semitones and tones, and then I'll move into some broken examples. They might be slightly more difficult, but I think at the end of the day, they are about equally as tough. So let's jump in. What is this first interval? We have a C to a D, that's a tone. What about this one here? Now we have F sharp to G sharp or G flat. T A flat. This is also a tone, one white note in between. How about this one here? B to C? That's a semitone because there's no black note in between. How about this one here? We have A to A sharp B flat. This one's a semitone. They don't get any closer. Again, if that's hard to see, slide your fingers in, and you'll notice there's no note in between these two. Next one. This is one of those tougher diagonal tones. Again, if I pull this finger up, you can see I've skipped over one note only, but it's one of those diagonal tones that are a bit more tough. How about this one here? C sharp to D or D flat to D. That's a semitone. How about this one here? Now we have E to F sharp. That's a tone. And last one here, let's go A to B. That's also a tone. Now for the next few, I'm going to start breaking them up, either moving higher or lower. It's basically the same idea. Make sure that visually you're watching the keys as well, too, because you'll be able to see which keys light up. In case my fingers are sort of shadowing over a little bit of what's happening, the midi keyboard, in other words, the colored keyboard is there to help you. What is this first one here? G to A is a tone. Next one. C sharp to D, that's a semitone. G to G sharp, also a semitone. Next one. We got two black keys beside each other with one white key in between. That's a tone. Next one. Now we have E to E flat. That's a semitone. Next one. F, down to E. That's also a semitone. Couple more. G down to F. There's one black key in between. That's a tone. Next one. B flat to C. That's a diagonal tone, one white key in between. Next one. C sharp, down to B. That's also a tone. And you'll notice now I'm not saying C sharp D flat every time. I'll usually give you the more common name. In some cases, they're sort of equally common, but I can't just keep saying the sharp and flat for every single key through this whole course. So I'll just be usually summing it down to one of the two answers. That's a bit more common. Let's keep it going a few more. Tone with one white key in between. Semitone, no notes in between. Also a semitone with no notes in between. That's a white white semitone. There's no black here. Two more. That is a black to black tone with one white key in between. And finally, this is a black to white tone with one white key in between. So I wanted to give you a bit of a friendly start with these semitones and tones, a bit of a game that we played that you can also take into your private lessons and play with your teacher to help you get better at seeing these tones and semitones. They're going to work their way into scales. We're going to talk about scales in the next class, and I'll see you there. 8. Scales: Next up, let's talk about scales. We're going to talk about something called a major scale and a minor scale. Now, in music, major means happy and minor means sad. In fact, in the next class, I'm going to challenge your ear a little bit to hear the difference between major sounds and minor sounds. But for now, let's get some context as to how we can create major and minor scales. And then in the next class, I'll challenge your ears. So to create a major scale, in other words, a happy sounding set of notes, we're going to start on a note, and C is a very friendly note to start on on the piano, because we're about to apply a pattern of tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. So that's two tones, semitone, three tones, semitone. And remember this first note is not a tone, it's not a semitone. To be an interval, to be a tone, it has to be the distance between two notes. So C to a D, there's our first tone. From D to E, there's our second tone. But you'll notice these sounds don't sound particularly great. So the way scales are played is one note at a time. C to D is a tone. D to E is a tone. And I'm not repeating notes as I go. Otherwise, we'd have this. In the end, we'd have this sort of galloped version. We're just thinking C to D is a tone. D to E is a tone. E to F is a semitone, no black K in between. F to G is a tone, G A is a tone. A to B is a tone, and B to C with no black note in between is a semi tone. So we end up getting from C, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. And that would be our C major scale. You'll notice. It sounds quite happy. Like, it doesn't sound innately sad or spooky or anything like that. Now, what you'll notice is that I've played this scale moving up, I've played it moving down. That is exactly how scales work. In general, down the line, if you continue with piano, you'd be playing these hands together. You'd be working up through all these different crossings at different times, and you could work through one octave, two, three, four octaves at different speeds. As you work through something like the Royal Conservatory, that's where the distance of your scales and the speed of those scales is going to increase. So we had our set of notes, C to C. We played them moving higher and then lower. This would be a one octave version of the C major scale. Let's try this together, but we're actually going to go two octaves. We're going to pass over the first C and go to the next C. For now, just an index finger is fine. And if at any point I reference finger numbers, thumb is always one, so one, two, three, four, five, back here, one, two, three, four, and five. So starting on middle C, we're going to start on the C and work our way up one note at a time. Isn't this simple? We're just playing white keys. So you can see why, remember, we're continuing on. You can see why I carted you with a C major scale. We're up to that C. Let's work our way back down. We're not repeating our top note. That is not a thing we do in scales. So we're heading back down our C major scale until we reach our starting point. Here it comes. There is the C. You're welcome to try this with left hand, right hand, and go more than two octaves, you could play the lowest C on the piano all the way up to the highest C. It's really up to you just to understand these basics of the C major scale. Now, if I start on a different key, let's say B flat, right away, my first tone is one of those tough diagonal tones. We can still do this. We can go B flat to C is a tone. C to D is a tone. D to E flat is a tone, E flat to F, F to G, G to A. Those are all tones, and A to B flat is another semitone. You'll notice I called this B flat. I called this E flat. Scales should have consecutive letters. B, followed by C, followed by D, followed by E, so I'm forced into calling this an E flat, followed by F, followed by G, followed by A, followed by some type of B, we're back to B flat. So keep that in mind when you're note naming in your scales, whatever note you start on, you then have to be consecutive. So in other words, you wouldn't have two types of As or two types of Bs within the same scale when you're talking about basic major and minor scales, which is what we're talking about in this course. Now, once you've figured out all the notes for an easier scale like C major, what you can do is take a pencil. I'm going to use marker because it's easier to see for the sake of the video. And a piece of paper. I have mine folded up, you don't have to, but it's just a little bit easier to manage when it's folded up. You're going to take your paper and you're going to slide it right at the edge of the key bed. In other words, where the keys touch the wood of the piano, that's where you're going to do this. Be very careful. I'm using marker. B super super careful. What you're going to do is draw a little slash in the middle of every single note from that scale, CDE, F, G, A, B, and see. So we get something that looks like this. Don't do this at this edge of the keys because everything is wide on this part of the piano, but you'll notice that as you sort of scooch in a bit, this white key is the same width as this black key, so you have to be working with this part of the key in order for this to make sense. So once I have this sort of collection of slashes, you can see it a little bit easier now as I sort of slide it in here. Again, once you go here, it's a little different. So bring it up here. And you can see it's like long, long, short, long, long, long, short, tone tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. If I slide this first slash from C over to D, now I can see it's D, E, and then this slash lines up with this black note F sharp, GA, B, C sharp, D. If I move to E as my first note, E, F sharp, G sharp, A, B, C sharp, D sharp, E. I will expose to you every shape for every major scale using this one simple trick. If you do the same thing with the slashes for an A minor scale, also all whites, then it works for all your minor scales. You can slide it around and figure out any shape for any minor scale. Now, they do sell these sort of specialized rulers online that have these slashes already kind of done for you. I think it's major on one side, minor on the other, and they might even have, like, specialized, like harmonic minor, melodic minor. Feel free to check the net and see if you can find one of those yourself, but I think it's worth doing yourself to actually do the slashes and explore and figure out how easy it is show yourself the shape of any major or natural minor scale. So I wanted to make sure that I showed you that simple trick as I do think it can help give you a lot of mileage while you're learning your scales and their various shapes. What I'm not doing in this class is trying to get you to memorize all the shapes for all the scales, but feel free to bring this to your teacher and see how they might be able to add it to what you're already doing in lessons. Now, there's minor scales, and minor scales have a lot of variations. In this course, we're going to talk about natural minor. We might dip our toes into harmonic minor later on. But for now, we're going to play natural minor. And it is naturally a set of notes within your major scale. You have to start on the sixth note of your major scale. C is one, D is two, E is three, F is four, G is five, A is six. So if I play all the notes from my C major scale, lucky, it's all white keys. A, B, CDEF GA, that is the A natural minor scale. And you'll hear it does sound a bit more minor. It sounds a bit more sad or a little bit spooky at times. Now, this same trick with the paper works once you've figured it out an A minor scale, draw the slashes, slide it around. You can get every natural minor scales shape on the piano using that cheat sheet piece of paper. So keep in mind, it's a cheat sheet. Don't use it for too long. It's like crutches. Once you've started to heal, you got to ditch the crutches and start to put some weight on those muscles. For you, talking this muscle. Now, you might be saying, but Josh, we started on the sixth note of a major scale. I went up to the sixth note using all the same notes from the major scale just starting on the sixth, but didn't we have tones and semitones before, and that's kind of the system we were using? We can totally still use that. I think a lot of people kind of do this whole six to six thing more than tones and semitones, for minor scales, but about 25% of my students prefer the tones and semitones all around. So for you guys that really love tones and semitones, we're going to break down the natural minor scale. Using the tones and semitones, and we're going to view it two different ways. The first way is we already know that A to A, all white notes, is a natural minor. So we're going to start with that way. And just so you know, as an extra little side note, this is called a relative minor scale. It's natural minor. That's the sound it has, but it is relative to C major. So if you say this is C major and someone says, play me the relative minor scale, they're talking about A minor. Just like relatives have the same DNA, C major and A natural minor have the same DNA. No black keys, not a single black key. So they're relatives. Think of them like brother and sister. They're just starting at different points. So starting on this A, we would have tone semitone. Tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone. So one more time, tone, semitone, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone. And if I start that on C, for example, a different minor scale, I would have tone semitone, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone. You can do this starting on any note. But let's analyze C minor, C natural minor, which is what I'm playing versus C major. You might notice three notes have changed. The others are the same. The three has gone flat, the six has gone flat, and the seven has gone flat. So any major scale, you can flatten three, six and seven to get a natural minor scale. So minors, you can start on the sixth note of a major scale. Up to the sixth note, you get a minor scale. Tone and semi tone, tone, tone, semi tone, tone, tone. That'll also give you a minor scale, or a major scale, flat three, flat six, flat seven also gives you the natural minor scale. The point here is not to be overwhelmed with options, but take the one that works best with you and just roll. It gets you the right answer one way or another, unless you're trying to be a theory buff and really be able to discuss music from every possible angle. You don't need to know all three of these systems. But the longer you're saturated in the music environment, I promise you, the more eventually all three of these will kind of synergize together and give you a broad view of how these scales are created. Now, something I want to mention is if I play A major, so if I go up from A, tone, tone semitone tone, tone, tone, semitone. This is my A major scale. But if I was to take the third, sixth and seventh notes and flatten them, you'll notice I'm not moving whites down to Blacks, and traditionally, that's how we've identified flats. E down to E flat, D, down to D flat. But if we can now more broadly think of flattening a note as lowering it by one, we can now say this C sharp down to a C is a flattened version of the C sharp. So it's a little bit digging into the weeds, a little bit complicated. But I just need you to understand if you stumble upon this on your own you're gonna be like, Wait, Josh was. They're not flattened. Well, they are, technically, we're still flattening three, six and seven. But instead of whites down to flat blacks, we're taking sharp blacks down to whites. So possibly a little bit out of context for this course for beginners, but I wanted to make sure that you understand that it's always three, six and seven lowering by one semitone. We could say they are flattened, but at the end of the day, just think of them as down a semitone. So there are 12 major scales. There are 12 minor scales. And not only with minor scales, do we have lots of ways of thinking about how we can arrive at them, but then we start to variate them. We can have harmonic minor, melodic minor, Dorian modes. If you're a jazz musician, there's all these different types of minor scales. And I think that's why at the end of the day, a lot of people like minor music a bit more than major. I think it's a bit more flexible. I think it's very honest with the sort of dark emotions that we feel sometimes as humans. You can be a very upbeat person and be having the best day, but maybe you still just want to listen to some minor music as a fun contrast. For whatever reason it might be, children under the age of five, they love their major music. It's all bright colors, happy. And then after around that age when I start to talk to students at around six, seven or 8-years-old, they start to slowly gravitate towards appreciating minor music. And my best guess is that it just has more shades. There's more ways that you can approach minor music, and we're not going to dive into harmonic minor, melodic minor, the Dorian mode. Again, we might dip our toes a little bit into harmonic minor. But this is something to consider is that as you learn scales, and as you're learning these minor scales, there's going to be some variations coming your way. This kind of blindsided me. I learned my minor scales, and then my teachers like, Okay, now let's make this change to them so they're harmonic minor. I'm like, Okay, so now I have 12 more scales. Just keep in mind off the start, there are lots of scales. There's no rush to learn them all, but they all have different flavors. So at the end of the day, you can think of it kind of like being able to make different types of pizzas. Even though you might have made 1 million pizzas, now all of a sudden, there's some new toppings that become available to you, and it changes the taste or the flavor of that pizza. Scales, the flavor of a scale can be changed just the same based on what type of scale you use. So that's it for the overview of major and natural minor scales. In our next class, I'm going to test your ears a little bit on major and minor sounds. And I've also decided in the class after that briefly in this class, I talked about finger numbers. So I'm going to play something called the finger number game with you. The next two classes are really game oriented, and I'll catch you in those classes. 9. Major Minor (GAME): Alright, let's dive into the major minor game. Remembering major is happy sounds and minor is sad or spooky sounds. I'm going to start off by playing some small song examples. You will then guess if it's major or minor, and I will tell you. I'm then going to play some scales, which will get a little bit more tough. But we did review them in the last class, so make sure that you're kind of understanding this collection of notes is generally a bit more happy or more sad. And I'm even going to throw some chords into the mix. We haven't talked about chords yet, but it's essentially a set of three notes when combined. You can get some happy or sad sounds. So again, I'd recommend not looking at the keys. They are here visually for you in case you think it helps, but eventually ditch them because as you learn your skills, as you learn your chords, you'll be able to recognize the shapes, and it's kind of cheating at that point. But for now, you probably won't understand a whole lot of what I'm playing if you are an absolute beginner, so you can feel free to watch the keys if you'd like. Here's your first example. That one there would be major. How about the classic For release by Beethoven, that's minor. Next one. Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. That one's also minor. How about this sound here? Although it may have had a bit of colorful tension at the end, that is a classic sort of sound from the blues, and that would be a major blues sound. How about this next one? That would be the Rugrats Thema cartoon from the 90s, and that one is certainly very major sounding. A couple more. I'm just going to improvise some songs. How about this one here? That would be major. How about this next one here? That one's minor on the spookier side of minor. How about this one here? Another classic? Cold as Ice. That one is going to be minor. How about this one here? That one would be major. And last one, let's go with, um It's a little piece of the song Manifesto by Chili Gonzalez, one of my favorite modern pianists. If you haven't checked his stuff out, do check out Chili Gonzalez. So those are some examples and that was minor. That was a minor one. So those were some examples of going through little song snippets, where you've tried to identify them as major or minor. Let's do some scales next. This one's gonna be quite a bit tougher, but that's okay. We're just here to learn. Let's try it out. Here's your first one. It was a D major scale. Next one. It was an E flat natural minor scale. Next one. That would be a C natural minor scale. And I mentioned before that a major scale if you flatten three, six and seven, you get a natural minor scale. Listen to that third note. It is very telling versus you hear that difference. That third note really outlines the tonality. In other words, it tells us if it's major or minor. Let's keep it going. How about this one here? That would be a flat natural minor. Next one. That would be a G major scale. Next one. That's your E major scale. Two more to go. C sharp, natural minor and last one. That would be a B major scale. Now I'm going to hit you with some chords. Basically, a chord is just skipping notes within a scale. We're going to go into more detail on this very soon within one of the next classes. But for now, just understand it's a small collection of notes played at the same time that can sound major or minor based on where the middle note is situated. I might add some extra notes just to make it a bit thicker and more full, but ultimately, it works the same way. I'll play each example twice. Here's your first example. That would be C major. X one. This is F minor. Next one. That is E flat minor continuing. That's B major. X one. That's G minor. X one. That's E minor, continuing. That is C sharp major. Next one. That is B flat major continuing on. This one's D minor, two more to go. That's F major and the last one. That is C minor. So one other thing I should mention is that the range that we play a chord can influence if you think it's major or minor. Like, if you think about, low notes, you're generally thinking dark and spooky. If you're thinking high notes, you're thinking more bright and airy. But I can play a minor chord up very high, and I can play a major chord. Quite low. So the range that you play a chord doesn't necessarily influence if the chord is major or minor. It does influence the perception of that chord a little bit, but it's still at the end of the day, a major chord shape, whether I play it here, here, here, here, or here is still major. But let's say you want to be a composer one day, for film or for video games, and you're really trying to blend major and minor tonalities together. You might want to explore these sort of juxtaposed minor chords up high and major chords down low so that things don't feel overly major or overly minor. You're kind of blending sensations a little bit when you approach it that way. Anyway, those are our major and minor games. Make sure you feel free to go through this class as many times as you would like. Feel free to jump around, feel free to pause as needed. I hope you had some fun with that. I did. I'll catch you in the next class, but we're going to do the finger number game. I'll see you there. 10. Finger Number (GAME): All right, this next class is going to be pretty short. We're going to be playing the finger number game. It's relatively simple. I'm going to hold up my hand. I'm going to point to finger one being the thumb, two, three, four or five, you will then name the number of the finger that I'm pointing to. And I will also say the number to verify if you got your answer correct. Then we'll be doing left hand for a little bit, and then I'll start switching between the two hands. It should be simple enough. Thumbs are always one. Pinkies are always five. Let's dive in. Here we go right hand first. One, three, five. Four, two, three, one, five, one, two, four, three, five, two, four, three, one, let's switch. One, two, five, three, four, two, faster, one, three, five, two, four, switch back, two, four, three, five, one. We're now going to freely switch between the two hands. One, two, five, four, three. Three, two, two, one, five, one. Nicely done. Keep in mind when you're at the keys, we're always considering thumbs one, pinkies five. So if your teacher says, I want you to play one, two, three as your first three finger numbers of a scale, you now have some context for what they're talking about. That's it. It's simple. That's the finger number game. Feel free to play with your teacher or with another peer that's learning music. You don't need to do this one a whole lot, as I think it's a bit more simple than some of the other games, but it's still very important information. So there it is, the finger number game, and I'll catch you in the next class. 11. Creating a Melody in Key: Let's get talking about how to play a melody in key. Let's break down what that means. A melody is going to be the singable part of the song, some sort of tune that is ketchy and something memorable, whether it be from a jingle to a John Williams full orchestral score, we see melodies all the time in music. Now, what do I mean by in key? There's a lot of overlapping terms, right? Like the idea that a tone can be the distance of two notes with one note in between, but guitarists can adjust the way their guitar sounds and adjust the guitar tone. While the same way that there's overlapping terms in terms of tone, there's also overlapping terms in terms of key. We have keys on our keyboard instrument, but to play in a key essentially means that you've taken the notes from a scale, and that is your playground. C major. Here's our set of notes. A scale is very linear. It's played up and it's played down, and there's sort of an exact way to go about it. But once I know what that collection of notes is, now I can play around with those notes however I would like, and we would say we're playing in the key of C major. As an example. Notice it was all white notes, so I was playing a little melody, sort of like a jig within the key of C major. If I flatten the third, sixth and seventh notes, I'm now in C natural minor. So if I want to play in the key of C natural minor, I have to use only those notes. Okay. So when you're creating a melody, it's a good idea to start with a scale in mind, and then don't always just think of it like a scale up and down, one note at a time. Now think of it as a key. And again, that is the playground. That is the sandbox that you can play within. Those are the set of notes you can choose from when creating a melody. But how can you create a convincing and a good and a professional sounding melody? Well, there are some tips to help you along the way. Step one is simple and singable is almost always best. If I play a melody like this, you're not going to be able to sing that. I mean, if you're very advanced as a singer, maybe, but there's lots of leaps, it's all over the place. The range is really being explored in a very wide way. And it's almost something that's tough to memorize. Like, to even sing it back in your head is quite difficult. But if I played something like, It's just three notes. They're close together. I use some repetition and a little bit of a theme with these notes sort of developing and repeating. So it's a little bit more easy to memorize. It's a little bit more easy to sing, and overall, it's quite simple. So in terms of what a simple melody is, you want to consider using lots of repetition, whether it be with a small collection of notes or just on one note, E, E E, C. That's repeating just one note quite a bit, and it makes it a whole lot easier to sing. You also don't want to leap around too much. That's going to be tough to sing. But it's not to say that you have to avoid leaps altogether. As a general rule that I have is, if you've had some sort of big leap, follow it up with some more stepwise motion. In other words, a bit of a large leap C to G, and now I'm going to step around the notes within my scale or within my key. Similarly, if I'm leaping down, I might want to work with a few steps, again, just notes beside each other to alleviate the difficulty after that leap. Quite often, if I'm leaping down, I will step up or if I'm leaping up, I will step down. Part of the reason for that is just keeping things in a more narrow range altogether. If I leap up and then step up and then step up and your range is going to be quite high by the end. But even if I have you exploring a higher note, and now I start to step down, it can alleviate vocal tension, for example, if you have vocal tension or just generally be a nice contrast to that initial leap. Lastly, what I'll say is to keep your melody simple, feel free to use space. Space and repetition are two things that a lot of beginner pianists almost tend to avoid and not intentionally. It's just I think that we feel as beginner pianists that we have to be doing a lot to play catch up to the other pianists. But what you'll notice is that the really good pianists are usually leaving quite a bit of space, and they're not afraid to explore repetition. I'll give you two examples of a melody, and I want you to tell me which one you like more. There's no wrong answers here, but I have my own opinion, and I think we might line up similarly on that opinion. Let's try it out. I'm going to add some left hand, as well, too, just to kind of make it a more full sounding song. So it sounds like this. Okay, there's the first example. Here's the second example. The second example had a lot more space. There were some leaps, but generally I was following it up with some stepwise motion, and I was leaving more space. The first one just got kind of squirly. And at some point, it's sort of like language. It's like, Are you leaving space for breath? Are you leaving space for listening and letting someone respond? Or are you just talking until you're absolutely exhausted and everyone in the room is done listening to you? You've listened to a little kid who's just started to learn to speak, they are blabber mouths. They just keep going. But at some point, we learned that it's more effective to use space. In speech, this is very true. If I said, Hey, everyone, and thank you for coming to this year's convention, today, we're going to be talking about scales and chords and a little bit of everything in between, but music theory is the main subject for today. Versus, Hey, everyone, and welcome to this year's convention. I'm Josh Cook, and today we're going to be talking about blah, blah, blah blah. At that point, I've caught your attention by leaving little spaces to let your voice really reverberate in the room, to capture attention, and to get the listener to think, what is he going to say next? So remember to keep things simple. Space and repetition is key. Make sure that you're either repeating little groups of notes or a single note quite a bit. There's nothing wrong with that, especially in pop music. You want to make sure that things are singable and simple and make sure that whatever scale you're choosing, whatever key you're choosing, stick with those notes, really make sure that you're not deviating too much for now. Down the line, other notes outside of your key will become available. But for so many melodies that sound fantastic and are timeless, they stuck within a key and they did it well, and they did it simply. So those are the basic mechanics for coming up with a melody. I hope you enjoyed this class, and I'm going to recommend that you get straight to the piano and just start playing around in whatever key you would. Whether it be C major or A minor or a more advanced scale key, whatever it might be, take 5 minutes to explore that set of notes. Ask yourself, how do the bottom five notes of the scale sound? How do they make me feel? Is it the more minor sounding part of the scale? And how do the top notes sound? Every note within a scale is going to have its own flavor. The more you work with these scales, keys, whatever we want to call them, the more you're going to recognize in a minor scale, third note is very minor sounding, and the sixth note is quite minor sounding. In a major scale, the seventh note really wants to pull us up to the eighth note. There's these little characteristics that you're going to learn. It's no different than doing a hybrid pizza that you want to be spicy, but also sweet. Eventually, you'll know what ingredients you want to put on the pizza to accomplish that. But, of course, instead of tasting things, we are hearing things, but they work very in tandem with one another. I love using food as an analogy within music because I think that taste and hearing are maybe more connected than we might initially think. Anyway, I digress that is our class on creating a melody. Again, keep it simple. Explore your instrument, and I'll catch you in the next class. 12. Extracting Chords from a Key: So now is the time that we get talking about how to extract chords from a key. You understand basically what a key is. It's a set of notes, similar to a scale, but you don't have to follow the rules of moving up one node at a time, moving down one node at a time. You can just play around within the set of notes within that scale. That's a key. And within a key, there are lots of chords. Don't worry, I'll break down chords a bit more individually in a moment. But it ends up looking something like this. If here's our C major scale, every one of those notes, we can go up a skip, so skipping one note, and then another skip skipping another note from within a key. Once we have this set of two skips side by side, you can then move around your key staying true to the notes within that key. In other words, right now I'm in the key of C major. So I'm staying true to all the white notes that are available in C major. Now, if I'm in, let's say, E flat minor, a much more complex key, I need to consider which notes are white, which notes are black. And as I start on my first note, I skip a note, and I skip a note. There's my first chord. So I start on the second note of the scale or key. I skip a note, I skip a note. There's the second chord. Third note of the key, skip a note. Skip a note, but you'll notice I'm going through all the whites and blacks and no extra notes outside of that key. So as I'm going through C major and all of its available chords, I end up getting different sounding chords. And the three main types of chords that you're going to get from a major key or a natural minor key are major chords. Minor chords and diminished chords. Let's break down those three chords and then come back into the context of talking about them within a key. Now, we talked about tones and semitones. This idea that a semitone or two notes closest together, and a tone, we're going to skip one note and then move to the next available note. If I go one note further, I get something called a minor third. In other words, like, thirds and skips are kind of similar where it feels like I'm skipping a note in a scale. And there's two types of thirds. There's minor thirds, which you can think of as a total of three semitones or being slightly larger than a tone. And there's major thirds, which could be considered one, two, three, four semitones higher or the total of two tones. C to D is a tone, D to E is a tone. Ultimately, I think it's easier to think of as up three semitones is a minor third up four semitones is a major third. So a major chord is going to be a major third. And then on top of this top note, we're going to add another minor third, up four semitones plus up three semitones. And no matter where you start on the piano, that will always give you a major sound. Here's a B flat up, one, two, three, four, up one, two, three. If I reverse that, so I go up three semitones, and then four, I get a minor chord. Back to C as our example, up one, two, three, and then up one, two, three, four. Now I have C minor, or a more tough one maybe F sharp. Up, one, two, three, and then up one, two, three, four. That gives me an F sharp minor chord. Now, the other type of chord we discussed, the diminished chord is only going to use minor thirds. So we start on C up three, up three. There's our diminished chord. A flat up three, up three. There is an A flat diminished chord. So again, to recap, major is a major third plus a minor third, four plus three. A minor chord is a minor third, plus a major third, three semitones plus four semitones. And a diminished chord is up three semitones plus another three semitones. Now, look, I know this is a lot to digest. I don't expect you to get it on the first pass anyways. So I don't know that there's a whole lot more that I need to dig into to give you the basic concepts of major and minor chords. But there they are laid out. Really you want to be thinking of them as combinations of thirds, major thirds, four semitones, and minor thirds, three semitones. You might be thinking, we did four plus three, we did three plus four. We did three plus three, but we never did four plus four. Quite briefly, if I went up four semitones and another four semitones, you'd get something called an augmented chord. But for now, you will not find these in major scales or natural minor scales. So it's out of context, but I wanted to at least sort of overturn that one rock that you might be left kind of wondering like, but wait, what's going on with the four plus four? We didn't address that. So it's called an augmented cord, augmented being big, so it's the bigger number four plus four, in this case. And you might have noticed diminished is to make something smaller. So we've used the three plus three, the smaller intervals. So going back into the key of C major, our first chord, if we go C up a skip up a skip staying true to white notes for now, get a major chord. If I move up to the next note of my C major scale, go up two skips. I get a minor chord, minor major, major, minor diminished major. Major chords are always going to sound a bit happy, minor chords. Are going to sound a bit sad, and diminished chords are going to sound tense and on the spookier end of that minor sound. Now, this whole major chord, minor chord, minor chord, major chord, that pattern of major, minor minor major, major, minor, diminished major is true for every major scale. Remember, we're using tone, tone, semitone tone, tone, tone semitone to create every major scale. And despite the fact that their shapes might be quite different than one another, spacing of every note to the next note is the same amongst all the scales. So whether I'm in C major and pulling out major, minor minor, major, major, minor, diminished major or E flat major, major, minor, minor, major, major, minor diminished major, it's the same sort of sound. So this is why some pianists, if they're playing with a singer, for example, and they're playing a song that is in the key of G, it uses the G major scales set of notes. And the singers like, My voice is a little thick today. I'm getting over a cold. Let's take the song down to E major. A pianist, if they're well seasoned, will be able to now reshift all the chords into this new key because there's this relativity of understanding, my first chord is major. The fifth chord is major. Oh, she wants it lower. Okay, so E major, the first chord is major, up to B major. The fifth chord is major. You're just shifting all the same relative chords, so majors and minors down to a new area or up to a new area. Again, that's for more advanced players, but I wanted to give you this idea that even though the chords have all these different shapes and scales have all these different shapes, it's really a byproduct of the piano being a little bit tricky with this set of three black notes and two. We have five black notes. We have seven white notes. None of these numbers are particularly even within math. So you end up getting this cacophony of shapes that you have to memorize if you want to get good at the instrument, but we are lucky in that things are relative. So if I'm playing C major, we'll call this A major one because I'm starting on the first note of the scale. D minor, a minor two because I'm starting on the second note of the scale. A major five back to a major one. So one, two, five, one, where the two is minor, I could do this in Fmjor now. Fmjor has its own set of notes, so I need to watch out for any black notes, but we end up getting one, which is major, two, which is minor. Five, which is major, and then back to our major one. Now, I'm playing a bit of advanced voicing, so let's make it even more simple. C major is major one, D minor is minor two. G major is major five, one, two, three, four, five, so we're identifying the scale note to help identify the chord. One, two, five, one. The two was minor, everything else was major. We're in F major now, one, two, five, one. The two is the only minor chord. If you've learned a song that you really like and you've learned the chords, you can readjust the chords into a new key. Instead of playing it in G major, you could play it in D major. You'll get a whole new set of shapes, but it'll sound relatively the same. Not talking theory for a moment, listen. Here's the example G major shifted to D major. Here it is? There it is in G, now in D. It still has a similar feel, although it's a little bit pitched down. So get started. What I would recommend is that you focus on the one, four and five. What's really cool about that is in a major key, the one chord built on the first note is going to be a major chord. Passing over these minors, the four chord, the next one is also major, and the five chord is major. It's all the major chords within that major key. You might remember we had major, minor, minor, major, major, minor diminished major. The one, the four, and the five were all the major chords. And again, when I say 14, five, I'm just talking about a chord built off of the first note of the scale, a chord built off of the fourth note of the scale and a chord built off of the fifth note of the scale. Now, if I go to a minor key like a minor, the one is minor the four is minor, and the five is minor. Now, that five often gets challenged in its own way and it's played as a major chord, but it's outside the context of what we're talking about right now. But also, just as a starting point, remembering that one, four and five are either all major or all minor, it's a really great starting point. It's three out of seven chords, nearly half, and it's super easy to memorize if you approach it from that angle. So, step one figure out the notes of a scale. Step two, go through each note of that scale, but skip two times above each note. Again, you can only choose notes from that scale, so we're not introducing other notes, but those will be the collection of chords that you can use to play a song within a key. I gave the example of C major being all white keys. But let's choose a scale that's a little bit more difficult. Let's choose G major. From G, if I go up, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone, you'll see I have one black note an F sharp. So now as I'm going through each note within the scale and adding two skips, I need to make sure that if there's an F, I raise it to an F sharp. That's going to happen three times F sharp can be the top note of a chord. It can be the middle note of a chord, like this D major, and it can also be the bottom note of a chord, like this F sharp, diminished chord. That's considering one black note that we have to watch out for. But some scales are going to have all five black notes. So as you explore this stuff more and more step by step, it will get easier, but start with approaching scales that maybe have no black notes, no sharps or flats or maybe one maximum two, just to make sure that you really have a comfortable starting point. So that's the basics of extracting chords out of a key. It's not even a bad idea. Once you figure out all the chords that are available within a certain key, write them down. Now if you want to do some songwriting, you have a collection of chords that you know will work well with each other, whether it's a Taylor Swift Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Sabrina Carpenter song, doesn't matter. I'd say 90% of the time, they're only going to use cords that are strictly available within a key. Now, sometimes they do explore a little bit outside, but it's really about understanding the basics and then exploring further from there. You would start with a cheese pizza, learn to make a pepperoni pizza, learn to add some extra top, but you're not throwing sardines on your pizza on day one. If you're going to do it in a way that's actually convincing and tasty, you have to do it with taste, and that comes from experience. So there it is extracting chords from a key. Now we want to start to combine the chords that are available, as well as melody notes that are available so that our harmony and melody can be put together. Now, before we get combining chords with a melody, I want to first go over what a chord progression is developing our chords a little bit more so that we can put it all together. I'll catch you in the next class where we're going to discuss chord progressions. 13. Chord Progressions: All right, let's get talking about chord progressions. In the last class, I started to refer to chords a bit as a one chord or a four chord or a five chord. Again, to recap what I was talking about, if we take a key or a scale or a collection of notes that are available to us and we start on the first note of that scale and go up a couple of skips, this chord that is now provided is called R one chord because the bottommost note is the one of that scale. It is the dough. It is the first note. So C major is a really easy key to work with because we can very clearly see in a linear fashion how all these white white white cords just step up one to get to the next cord. So our one chord is major, or two chord is minor, three is minor, four is major, five is major, six is minor, and seven is diminished before we're back to eight, which is essentially just another one, which is major. So a chord progression is going to take a series of chords, for example, one, four, five, one, or one, two, five, one or one, three, four, five, generally in groups of four chords at a time. And this gets repeated over and over and over, and that might make up the verse of a pop song, for example. Now, if you wanted to learn classical or romantic music, the chord progressions get much more developed and much more theoretically dense. But for pop music, it's easy enough to understand that if I say, we're in the key of C major, and the chord progression is one, two, three, four, five. It would be and just because I'm in C major doesn't mean that every chord is major, right? As I mentioned, there's going to be some major chords and minor chords that naturally get extracted as part of this process. So I have had students in the past that ask me, they're like, if it's a major song, it has to be all major chords, right? Well, no, but the most important thing is that the one chord is major. Now, again, like I recommended from the last class, one, four and five in a major key are all major chords. C major is one. F major is built off the fourth note of the scale. So it's a major four, and G major is built off the fifth note of the C major scale. So it's a major five chord. So we take these chord progressions that are generally four chords long. They might be less. They might be more. You might have, like, a simple two chord chord progression, which is pretty rare. Sometimes it's doubled at eight. But keep in mind, music really likes fours. So our chord progressions are usually four chords long or doubled up to eight. Now, as a general rule, your first chord within a progression is generally going to be the one chord. In other words, if my key is C major, I would start generally with a C major chord. As a secondary rule, if you don't want to play C major as your first chord in the progression, just make sure that it finds its way somewhere into your progression. But for now, you should only be starting with your one chord to start these chord progressions. Now, the diminished chord is a bit more tough to deal with. It almost exclusively wants to take you up to the one chord. So if you're going to use the diminished chord built on the seventh node to the scale, make sure generally you're resolving it up to the one. But for now, I would actually say just avoid it altogether. So let's say we're working really with one, two, three, four, five, six, and avoiding that seventh chord. Could almost roll dice to figure out a good chord progression. You start on one, and then out of the options two, three, four, five, six, you just pick three of them. One, six, three, four. I don't even think that's going to be the best sounding progression, but you'll see it still functions fairly well. One, six, three, four. I like that. That sounds nice. Now, one up to six, that's a big leap. Maybe instead of C major up to this A minor chord. Maybe I want to go C major just down to the six. Every A minor chord on the piano in this key is your six chord. So you can generally choose to leap in whatever direction is easiest. I C major, down to A minor, is closer than C major up to A minor, then choose that direction. Now, there are ways that later we can develop these chords based on play styles, and I'm going to be creating lots of courses around different types of playstyles. If harmony in chords is something you're very interested in, I have three levels of courses on chords and chord progressions, as well as courses on romantic harmony and modulation. So I have lots available to you. You can take this to whatever level you want. But for right now, let's keep things simple. We're going to start on our one, and I'm going to develop a bit of a play style. I'm going to create an octave in my left hand and reorder the notes of C major in a different way. So the C is now on top. This is not translatable right now. I don't expect you to go to the piano and do this right away. But what I want to show you is that as you develop this stuff, I'm still playing a 1634 chord progression. It's just disguised with a bit more flair. It would sound like this. Sounds a whole lot nicer than just but that's our shell or our outline for the progression, and from there, you can apply a style to that. We'll be discussing that more in one of the later classes within this course. So if you like the idea of playing a particular style, I'm going to help you break down some ways that you can analyze the style and try to re engineer or reconstruct it yourself. So again, just keep in mind that chord progressions work for major keys and minor keys. Let's do the same thing where we're in a minor key this time. We're starting on one again. It's very safe. Maybe one, four, three, five. We would have a minor as the one. Three, four is D minor. Three, one, two, three is C major. One, two, three, four, five is E minor. Gives us this sound again with a more sort of finalized touch, one five and then back to one. From there, you can sing over top. You can have a guitarist ripping a solo. There's lots of room for melodic development over top of these chord progressions. Now, some styles follow a very particular set of chords as their progression. The blues, for example, is very often one, four, one, one, four, four, one, one, five, four, one, and then the option of five or one at the end. So, for example, 14. One, sits here for a bit. Four. Four twice, and then back to one, two times. Five, four, one. And then five is optional at the end, but you start to learn and memorize certain types of progressions based on the genre. Now, the blues is very particular. It follows this pretty exclusively with some variation. There's a blues in 68, there's a jazz blues. There's all these other types of blues progressions, but they all start with this in mind and then change things slightly. Classical music, for example, has its own set of rules that are arguably even more simple to start, but then get much, much more detailed as you dive deeper into that harmonic theory. So keep in mind that as you're learning a style deeper and deeper, you're going to understand the tricks of the chord progressions used within that style. It makes it a lot easier to learn other songs within that style or even compose songs in that style yourself. So that's the basics of a chord progression. Whether you're playing the chord progression with both hands, focusing on harmony in both hands and then having some sort of melody over top, or maybe a chord progression in the left hand and then a melody in the right. Those are both options, and they're the two main options that we have as pianists. Is my role simply harmony or is it harmony and melody? Sometimes we have a role of just melody, but it's a lot less common than the first two options. So in the next class, we're going to talk in much more detail about combining harmony, AKA chord progressions with melody so that you can start to play some songs and start to create your own songs. Let's dive in. I'll catch you in the next class. 14. Combining Harmony & Melody: Alright, let's start putting harmony and melody together. In other words, taking the chord progressions or the concept of chord progressions from the last class and applying some sort of melody over top. At the end of the day, this is not a whole course on melody writing, and there's a lot of nuance that goes in to taking harmony and melody and fusing them together properly. But as a course that outlines the basics, I'll give you the basics of this concept so that you understand how to take harmony and melody and fuse them together quite quickly so you can hit the ground running, experimenting with some melodic and harmonic ideas. For now, let's stay in the friendly key of C major, giving us these seven chords as options. C major, D minor, E minor F major. G major, A minor, and B diminished. Again, for now, let's avoid the diminished chord and work with the first six chords. We don't have to start on the one chord. In other words, C major. But most of the time, you're going to find that's the case, so we will be starting on C major for this little harmonic slash melodic fusion we're about to put together. To prove how we can put this together pretty randomly, I actually have a die here. I don't think a one is on it. It goes up to nine. This is actually for determining time signatures when I do piano improvisations. But we're just going to play around with it anyway. I'm just going to kind of roll onto my hand. We have four I think that's a nine, but we're gonna call it a six 'cause there's not nine chords available. So four, six, four. Okay, that's fine. We don't have to have all different chords to do this. So we're gonna start on one. Then we're gonna play four. Then we're gonna play six. Then we're gonna play four. It's gonna sound just fine. So this role is more for my left hand. Now, there's no crazy playing style at this point. I'm sort of just kind of taking my left hand and holding each chord. Now, towards the end of this course, we will be going into more detail as to how to outline the attributes and aesthetics of a style. In other words, little pianistic qualities that make your piano part fit the genre well. As a brief example, this one, four, six, four, if I play it like this, it almost has a Latin sort of feel. So there are certain play styles that we can apply to these progressions to really hone in to that style. But again, for now, one, four, six, four, holding each chord as we go. Now, as you know, in the key of C major, the notes available to us are CD E, F, G, A, B, and C. When I'm playing a C major chord, the three notes I'm playing are C, E or G. And if I was to play this chord in both hands, it would sound fine, just a little bit thicker. So that tells me right away that my right hand can choose any one of those three notes. After all, if this full chord works with this full chord, then a piece of it should be fine, as well, too. So E works, G works, or C works. It's kind of the Canadian national anthem. Anyway, if we take the second note of the scale, it's not in my chord, but it doesn't sound terrible. It's quite colorful. If I take the fourth note, maybe a little more conflicted. The sixth note, quite colorful, and the seventh note, also quite colorful. So your options are stability. Play something that is in the chord currently. So if I'm playing a C major chord, those are my three note options. If I'm playing an F major chord, these are my three note options, the three notes that make up that second chord. So stability, a chord note. Our color or dissonance. So conflict. So for now, we're going to stick mostly towards chord tones to play things nice and safe. So if you were in the room with me, I would say pick CE or G, doesn't matter. A lot of students pick E. I don't know why, so we're just going to choose that as our starting note. Again, it's in the chord, so it sounds fine. Some solid options from here would be repetition. Now, on piano, this sounds a little bit too repetitious. But if I say, like, once in my life. Now I put words to it, and we repeat a lot when we're singing. This sounds fine. So, maybe not too much repetition, but we could try repeating the note. We could try stepping up a note from our key and then back down, or we could go down a step and back up. These are called neighbor tones. I could also pass through this neighbor to the next chord tone, G, G is in my chord. Or E can pass down to the C, the other chord tone, again, through its neighbor, down to the next chord tone. If I was on C, I'd have to pass down through a couple of notes before I reach another chord tone cause C is in my chord. B is not, A is not, but then G is. And you can hear it doesn't feel settled until I reach that G. Listen, this is fine. And then still some conflict. And now it sounds resolved. So we have these passing tones where we're passing through the neighbor, up to the next chord tone. So repeat, upper neighbor, lower neighbor, upper passing, lower passing or in some cases, what I would call, like, a double passing tone or G, up to C, in this case, another double passing tone. So I'm going to do this almost kind of randomly. Now, I wish you were in the room with me, but you're not, so you're gonna have to trust that what I'm doing is just sort of randomized. We're on our C chord. E is our first note. Let's do an upper neighbor. Now our next chord is F, and I could come back to this F. I'm going to repeat the E into it. Maybe another upper neighbor. And then I'm gonna pass through G to this A for my A chord. Maybe a lower neighbor, and then we can just jump straight up to a C. You don't always have to be passing through. As long as you're not leaping too far, you can just sort of hop to another chord note. Now, this is a little bit colorful. And then we're back to this C chord. So we're on this C with our F chord. I'm just going to start passing down through a bunch of notes until I reach my first note again, E. So I believe we have something like this. Following some basic rules, it might have been 90% accurate. I think I might have played one thing a little wrong, but you can see even getting to that 90% mark following the rules worked pretty well. We had these neighbor tones. We had passing tones, especially towards the end, we're passing through a bunch of notes within our key with the anticipation of landing on the E. I'll be honest, when I was playing the C on my F chord, I knew my next chord was going to be a C major. I knew it was going to be this set of notes CEG. And I told myself, I need to try to get back towards where my melody started. I don't need to, but I like the idea that if I wanted to repeat a verse, I could start it the same way. Just something that was happening in my head at the time. So I thought, Okay, why don't I just try to get to this E? I'm not even thinking of the F chord. Even though I'm on this F chord and playing this C, I'm anticipating the next chord. And that kind of comes from jazz studies. Like, if you are a jazz musician, you'll recognize that you're usually kind of thinking one chord ahead. And the idea that you're playing, you actually had already one chord prior. That's not necessarily true for everyone, but this idea of thinking ahead is also very important. So let's switch up the sound and hear it one more time. So I threw a little grace note in there as well, too. It's just the idea that imagine you're trying on a C chord to play a C, and you accidentally stumble into it with a note beside or it's almost like the first person that did that when, you know, that actually doesn't sound too bad. So you get these little scoops into notes as well. So as an overview, we have a chord progression usually for chords. That's for a section of a song like a verse or a chorus, and our melody is going to work mostly around the notes from each chord. Now, I'm not saying my first chord is C major, so all my melody notes need to be focused around CE and G because the next chord has a different set of notes. And then the next chord has a different set of notes. So whatever chord you're playing in that moment, that will influence the notes you choose for your melody. Now, I think the most improvised part of all this is the rhythm that you choose. So listen to a lot of music that exposes you to dense and complex rhythms, so that even if you want to play the simple stuff, it's going to feel like taking some weight off the bat. It's going to swing a lot more light and a lot more easy. But in terms of coming up with the melody itself, it can be kind of formulaic. You can also choose to be a little bit adventurous and not play all the right notes. In other words, a melody note that reflects a current note within your chord. You could try to be more colorful. You see, it's much more colorful if I'm not choosing all the safest notes, getting a little bit more jazzy or contemporary, but that's not a bad thing. So there it is the basics of putting harmony and melody together. You can go as deep as you want into this sort of study. But I'd recommend, if this is something of interest, do take some courses specifically on melody writing, which goes much deeper and chords and chord progressions. All courses that I do offer something to consider. I'm not trying to funnel you. I'm just saying if it's of interest, make sure you check it out. So that's it for this class, I'm going to catch you in the next class where we're going to talk a little bit more about pop music. I'll see you there. 15. Learning Pop Music: So we've talked about chord progressions, adding a melody to some chords and understanding the basics of songwriting. And I think from here, the next natural step is to analyze the approach to pop music so that you can take a pop song and start to learn it on your own. Now, admittedly, I'm cautious about using any one particular pop song within this course because as I've done that in the past, certain types of course providers will flag it, and then the course can't be put out. So what I'll do is I will do a little screen recording of some of the stuff I'm talking about in terms of accessing pop songs online. And then I'll give you some more generic examples as to how you can apply this stuff. Again, I'd recommend if you're taking private lessons, take these concepts into your lessons so that you can start to work on specific songs on your own. So let's take a simple song, whether it be from The Beatles or Bruno Mars or whoever it might be. What we're going to do is take a look at how this music looks on a site like, for example, Ultimate Guitar. Usually, if you type in Hey Jude chords and lyrics or any song, chords and lyrics, Ultimate guitar is going to be one of the first websites that pops up. So what you'll notice here is that you see all the lyrics laid out and you'll see chord symbols up above those lyrics. Generally, the chord symbol is going to line up with the syllable or the part of the word that is being sung in that moment. But it all kind of looks loose. There's no grid. We don't have a full proper understanding of rhythm. So some of this comes from this intuitive, I'll say intuitive, but I think just basic listening skills of the song you're trying to learn. Does the first chord sound like it lasts four beats or maybe it's only two or maybe it's eight beats? As a general rule, I would say, start with four beats per chord. You'd be shocked at how often that is the case. But if you start to see sections that are a little bit more dense, in terms of those chords, they might be playing a little bit faster. They're coming down those chords a little bit quicker. Now, there are a lot of pop songs that use the chord progression 15, six, four. And by now, that should be making some sense to you, right? We have the first chord of our C major scale. The fifth chord, one, two, three, four, five, building a chord from that note. Here's our sixth note. There's our chord. Here's our fourth note. There's our chord. So one, five, six, four. From No Woman, No cry by Bob Marley to Let It Be by the Beatles to Don't Stop Believing by Journey, there are so many pop and rock songs that use this chord progression, so it is a pretty broad band place to start. And I'm going to show you some playstyles and approaches that you can use with this progression. Now, first, I should mention there's two main approaches. Are you singing or are you working with a singer or a horn player, for example, somebody else that's playing the melody? Well, if you are, here's the approach. And after we'll talk about the approach where you're playing the melody and harmony together. So what I would recommend for your left hand for now is just play octaves. Get used to the stretch of a C to a C, for example, it's going to be the same stretch for any octave. It doesn't matter if they're black notes or white notes. The stretch is always the same. And as you get more comfortable with that stretch, eventually, you can start to really play around with some more complex rhythms outside of the context of this course, but just letting you know that octave will set you up for success later. So one thing I should mention is this is going to get in the way of your bassist territory. We are now down in that bass area. So you either want to work with a bit of a thinner piano sound or at least make sure you're not cranking the bass like on a house mixer or something like of your piano sound because that's really going to conflict with your bassist. If this is too conflicted as an octave, your next option is to play a fifth. In other words, think of a chord with no middle note. CDEF G one, two, three, four, five, there's our fifth. It can still give great results, but from my experience with pop and rock piano playing, the octave is going to be a little bit more authentic and give you a little bit more of a beefy sound. So to start off, let's do something relatively simple, but for some, it might be tricky. We're going to play the one the five, six, and the four as octaves. Now, because the stretch is always the same, I'd recommend either just watch your thumb or pinky. Visually, my thumb is closer, so I'm watching my thumb, and I'm keeping this stretch. It's almost like I could take my other hand and just move this left hand around on the piano. Imagine this hand is made of stone because the stretch is always the same you just really have to aim one finger, knowing the other finger will play the proper corresponding note. Next, we've already kind of gone through one, five, six, four in the right hand. Let's now put it together, and mostly because these court shapes are all the same, I'm mostly just watching my thumbs. So thumbs on Cs, thumbs on Gs, right? Thumbs on As. There they are, thumbs on Fs. You don't have to play it like that. I'm just showing you when I play those extra notes after. Visually, that's where my eyes are for the most part. Even if my chord shape has a black note in it, I'm still watching my thumb, and I know to kick this finger up a little bit. But in terms of these progressions that jump around, that's what you want to be doing is watching mostly one finger and adjusting the shape accordingly. Now, in more advanced courses, we would be talking about inversions, ways of being able to play those four chords without jumping around. It's by reordering the notes, but it's a kind of complex subject, especially at this stage of things. So you're kind of left leaping around a little bit, which has its own sound. There's nothing wrong with that, but it has its own difficulties. Just the leaps themselves can be quite tough. To remedy that, you need to learn more theory. So consider this a rite of passage. You have to learn it this way to later sort of earn the more proper version. So now that you have the concept of these left hand octaves and right hand chords moving around, let's talk about a couple of different playing styles that you can try applying. The first one is really simple, four beats per chord, so one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. You'll notice on that first chord one, two, three, I'm already moving my hand, but the sound is still holding. Because I'm using my sustained pedal, and sustained pedals are our best friend as pianists because it allows the illusion that our hand is moving like you see, it's inaccurate. It's moving perfectly fast like a laser beam. But no, I'm playing the first chord. My pedals holding so my hands don't have to. And then when I play that next chord, I lift the pedal and then catch the new sound by pressing it again. Playing with a sustained pedal is a bit outside of the context of this particular class. But if you have some experience with it, make sure you're using it. And again, generally, pedal down, sound holds, pedal up, sound doesn't hold, so you'll be lifting it and then catching a new sound by pressing back down. If you hold it the whole time, Everything bleeds together, and if you don't hold it at all, the sound is more separated. So the petal helps us smooth out the connection of chords. The second version you might want to try a four bit pulse in the right hand. Now I'm not using the pedal. It's okay that it's a little bit dry. This is tougher than it looks if you're a total B getter, but this is the concept. You take the right hand. You're playing four times per cord. If you're catching on to this pretty quickly, good for you. And then you can change the cord to do whatever you want from here with the pedal. This sounds a little bit different. This is with the pedal down and here's no pedal again. Now, this is what the left hand holding. You can also just play the left hand staccato or short, kind of like the right hand, but just once. From here, I like to add extra little left hand accents, something like this. Now we're starting to get a little bit sort of Michael Buble. Again, still kind of Beatles. You turn this minor, you give sounds sort of like the killers or Imagine Dragons for some of their songs, miss Well, too. Next up, we can take a chord and play the highest two notes followed by the lowest. Highest two notes, followed by the lowest. Again, the left hands not changing. It's just holding these octaves, removing through. So that's the concept. You can play it dry as well, too. Sounds a little bit more like a little kids TV show at this point, but you can see that little change is pedal or no pedal, holding or not holding. These sort of differences instantly change the style of what you're playing. With this same sort of thumb and top notes broken, we could also play something in 34 or 68, where our main pulse in the music is three beats. Thumb, chat, chat, thumb, chat, chat, um, chat, chat. Faster. So you can get singing over this or have a singer do their thing. I've given you a lot of major examples. Let's turn it into a minor example, something like So there I'm just taking the octaves and moving them around a little bit. Sort of like the idea of connecting a melody through chord tones. So if I'm going from a C minor to an F minor, for example, I can take my left hand and walk up through the notes in my scale until I get to this F. Maybe my next chord is A flat. So again, I can pass through the G and then settle back to the G, depending on what the chords are. But don't be afraid to move that left hand around, fill in between the roots of your chords, or even just sidestep from time to time. You can really play around with things. Now, a fun thing you can try is drones in the left hand, just taking that octave and wiggling pinky to thumb. You're going to end up getting an 80s power ballot or a very 80 sort of sound if you play around with different chords over this, something like So that's not necessarily something that's going to work for a lot of pop songs, but again, just showing you that this arrangement of an octave in the left and moving around chords with subtle changes, you instantly tap in to different styles. Now, if you want to learn some really funky styles, the first course I ever put out was on funky piano rhythms. It's this idea that you could take a left hand and break up this octave. And you can really place some complex stuff over top. It's a lot harder to sing over, but it certainly does have a lot of value when you're playing in a band. Now, the other option that you have is to learn the melody of a song in the right hand, just maybe one note at a time and play through the left hand chords. We did that in the last class, but basically, it kind of applies to any song. If you're just holding chords in the left hand and then playing a melody in the right you're gonna get some pretty simple but effective results. So whether it's a major song or a minor song, the thing that you're not going to get from a site like Ultimate guitar is the melody. I think the expectation is you learn the guitar chords or pianists, we can steal those chords, as well, too. And then you're meant to sing over top. It's kind of like everyone's around the campfire. Someone has their guitar and everyone's singing. We want to learn the song, but we don't know the chords. So you pull up the chords, and then, generally, most people are able to sing along with that melody. A little bit tougher when you're trying to figure out the melody in that right hand. So if you're trying to dodge sheet music, your best bet is to, if you have some singing capabilities, sing through and try to find out the notes within that song. Now, if you can find out the original key of the song, let's say a Taylor Swift song is in the key of G, then you know that the G major scale is most likely or the key of G major, is most likely the set of notes that she used in creating that melody. So half of it is really just finding the first note. If she starts singing on this note, you have to kind of fish around that sounds like it. And the first chord on Ultimate Guitar, wherever it is, is showing me a G major chord. So this is my starting point. Now, the chords are going to help you a little bit with the melody. Remember, I was saying, whatever notes are in the chord are most likely going to be in the melody. Well, that narrows things down quite a bit. It's not going to be consistent every time, like a D major chord will not always give you these three notes in the melody, but it starts to narrow down most likely what their choices were as a songwriter. Now, the coordination of coming up with fancy left hand parts is quite a bit for a beginner. So I would say either hold the chords for four beats or try pulsing the cords for four beats. Okay, so left hand holds chords or pulses. Right hand plays the melody. At this point, you kind of have to figure it out on your own a little bit. But I'd say, start with playing some chords and singing overtop or have a friend sing overtop, get more acquainted with melodies, how they flow, how they work. And then if you want, try to create some pop renditions at the piano. The point of this class was just to show you the two roles that we have as a pianist, either accompanying a singer or some sort of melodic player or doing it all ourselves. And as we do it all ourselves, it's important to keep things simple enough that you can execute it well. Small changes like using the pedal or not using the pedal, pulsing chords or holding chords. They're going to give you different results, and they're going to sort of tap into different styles. So take this information, ask yourself, what's the pop song that I think I would want to learn? Go onto the net, type in chords and lyrics for that song, once the chords pop up, play through them. And then, again, your choice is to sing over top or have a friend sing or try to figure out the melody with your right hand. So that's it for this class that takes our basics of fusing melody and harmony together, applies it within a pop setting. I hope you had some fun. I hope you're inspired enough to go out and learn one of your favorite pop songs. I'll catch you in the next class. 16. Summarizing a Style: When it comes to learning a style on piano, the best thing you can do is listen to lots of music within that style. Now, sometimes we're lucky, and they already have a piano player, and we can listen to what they're playing. Are they playing something pokey? Are they playing something smooth and buttery? What is their play style, and how can I emulate that? But we're not always so lucky. Sometimes a band might not have a pianist, and then your guitarist comes to band practice and goes, I want to learn this song. And you're thinking, I don't know what I'm supposed to play. And you have to come up with your own part. Well, two things. One, listen to the overall characteristics of the song. Is it pokey? Is it energetic? Is it slow and groovy and use that as a synopsis for what you're going to bring to your piano part. Also, listen to what the other instruments are doing. Is the guitar part really busy? If your guitarist brought it to the band, probably they probably want to challenge themselves with something fun. But you want to make sure that you're complementing that part with something contrasting. If they're complex, feel free to make it more simple. If their part is very simple, you can feel free to make it more complex. But assuming you're a beginner because you're taking this course, I would say don't feel like you have to make it complex, simple will almost always work. Something else to watch out for is listening to the rhythm in terms of how it lays out on the grid. Is it straight? Just like a metronome or a clock, or is it swung, something that's a bit more gallop. This is really important because styles like hip hop, big band swing, and jazz are going to swing their rhythm with that gallop. But other styles like pop, rock, and classical will be a little bit more straight ahead with a straight rhythm. Now, the cool thing about learning a lot of one style, let's say you're learning a lot of Beatles songs is that you'll start to pick up on the play style of that pianist. And then any of the influences that the Beatles had and any bands that the Beatles have influenced, that style is going to bleed over a little bit. This is really common in jazz where we learn the style of one guitarist, for example, and then ask, who were they influenced by? Let's learn them, and who, as modern artists, have been influenced by that guitarist. Let's learn some of their music, because ultimately the bands before and after your main influence are going to have very similar characteristics, but they're going to bring their own thing to the mix. And that's going to kind of show you how to take a play style and do something different with it. You'll get to see that on multiple levels with that sort of approach. So if you want to get really good at playing a certain band's music or a certain style, listen to a lot of that band or listen to a lot of that style. Not passively, not while you're cooking, not while you're chatting with friends, headphones on, presumably, and digging into what you're listening to. What sort of rhythms are they using? Is it straight or swung? Does it feel like it's four beats or three beats or six beats as the main pulse? And if you're not too sure, check the Internet or Chachi PT or whatever. All those sort of simple questions about songs are readily available. But it's more important that you are able to get this yourself. Off the start, sure, if you're not sure if the song has three beats or four beats, use the Internet, but you should be able to hear this stuff over time. So don't rely on crutches and make sure that you're actively trying to improve your active listening. And lastly, there's nothing more important than just diving in. Even if you don't feel ready, just go for it. Bring some material either to your private lessons or try out some self study. With everything that I've given you within this course, it should be enough to get started as long as you're okay to take it slow and simple off the start. Now I have plenty of courses on chords and chord progressions, funky piano rhythms, melody writing one oh one. Those are all available. If there was any area within this course that you felt particularly intrigued, feel free to check out those courses. Also, I'm not the only chorus instructor on this platform. There's lots of great stuff out there. So if there's something that I haven't covered yet and someone else has feel free to go and check out their material, especially if it's something that they specialize in. If you want to learn gospel piano, learn it from a gospel pianist. If you want to learn Blues piano, try to find someone that specializes in blues or has played a lot of Blues piano. But again, as this course as your starting point, you should be able to start to be asking yourself the right questions of what style do I want to learn? And how can I take this material to get started. I really did have a great time teaching the material within this course. I hope you had fun learning it. Don't forget to review the material as much as you see fit. Lots of repetition is really going to help you digest this material. Again for taking this course, and I'll catch you in the next one. 17. Outro: Thank you for taking this course on piano concepts for absolute beginners. If you truly were a beginner coming into this, I hope that you can see we've covered a lot of different areas from theory to some technical, to some ear training, to make sure that you have a wide variety of skills so that as you want to explore this instrument further, you don't feel like someone approaching the piano. You start to feel a bit like a pianist all on your own. Now the truth is everybody at this instrument always feels humbled, always feels like there's another thing that they could be learning, always want to get to that next step on the piano, always want to challenge themselves to the next level. So I want you to also keep in mind that to some extent, even professionals feel like a beginner in certain areas. It's really about asking yourself, what do you want to take away from this instrument the most? Are you hoping to develop your ear? Are you hoping to challenge your fingers? Are you hoping to become a songwriter? Find out what it is from within this course that you appreciate the most about the piano and start to really implement that into your own style and into your own exploration on the instrument. So, for example, I really love harmony, and lately, if I pop onto YouTube, if I pop into a lesson with a teacher, whatever it might be, I'm asking harmonic based questions. Now, I'm not ignoring scales and theory and ear training and all that other stuff, but I'm making sure that where I feel most passionate on the instrument is where I'm developing the most. And my hope within this course is that you can start to pinpoint I appreciated this class a little bit more and this one, actually. Come to think of it, they're both based around melody writing. Maybe that's the thing I should be working on a bit more because it's what I'm most passionate about. At the end of the day, if you want to be practicing a proper amount on the instrument, let's say, five days a week, 20 to 30 minutes, you're not going to do that if you're forcing yourself to play scales. You really want to make sure that you're studying the stuff that you like the most and using that as fuel for your practice. So that's one of the big reasons why I created this course. And I hope that by the end, having gone through all the classes, there's a couple that resonate with you so you can take your exploration of the piano to that next level. I want to thank you for taking this course and also congratulate you on getting through to the end. It's not easy jumping into some new topic, but what I promise you is that I'm going to continue to create so many courses that whatever you are most passionate about, there's some other avenue that you can take to help you develop in the right direction. Now, don't forget to practice the material within this course. And if you are studying with a teacher, make sure that you bring this material into a lesson so that they can help you develop it. Try to get to the keys a little bit every day if you can. You don't need to be spending 2 hours at the instrument every day, but some amount of playing the piano every day really adds up. So it's really important that you put in the work and continue to come back and explore the material from within this course, as at the end of the day, this is not something that I expect you to blow through once and fully absorb. So do make sure that you're going back, exploring all the classes that you found you were most passionate about and using that as fuel for your practice. Don't forget to review the class that is specifically on project details as there is a project for this course, and I want to make sure that it's all very clear. So please do submit your project so that I can review it and give you some feedback and help you take your playing to the next level. So that's it for this course on piano concepts for Absolute Beginners. I hope you had a great time and that you're starting to understand what areas of the instrument you feel most passionate about. And at the very least, I hope you just feel a little bit more comfortable at the instrument as you take your next steps forward. That's it for this course, and I'll catch you in the next one.