Piano Improvisation for Beginners

1. Introduction: Hey, and welcome to my course for beginner pianists, where I'm going to teach you how to improvise. We're going to cover some of the basics and talk about chords in our left hand, as well as chord progressions to satisfy some of what we need to understand about harmony. We're also going to talk about some rhythms that you can apply and some scales that you can apply to your right hand. In other words, we're going to be talking about how to create melodies. So you have some harmonic ideas, some melodic ideas, some rhythmic ideas. You put it all together. Next thing you know, you're improvising. I think a lot of people have the goal to be able to just sit down and play freely on the instrument. It's not always that simple. You need to understand some of the tricks along the way. Now, that being said, it doesn't have to be difficult as long as you're taking the right approach. This is really a course for beginners where we start just playing around on the black keys. Then we talk about just playing around on the white keys, and then we kind of introduce a little bit of mostly white keys with some blacks. But I'm not taking you through some really fancy scales. We're keeping things relatively simple. Even on a rhythmic level, we're either just holding chords or creating a basic pulse. You can get so much mileage out of simple tricks within improvisation, you can use different scales or collections of notes for your melodies, and you can use different chords or chord progressions to really shift and shape the emotion that you're bringing through that harmony. Now, I would have loved to have a chorse like this when I was a beginner that I could take. It would have saved me going through all the mistakes that I had to make to get to where I am now. Now, of course, we're all going to make some mistakes along the way, but I can help you avoid some of the mistakes that I made. As long as you're going through this course in order, it should get progressively more difficult with a certain set of rules that will help you achieve something that sounds very passable as your improvisations. Now, there is going to be a course project for this course, and it's actually one of the easiest projects that I've given out of all the courses that I've done. Simply put, you're going to take one of the classes provided within this course, the one that you like the most, and you're going to create an improvisation based on the material from that class. You're going to record yourself doing that, whether it be on video or simply audio and upload it so that I can review it for you. Now, there is going to be a class that goes through the course project in much more detail, so make sure that you check it out. Lastly, I want to say congratulations for registering for this course. It's a big step forward for any pianist or musician to start to dive into improvisation. I think a lot of us feel kind of worried or scared. What if I play the wrong note? I don't know what to play. Well, I'm gonna help you know what to play, and I'm gonna help you so you don't play the wrong notes. You're still gonna make some mistakes, but we do this all the time. Do you know how many things I have to edit out in these classes, 'cause I just say gibberish? This is not a one take by any means. So whether it's verbal and we're making mistakes, it's not really that different when we're playing piano and making mistakes. So if you're comfortable going out and talking to people in the could be comfortable improvising on the piano, as well, too. You just need the right set of skills. We're going to cover major material, happy. We're going to cover minor material, sad, we're going to do some pentatonic scales, which are even cool for, like, guitar solos and piano solos. While that's a style of improvisation, you improvise a solo. This course is more going to be about creating sort of mini pieces or composing on the spot. I mentioned, we're going to develop things as we go so things get progressively harder. So you can feel free to saturate in the first few classes before you move forward. Really make sure you take this course inch by inch, so at no point you feel overwhelmed. It's really meant to be a step by step thing where you can choose your own pace. So, I'm excited to get into things. I hope you are, as well, too, and I'll catch you in the first class. 2. Class Project: All right, so let's break down your project for this course. It's relatively straightforward. Once you've completed the full course, you're going to ask yourself, which class did I enjoy the most and pair that with am I capable of playing the material within that class? If you find a class that really resonated with you, what you're going to do is take the material provided in terms of the techniques for improvisation, and you're going to record yourself playing an improv using that approach. You can record yourself with video. Phone is fine as long as the audio and video quality is decent enough that I can see you and hear you, or you can just record it in a voice app or with a microphone. If you're going to record yourself in terms of video, you're going to upload it to YouTube or Vmeo and supply a public link, and you'll include that link within the course description of this class project. Same thing goes. If you're just doing audio, I'd recommend upload it to SoundCloud. You can access a free account most of the time. You're going to share a public link again within the course description for this project. Now, make sure that you're practicing the material ahead of time so that one, you know you can execute it. And two, you feel comfortable enough sort of showing the progress that you've made so far so that the direction that I give you is kind of like you've hit a roadblock and now you need some help, and then that's where I can step into the picture and help you find your way to the next step. Make sure that you're recording yourself on a day where you really feel in the zone. I do the same thing with these courses. I need to make sure that I'm really feeling dialed in. Yeah, sure coffee helps. But also, there's some mornings I wake up where I'm just like, I don't feel like being in front of a camera. That's the case, don't do the project on that day. Make sure that you're really feeling comfortable. If you're a morning person, record it in the morning. If you're an evening person, record it in the evening, make sure you set yourself up for success as much as you can. This doesn't have to be a cinematic masterpiece. The audio quality doesn't have to be super fantastic. Just make sure you give me enough that I'm able to see and hear things clearly to be able to clearly instruct you in terms of next steps. Of course, I'll let you know the things that I think went best and then some areas of improvement, and I'll give you some direction from there. Now, in all of the classes, I do demonstrate myself improvising, using the material that I'm teaching. So take any one of those as an example of how I would submit this class project. If I'm taking A minor, down to G, down to F, down to E, and improvising using the minor pentatonic, Maybe expanding that so it's longer and then submitting something like that, I can let you know how does the weight between the two hands feel? How is the rhythmic density of your melody? How on time are your chords? There's a lot of things that I can be listening to to help you sort of hone in your sound a little bit more. So that's it for this class project. It's relatively simple, but it's meant to be fun because you're taking the material and you're accountable to be practicing it and then even submitting it to me. Now, the same way improvising is a bit of a vulnerable sort of feel recording ourselves is the same thing. So doing both of these, the course itself on Improv and this particular class project, will help you expand your shell a little bit more as a musician and allow you to consider yourself an improviser. Like I said, we're all improvisers at heart. We do it every day. I'm just helping you hone it in so you can do it on your instrument. And, of course, please do share your experiences with me. And yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing that class project. So once you submit it, I will give you some details. That's it for now. Let me know if you have any other questions, and I'll catch you in the next class. 3. What is Improvisation?: So what is improvisation? I think there's generally two ways that people think of improvisation. One is, and especially on the piano, sort of coming up with a composition on the fly. I heard at some point that improvisation is just the fastest form of composition, and that really stuck with me. I think there's a lot of truth to that. But there's another camp of people when they hear improvisation, they think of a guitar solo or maybe a jazz trumpet solo, which, again, is improvised material. We're used to hearing that rock musicians and jazz musicians will improvise these solos. While the two things are somewhat different, they're actually still very much interrelated. So if I'm improvising a song and I have some chords in the left hand, and I'm choosing where those chords move and how I voice the chord, in other words, how I set the notes up within that chord. And I'm playing a melody in the right hand. What if I just make the melody a little bit fancier? Well, isn't it now kind of like a solo? So if I was to play something like this, Now, if I was to play something like this, it feels a bit fancier and more flourished and ornamented. The first way might feel a bit more like a standard composition in terms of its improvisation, whereas the second way feels a bit more flourished, ornamented, and like a solo. Now, of course, there's a gray area of, if you have some flourish but not a lot, is it a fancy melody? Is it a simple solo? And also solos don't need to be flourished. They could be quite simple, as well, too. So the general rule with improvisation is it's music that you're coming up with on the spot. This is true for acting as well, too, where it's like, give me a topic, and I will act out a scene. You didn't rehearse it, so it's improvised. In fact, even right now, not all of my courses are scripted out word for word. So I'm improvising in telling you what improvisation is. We do it on a daily basis. So first, I want to get rid of this notion of if you're saying to yourself, like, I'm not an improviser, you are but now you just need to learn to translate how to improvise onto your instrument. After all, every day, we're improvising in tons of different ways, probably countless. Now, we do have certain sayings that we might say quite a bit or certain facial reactions that we have that are kind of our go to. And that's kind of part of your personality. But personality on the instrument translates to style. So if you're used to playing certain little melodic phrases or a chord progression that you really like you tend to go to quite often, then that would kind of contribute to your style as a composer or an improviser. For me, I really like the sound of a one flat six, four, five chord progression. I also like to elaborate it so it sounds a little bit more romantic, something like this one, flat six, four, five, And I'll move to that progression quite often when I'm improvising. But from there, I learned how to expand on that progression, change it, create permutations and variations so that it slowly morphed into other progressions. Then you get obsessed with those progressions, change them, and it becomes this like the roots of a tree sort of expanding out into the soil of knowledge, so to speak. So to be clear, for the sake of this course, when I'm referring to improvisation, what I'm really talking about is the idea of sitting down and composing a two handed song on the spot. We want some harmonic elements. We want some melodic elements. And even if your rhythms are simple, that's fine, but you want to slowly also develop the rhythmic elements as well, too. So, of course, I'm going to give you some tricks for harmony, melody, and rhythm. And it's sort of up to you to ask yourself, which of the devices that I teach within this course, which do you like the most and start with nurturing those techniques. In other words, kind of get obsessed with a certain sound and oversaturate in it so that slowly you can expand, like, again, I said, those roots of your knowledge into other things that you can be equally excited about. Another great example is, I play jazz, but I didn't always like jazz, and I never saw myself as a jazz player. I liked classical and I liked rock. Rock led me to funk. Funk led me to jazz funk, Modeski Martin and Wood. Jazz funk got me comfortable in saying, I like jazz. Then I started to explore jazz a little bit more, and the classical upbringing allowed me to understand some of the theory. So that's when it kind of all came connected together. Now, improvisation can be very structured, and that's kind of the way that I'm going to be teaching it within this course. Some contemporary improvisation can be very chaotic, and it's admittedly not the stuff I like to listen to. Like, who's to say this isn't improvisation? Sure, it's improvisation, but is everyone going to like the sound of it? Not necessarily. So there's always like a sort of pushback as we go through Baroque into Classic, into romantic, into contemporary 21st century music. There's always a bit of a pushback of what did they just do in the last era, and let's do it a bit different. Baroque was very nody and had a lot of ornaments, because dynamics on a harpsichord, couldn't be soft and loud and everything in between. Classical music watered down the ornaments but brought in dynamics with the pianoforte or what we now know as a piano. Romantic music allowed us to stretch the time a little bit more and played around a little bit more with the harmony and chromaticism within the melody. In other words, sidestepping to notes outside of the scales a little bit more. And then you get into contemporary music, where it was like, why do we have all these rules? Let's kind of just start breaking them all down. Now, I feel like that was kind of the end of a pretty serious progression of musical eras because it really comes down to what do people want to listen? Some of the more chaotic stuff, I kind of consider that like music for musicians or even more like music for academics. Like, let's study this music and turn it into a thesis. So what I'm trying to say is there's a lot of different styles of improvisation. Some of them are totally random and chaotic. But what I do love about the contemporary style improv, where it's just all over the place is it just gets you out of this structured box and allows you to feel like you can just treat the instrument like a toy. It's a playground, and what do you want to do to have fun? So that's my quick breakdown of what improvisation is, especially within the context of this class. I hope you're ready to learn how to improvise. It's totally fine, but it's going to take some work. I'll catch you in the next class, or we're going to talk about more of the benefits of improvisation. 4. Benefits of Improvisation: So what are the benefits of improvisation? Well, as I mentioned before, improvisation is sort of the fastest form of composition. So if you can improvise, you can compose. In fact, I was taking improv classes in university before I was really taking composition classes. Now, I had composed pop songs, rock songs, funk songs, and electronic, EDM and hip hop songs, but I never really sat down and created piano pieces. Now, I started to improvise these piano pieces, and it wasn't until a couple of years later that I went, like, if I just slow down this process a bit, I can call myself a composer. And since then, I've created a few collections of piano songs, and I do feel like I can call myself a composer or an improviser. So it's totally loud. If you get comfortable with improvising, you're also a composer. Welcome to the club. One of the big benefits of improvisation is this going to teach you how to recover from mistakes. When you don't have time to rehearse the material, you need to sort of just rebound a little bit better when you do hit a wrong note, a wrong chord or play a questionable rhythm. But if you're able to do this within improvisation, what that's going to do is as you're composing, you might go, and then I'll do this note in the melody. Wait. No, I tried that in an improv last week and it sounded weird. Let's change it to this. You can get ahead of those mistakes in your compositions because you've made them so many times within your improvisations. And side note, you will make mistakes in your improvs, and they're encouraged because without making those mistakes, you won't know what sounds good. You won't hone in on your style. And quite honestly, something would be very wrong with you as a human being if you started to improvise and got everything perfect. I would question if you were a robot. So, yes, make some mistakes. It's totally part of the process, and don't beat yourself up over. Now, as part of these mistakes, you might have happy mistakes within your improvisation. Maybe moving to a chord you didn't mean to go to, but you really love the sound of that chord. In fact, I have this with students in lessons sometimes. They'll play the wrong thing. They'll go oops and I'm like, No, no, no, hold on. What'd you just play? And I'm really intrigued, and then later that evening, I'll take that into a composition or an improvisation and play around with it myself so it becomes something that's accessible to me as a composer, improviser. I think these happy mistakes are one of the biggest benefits of improvisation, because they're the things that naturally allow you to expand your style, and not because someone goes, You got to try this progression. It's the coolest chord progression. But instead, it comes from a genuine point of intrigue. You accidentally played one wrong note. You're like, Whoa, I really love the sound of that. What was that? And there's something about making that happy mistake and learning from it that just ingrains it that much more because there's depths of your understanding of something, right? If you learn something at the surface level, like in music theory class, maybe you understand it, but if you're not applying it and applying it with passion, it's not going to be something that's kind of always readily available to you. So try to make sure that you're watching out for those moments that might be considered happy mistakes because they are there for a reason they're there to help you develop, and they're just really fun. Again, it's like the point of intrigue that we have when we first start listening to music that brings us into music. And it's harder and harder to find those points of intrigue as we learn more theory, you can make sense of everything. Another example is I'm a magician. I'm a former professional magician. And the more I learned about magic, the harder it was to fool me. So I would really try to watch for the moment when I felt genuinely fooled because that was me being a kid again, the thing that got me into magic. It's the same with music. The more you learn, the harder it is to be confused about what's happening or really just genuinely intrigued. Those are the moments you want to watch out for. That's the fun stuff. So you really want to tap into those moments where you find something that you didn't mean to play, but you played it and you love it. Make sure you take note of that. Even if you're improvising and you stop mid improvisation to be like, Whoa, what was that? That's okay. Don't blow over those moments. They're super important. Another big benefit of improvisation is it allows you to play more freely with other musicians. The hang up that I see with a lot of students not choosing to be in a band setting or maybe it's a choir or an orchestra is like, I just don't want to mess up in front of everyone else, and I don't know if I'm going to know the right notes to play and the right things to play. Well, the more you improvise, the more you kind of make yourself vulnerable as a musician and get comfortable with that vulnerability. I think this is especially true in band settings when you're expected to maybe play a solo or just play some rhythms that fit in amongst the band. Now, when you first join a band, I will say this is more difficult. But as you start to get used to everyone else's rhythmic style and melodic style, it's like having a conversation. If you know your friend talks a lot, you better be a good listener. But if you know your friend likes to say a few sentences and then parley over to you and listen, then maybe that particular friend, you want to treat the conversation differently. It's the same in bands, and that's why some bands click and some do not. It's like the art of conversation. Do the four, five, six people know how to converse with each other at the same time in a way that makes sense? Well, when you've improvised a lot of rhythms, melodic ideas, harmonic ideas, you have more ways to be able to fit in to those groups. So, certainly, improvisation and the vulnerability that we feel from it really allows us to just sort of dive into settings where we can play with other musicians. Create music on the fly, which is one of the most funnest things you can do in music. So I highly recommend trying it at some point. Make yourself vulnerable, go out there, play with a small combo. It's a whole lot of fun if you think that's stylistically something you would enjoy. Another really great thing about Improv is I've mentioned it's the fastest form of composition, but that's also true for music production. When I'm producing electronic music or hip hop, the outlining chords and melody that are played, even the drums, I'm finger drumming on keys, which I'm quite comfortable with, it all comes together really fast. It's not unlike me to write a song in maybe 45 minutes to upwards of, let's say, 3 hours. But for a fully produced song, that's really quick. That's like you could write an album in two days. Now, are you always going to be inspired to do that? Not necessarily. But what I'm saying is your workflow will get quicker because you won't be hung up so much on theoretical ideas, and you'll have a better understanding of how to fit all the pieces, the bassline, the chords, the melody, the drums, fit them all together in a way that makes sense. Like, I've been in a studio in the past where I'm playing some parts that are meant to be sampled in hip hop beats, and the producer was like, How do you come up with these ideas so quickly? And the short answer is just practicing improvisation and just being willing to make some mistakes or play some things you haven't played before. Or the other thing, too, is if you have a certain bag of stylistic tricks and you're with a producer or someone that hasn't heard those tricks before, something that feels very standard to you might be very new and exciting for them. So it's just a really fun way to quickly come up with ideas in the studio that sound convincing. So zooming out a little bit, another huge benefit to improvisation is what it shows us and teaches us outside of the context of music. If you're a very shy person and you start to work on improvisation and especially performing for other people, maybe this is bringing you a bit more out of your shell. Maybe you feel better conversing with people. And again, conversation is a form of improvisation. So you might feel that you pick up some other life skills as you slowly expand that shell of shyness into something that's a bit more open and willing to make mistakes and willing to be vulnerable and come up with stuff on the fly. Now, while I don't think that those are all of the benefits of improvisation, I think they are the most important ones to address but if you haven't caught on by now, there's a lot of benefits to improvising from life skills to musicianship skills to expanding yourself stylistically. There's just a lot going on that improvisation has to offer to you. So when you start this course, make sure that you have some improv goals in mind. And as you're going through the course, ask yourself which classes help you the most to obtain that goal. And by the end, you should be able to see how that development is coming along. Again, pairing this course with a teacher and addressing those goals to your teacher is going to allow them to help you to highlight those goals and expand on them that much more. So that's it for this class on the benefits of improvisation. Let's get into the meat and potatoes of things and really start improvising. I'll catch you in the next class. 5. Right Hand Rhythms: Alright, let's get started with talking about your right hand rhythms. There's going to be a lot of devices and techniques that I give you throughout this course that you can apply to your left hand. There's going to be this question of what do I do with my right hand? I've been given a set of notes. But what rhythm am I supposed to play to have a convincing melody or improvisation? It's impossible to cover all the rhythmic techniques that you can apply, but I am going to give you some basic starting points to help you up. So even for people with no rhythm, most people can clap a steady beat. And clapping a steady beat equates to playing a steady beat, just kind of on a quarter note pulse, quarter note being one beat per note. Could we then move it around? Let's just stay up on the black keys because we are going to be starting our first improv on the black keys in the next class. So can we just jump around one beat per note. That seems relatively fine. So here's something that you could try that's really simple that will give you more mileage out of this. To start, I just want you to add some silence to either beats one, two, three, or four while keeping a steady beat. We're going to go about it in a specific way. First, we're just going to rest on beat one, then we're going to rest on B two and then rest on B three, and rest on beat four. If that's not making sense yet, I'm going to show you, so here it is. First, we're just going to try resting on all the main beats, one, then two, then three, then four. It would be something like this. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, where one is silence or one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. We're gonna apply this down onto the keys. You would get something like one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one. Beat two as a rest would be one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one. Beat three would sound like one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, and be four. One, two, three. Rest. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. So that you're not just continuously playing quarter notes or steady one beat pulses the whole time in your melody, adding a simple rest can really help break it up. And you can even start to variate, so you're resting on beats two and then maybe beat three, and it gives a bit more variety. It might sound something like this. One, two, three, four, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one. I did add a two beat rest in there, just goes to show there's nothing wrong with that. If you want to do a whole four beats of rest, that's okay, too. Just like in speech, we need to have some rests. You can't just ramble on forever. There's a reason why when we are taught the purpose of a period is to give a small rest that really helps us break up sentences or in this case, musical ideas into phrases or small chunks. The other thing I'm going to recommend you try is applying a pair of eighth notes on any of the main four beats. So what that would sound like is one and two, three. Four, one and two, three, four. If we were applying them to be one, two would be one, two, and three. Four. One, two, and three. Beat, three. One, two, three, and four. One, two, three, and now beat four. One, two, three, four, and one, two, three, four. Let's do another small improv while we're playing around with that. It would sound something like this. One, and, two, three, four, one and two, three, four, one, two, and three, four, one, two, and three, four, one, two, three, and four. One, two, three, and four, and one. Two, three, four, and one, two, three, four, and one. So I was playing around with these pairs of eighth notes on all the main beats. Now, if you really want to go that next step, you can start pairing pairs of eighth notes and rests on almost randomized beats. Now, already, we have tons of possibilities. If you consider all the ways that you could combine one beat pulses, half beat pulses, these pairs of eighth notes, and rests, and then two beat rests, and just it becomes already very dense. And we haven't even covered things like triplets and dotted rhythms. So again, I'm just giving you the basics to get started. This course is for beginners. So the idea of having a steady pulse, resting sometimes or doubling up some of those pulses. So instead of one beat, it's two half beats or what we call eighth notes. I'm going to do a small improv up on the black keys again, where I demonstrate some of these rhythms in the right hand where we are resting or playing eighth notes. It sounds like this. One, two, three, and four, one, two, three, four, and one, two, three, four, one and two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one and two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one. Then I get a little bit fancy with some octaves in the end. Yeah, but that's okay. I'm trying to show you some of the things that we're going to be diving into within this course. But again, I want to give it to you in the context of showing you what you can do with your right hand rhythms as a basic starting point. Now, if you're watching this and you're rhythmically inclined and you're like, This sounds really simple. I think I can do more complex rhythms. By all means, try it out. This is just for the absolute beginner that isn't really sure what to do with their rhythms. And if you just want to keep a steady pulse for a while, that's okay, too. Staying on beat is super important. I promise you, your brain is going to get bored with this at some point, and you might try putting in some little doubles or rests. Usually, the rests are actually not as intuitive for the beginner. Wanting to be more complex and play the things that we've heard so many times is very important. But when we're listening to music, often we're not taking note of rests. If someone plays, might be like, Whoa, that's crazy. I want to learn how to play that. But if someone's just resting, we're not going, that was a good rest. I like that. So resting, I think, for beginners, is something that we tend to avoid. It's something that just doesn't really happen naturally until a teachers like, take a breath. Slow it down. So steady beat, very important. Rests also very important. And from time to time, if you want to get more rhythmically dense with some eighth notes, feel free to try that out, as well. So now that we have that out of the way, we can really start improvising. I'm going to see you in the next class where we're going to try out an improv up on the black keys. I'll see you there. 6. Black Note Improv: Okay, let's talk about the black keys and how we can improvise on them as a nice, easy starting point. So if you just hold down your pedal, if you do have a petal, even if you don't, just try this anyway. You're gonna play around on some black keys with that petal down, and you're gonna notice that none of them sound particularly bad with one another. Just single notes. Try it out. Sounds like this. Sounds fine. In fact, it's so safe that even wind can play this. This is known as the pentatonic scale, and we're going to go deeper into it later within the course. But for now, all you need to know is that the black keys are nice and safe, and if wind can even play it in a chaotic sort of way, then these notes must be pretty safe to play around with. So in the last class, we talked about keeping a steady pulse as our sort of starting point. So right away, I just want you to play around on these black keys, but keep a steady pulse. If this feels too fast, pause the video, go at your own speed, but I feel like this should be pretty doable. Okay. What are we going to do with our left hand? That's the next big question. I'm going to give you a couple of things that you can try. What we're going to do is take the note on the left side from the group of three black keys, and then the note on the right side from the group of two black keys, and we're going to move back and forth between those two notes. There's two whites in between. Think of it sort of like hopping over a bridge and then kind of hopping back. Right now, I'm not trying to keep too steady of a beat in my mind. It's just loose kind of back and forth. And then once you have that, I want you to start to add in some of these right hand notes, and this will kind of help you establish a bit of a pulse. Let's try this out. It might sound something like this. Two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. So we're doing a four beat pulse every four beats. Our left hand is jumping over the bridge move into that next note. Just back and forth. That's all we're doing here. Now, some rest. We talked about adding some rests. Rest. Maybe doubles. Just playing some eighth notes. Rest. Rest. You can play around with that all day, and you're going to get some pretty easy and fantastic results. Now, there's a couple ways that we can develop this that still keeps it within the beginner territory, but at the same time, helps us expand on this concept a little bit more. The first way is to try playing fifths in the left hand. A fifth is going to be played between your pinky and your thumb, and you're going to, in this case, skip two black notes and then play the next black note. And then as we move our pinky down to that second note selection, you'll skip two black notes and play that next black note. For those of you that know your notes, we have F sharp and C Sharp together. And then D sharp and A sharp together or G flat, D flat, E flat, B flat, it's all the same thing. So now we have this. And we're going to do the same thing in the right hand. We're going to play around, add some rests, add some eighth notes, it sounds like. Okay. So I finished with a few extra notes as a full chord. Might be a little bit advanced, but you can just finish with that F sharp shape, the one that's on the group of three for your pinky. Now, if you're comfortable stretching an octave in your right hand, C sharp to C sharp or D sharp to D sharp, you can develop your melody by starting to add in these octaves. Might sound something like this. Okay, I'm kind of back and forth, choosing single notes, choosing octaves, and moving between those two ideas. Now, once you get comfortable with that, another thing you can try is venturing outside of the two black notes that I've given you this F sharp for the left hand and D sharp, you can start to play around on the other black keys. The only thing is the concept of this fifth moving back and forth works on all the black keys, except for this B flat here. It's a black to a white. So unless you're intending on trying that out, which is more advanced, I would say just go back to single notes in the left hand, but be more adventurous with your note selection. I would recommend ending on this note if you want a more happy, major sound or this note, if you want a more sad, minor sound. Let's try it out. Might sound something like this. Notice the happy finish on that F sharp? What if I had gone Now it sounds a little more sad when we finish on this note here, the D sharp. The point here is just to get you playing around, like, just like finger two, both hands. Everyone can improvise. But I think when we first start trying to learn about improvisation, we say to ourselves, I can't improvise on piano, and some people are terrified of it. It's like performance anxiety sort of thing. But it doesn't have to be like that. You can just hold your pedal down, play around up on the black keys, and already you've convinced yourself, I can do it. I can improvise. And from there, it's about adding slight layers of difficulty and nuance so that you can really hone in and develop that skill. So remember, left hand between these two notes here, F sharp and D sharp, you can try the left hand with a fifth pinky and thumb, where the pinky is aiming for those two black notes or even just single notes but venturing away from those two as your selection, but still likely finishing and starting on one of these two notes. F Sharp will give you the major finish, and D Sharp will give you the more minor sounding finish. You can also add octaves into the right hand to just help develop things a little bit more and make things feel a little bit more big and bombastic. But you can also try adding other pairs of notes that we haven't talked about just randomly. Could be these two, these two, even two beside each other. It's all what you do with it from that point. If it sounds bad, just don't linger on it for very long. Usually, you just have to move one note, a very small amount to help relieve that tension. So we've outlined your first improv up on the black keys, kept things nice and easy peasy. Play around with that, have some fun because in the next class, we're going to make things slightly more difficult. But again, notch by notch, that's the plan. I'll see you in the next class. 7. Black Note Improv - Guided Practice: Alright, so welcome to our first guided practice session. I'm going to take care of the left hand part for you from that last class. You're welcome to join with that left hand part as well. But if you're not comfortable putting it all together yet, you can just focus on improvising in the right hand. And then when you feel ready, you can join in with me. I'm going to start off by holding each note for four beats, and then I'll start to create a bit of a pulse, and I will cue you when the pulse is about to start. So let's dig into it. I'm actually going to start with the first right hand part, and then you're going to take it from there. Let's get going. Here we go in one, two, three, four. Your turn. Keep it going. Remember pedal down is fine. Keep it going. Doesn't have to be fast. Slow is fine. If you feel ready, join in with the left hand part with me. If not, that's okay, too. We're gonna try adding a fifth above each of these notes. We talked about this. Alright, I'm gonna start to pulse the left hand. Feel free to join, or you can hold. It'll sound fine either way. Keep that right hand going. Alright, I want you to keep this all going. I'm gonna add a little bit more low stuff just to help fill it out. Keep it going. Keep it going. Don't forget to leave some space rests. More important. Any more times? Two more. Finish it up on F Sharp. Now, if you were already comfortable doing it on your own, you might not need this class as an assist, but if you did need this class, I'm happy to have provided it for you. And once you start to feel comfortable with it, make sure you're diving in all on your own, but I wanted to make sure that I could help guide you through your first practice session. Hope you enjoyed that. I'll catch you in the next class. 8. White Note Improv: Alright, so we've done an improv on the black keys. Now we're going to use the white keys. There's a few more notes to select from where we have five different black keys, there are seven different white keys. So for our melody, we now have more notes to choose from. In our left hand, however, where do we get started? What do we do? Well, we're going to start with a C with our left hand pinky and move down two notes down to an A, C being just to the left of the group of two black keys, A being just to the right of the middle note from our group of three black keys. This would be a good starting point, and we can play around with all of these white keys in our right hand. And again, you can just use, like, pinky in the left, finger two in the right. If you want to start to get more developed, feel free to, but we're gonna keep things nice and simple for now. Might sound something like this. Okay. So just like on the black keys, where we're moving from F sharp to D sharp, the top note C will give you a more major finish, whereas the bottom note A will give you a more minor sounding finish. Now, that's not to say that we can't go to some other notes, but we'll come back to that later. For now, what we're going to do is, again, we're going to add thumb one fifth above. Now we're skipping three white keys. Same when we go down to this A, we're skipping three white keys down below. So we have C to G, down to A and E. Same idea in the right hand, adding some rests, adding some fast notes. Don't forget repeats are fine. We like repeats. A bit overdone but you get the idea. Okay. So same idea. Now we have a fifth in the left hand. But here's where this class gets a little bit more unique. We're going to do something a bit more rhythmically dense in the left hand, where we're starting to oscillate back and forth between the pinky and the thumb. Now, you can do two patterns, one, two, and then move, but I recommend trying four patterns on each shape. Tends to be the sweet spot in music. Two, three, four, and then down to a, two, three, four. One, two, three, four, one, two, right hand comes in. Keep it simple because your left hand is more developed, you're gonna find there's more room for error in terms of missing the transitions. So without me talking, continuing on, something simple like this. Okay. It doesn't even have to be that fast. You can go really slow with this, take your time. But the idea is our left hand isn't just plunking down some notes and holding while our right hand plays. It can be easy to lose our beat when we do that, which is why so often as musicians, we use metronomes. So the left hand is acting sort of like a metronome so that our right hand has something to sort of ground itself upon in terms of its rhythm, okay? Now, I mentioned you're not burdened to C and A as your left hand notes. You can move to nearly any white note. I would just caution B. Unless you're playing B by itself, which would be fine. If you're doing the fifth, B to F, in this case, does not sound so great. Every other fifth sounds fine. You just have to watch this B to F. So let's play around with this oscillating up and down pinky and thumb, but I'm going to allow myself to move to other places other than C or A. I'd recommend starting on C and finishing on C or starting on A and finishing on A. If you start and finish on C, it'll sound more happy, major. If you start and finish on A, it'll sound more sad or minor. It might sound something like this. Give me a few Cs and Gs to finish. So you can see I wasn't even moving very far C to D to E to F, moving up one note at a time. We don't have to leap all over the place. Some great progressions do leap quite a bit, but we don't have to. Again, you'll notice I started on C and finished on C, and a great finishing note for your right hand might be a C or a G, one of the notes from this left hand set of two notes. So now you're improvising on white keys. We've talked about C and A being very fundamental notes for this, adding a fifth in the left hand even oscillating that fifth, moving back and forth, creating a bit more of a rhythmic pulse to lay down a rhythmic foundation for that right hand. So that's it for this class on improvising on the white keys, we've covered a few different approaches. In our next class, we're going to develop the left hand further and talk about adding full chords to your improvisation. I'll see you there. 9. White Note Improv - Guided Practice: Alright, so I wanted to do a couple of guided practice sessions for you, so this will be the last one before you're out on your own improvising. But I wanted to make sure that not only the Black note Improv, I was helping you with the practice, but also this white note Improv. We talked about this idea of moving between C and G pinky and thumb and then down to A and E with the pinky and thumb. In the right hand just being able to use all the white notes. Same as the last guided practice session. I'm going to start off with the first little right hand part, and then you take care of the rest. I'm going to instruct you if the left hand is changing at all, but for the most part, we're going to keep it really simple and keep this fifth CTG or ATE rocking back and forth. Let's get started in one, two, three, four. Your turn. Get that right hand going? If it's only the right hand, that's okay. When you feel ready, join into the left hand. And if the left hand needs some practice, you're welcome to just play the left. Could it develop it a little bit more on my end, keep doing the same thing on your end? Stay on those white notes. Remember, rests are important. Doesn't have to be fast and flashy. I'll take one more phrase. Here we go. I'm going to add in some right hand. Back to you. Here we go. A few more times. Get ready to finish on C, here we go. So there it is another guided practice session where you are welcome to jam along with only a right hand part, only a left hand part and slowly help yourself put them together by practicing them individually and then just jumping right in and trying to join me. Also, by me moving between cords at the correct time, you might find that that's an issue that you have when you're playing by yourself, but playing along with me, you're going to really start to feel that count of four for each cord before you move to the next one. I hope you enjoyed that. Make sure you go through this class as many times as you want, and I'll catch you in the next class. 10. I-IV Major Improv: Alright, now we're going to start adding some cords to our left hand, and again, we're going to start on C. In this case, we have something called a C major chord, where our pinky is on C. Our thumb is on G. We've done this before, but we're also adding finger three down on E. Now, if you haven't played a chord before, start with your pinky and your thumb, add finger three. Pinky and thumb, add finger three as that starts to get more comfortable, try to plunk down all three of those notes at the same time. It might take a little bit of work on the side, but believe me, it'll be worth it. So what we're going to do is we're going to take some chords from our C major scale, CDEFGaBC. We're going to take the first chord available built on the first node of the scale, as well as one, two, three, four, the four chord, in this case, F major. Both of these chords sound happy. They are major. So any improvisation that we do with just these two chords is going to sound quite major. Again, our right hand has all these white keys to select from. If at any point something sounds wrong, just sidestep up or down, and it will alleviate some of that tension. You might find the perfect note or at least a better note than the one that was kind of not so great. So for your left hand, you're just going to hold both of these chords for four beats, one, two, three, four. And if that feels too difficult, you can also try pulsing, something like two, three. Whatever's more comfortable for you, try it out. And if one is uncomfortable, make sure at some point you also try that out. You want both of these to be feeling very comfortable. I'm going to try an improv in the right hand where I'm holding each of these cords for four beats, and then I will develop into a quarter note pulse on both of these cords. Now, just before I start one more tip, make sure you're aiming your pinky for the C and your pinky for the F. Your fingers don't have to move once they're in that shape because both cords have the same shape. If my hand was made out of stone, I could just plunk it on any cord shape that's all white, and it would always sound fine. So here's the improv. It sounds something like this. So you can try holding for four beats in the left hand or trying the pulse. Now, you might have noticed that a C major chord has the nodes C, E and G, and an F major chord has FA and C, but it also has a C, right? Like they both have a C. So why am I moving my C from all the way down here to all the way up here. Well, maybe I could just keep it down on the bottom and just change to the F and A for my top notes. So now I'm playing 531, pinky middle finger thumb, 521, pinky index thumb. And with my eyes closed, I'm going to get used to the feeling of moving back and forth between both of those chords. Once you can do that, now visually, I'm not so caught up in watching my chord changes to make sure that I'm moving to the proper C major chord and the proper F major chord. My left hand is sort of on autopilot. I'm able to look around, sing to the audience, focus on my right hand, whatever it is. I'm now sort of visually a little less caught up with that left hand, so I can focus more on other things like my right hand. So let's try an improv, where I'm holding each chord for four beats with this modified second chord and then also trying with a steady pulse on both of those chords. It might sound something like this. Okay? Again, you can play around with octaves in the right hand as well, too. And in your left hand, you're not necessarily always going to be burdened to just a couple of chord shapes. You can develop it into four chord or eight chord chord progressions. But for now, a really safe place to start is this one chord to the four chord. Now, I want to give anyone that's a bit more of an intermediate player a little side note here. Whatever scales you're working on, hypothetically, you're in lessons taking private lessons with the teacher and you're working on scales, or maybe it's self study, and you're teaching yourself scales. But whatever scales you're working on, if there's some that you're having a hard time remembering the notes, let's say it's A flat major. You're having a hard time on that C of black keys and white keys and you can't remember the notes, find the one chord and the four chord. Play those in the left hand and improvise in that key in the right hand. If you're able to navigate and move around those notes in the right hand, it's going to make you that much more confident when you're playing the scale in terms of, I know these notes. I can play a little mini song or improvisation on that set of notes. And you're also really going to know when you play a wrong note. All of those little corrections where you're pulling yourself back onto the proper train tracks of that scale, that's going to make you feel more confident with that note selection when you go to play it as a scale. So the first note of A flat major is A flat. The fourth note is D flat, so you're moving back and forth between those two major chords. Maybe you play some wrong notes. Okay. And then remind yourself where you were supposed to have gone. And again, those little corrections really do help you internalize that key, that set of notes. So when you're playing the scale, you can focus more just on things like fingerings and not have to focus so much on what are the notes. So now we're at the stage where your left hand is playing chords. Your right hand is playing within a full scale or key. In other words, in this case, the C major scale. Now we're really in the sweet spot of improv. Full chords in the left, leading us into four chord chord progressions, a full key or scale in the right, not limiting ourselves to five notes, but giving ourselves a full selection of all seven notes. Major scales, minor scales. These are very fundamental with melody writing and improvisation. But in this class, the focus was more on major. Why don't we flip things around, focus on minor a little bit more, tap into that sad sound. I'm going to see you in the next class where we're going to work on a one to four chord progression in a minor key. I'll see you there. 11. i-iv Minor Improv: Alright, now we're going to try out an improvisation on the white keys that sounds minor. It's going to use a very similar approach to the last class, but the sound is going to be much different. We're not going for happy, we're going for sad. But again, we're going to keep things nice and simple on those white keys. Now, instead of using a C major scale as our selection of notes, C to C, now we're focused A to A. This is our A minor scale with A being the first note or the one. So if A is our one, A, B, C, D, D is our four. So our left hand is moving between A minor one, A minor, and a minor four chord, D minor. Both of these chords being minor really locks us into that minor sound. And that's a big reason why I enjoy teaching beginners this one to four progression as their approach. It keeps you locked into major or locked into minor. If you're in a major key, the one and four are both major chords. If you're in a minor key, the one and four are both minor chords. Again, it just really locks you into that sound. We're going for SAD, we're going for minor. Our white notes in the right hand are still going to work. Our left hand is still going to make that jump from A to D, either holding for four beats each or pulsing if you find that more easy. To some, holding is going to be a little bit more easy because it's less attention on the left hand, it's a little more simple. But you might get lost. What beat am I on? When do I change chords? For those people, the pulse might be a little bit more simple. But of course, I'd highly recommend make sure both of those are comfortable because they're both very fundamental approaches to your left hand when you're improvising. So an improv using that technique, going from holding the left hand to pulsing the left hand might sound something like this. So again, you can see the approach is very similar to the last class. In fact, we can even try this inversion thing again, and an inversion is just reordering notes. So on D minor, the four chord, if I bring D up to the top and then F up to the top, but keep the same three notes DF and A. Now I have A on the bottom. And my A minor chord has A on the bottom. So I can move back and forth between those two cords without moving my hand very much. I'm able to comfortably look at you while making these cord changes without worrying so much about is my left hand going to overshoot the cord? Is it going to undershoot? If I move back and forth between the cords without looking A to D, I can feel that pretty well, but I might overshoot at some point. So that's why these inversions can really help. Also, it frees up visual real estate for you to focus more on your right hand. So let's do another improv where I'm holding for four beats per chord and then pulsing, it might sound something like this. Okay, so pretty simple approach. But again, we want to start nice and simple. We are on all white keys. We have just a couple of chords, and we're very much staying in that minor sound. Make sure you play through this class and the last one a bunch before moving forward, or at least to the point where you're comfortable. If you picked up on it really quick, feel free to move through. But if you're still feeling like these two classes are a little bit of a struggle, take a week, take two weeks with it. This is not a course you need to burn through really quickly. These fundamental concepts need to be really ingrained. That comes from practice and internalization. So when you really feel like you've got this class and the last one under your belt, we can move into the next one because now we've done improvs on only black keys and only white keys. But in the next class, we're going to mix it up white keys and black keys. It's going to be a little bit more tough but still very obtainable. I'll see you there. 12. E Minor Improv: He Alright, you've done some improvs on black keys, some improvs on white keys. Now we're going to mix it up. Now, admittedly, I'm a little bit biased because I really like the sound of minor. So for this improv, again, we're going to keep it minor. But what I will say is your left hand is not going to be much more difficult at all. It's just a small change to the right hand just to slowly expose you to this idea of scales that use sharps or flats as well as white keys. And this is just to expose you to the idea that some scales have white keys and black keys, and in our right hand, when we're coming up with our melodic ideas, we're going to have to watch out for some of those black keys. So now we're going to be E minor. E minor is the set of notes E F sharp, G, ABC, D and E. The second note right away, this F is actually F sharp. I want you to imagine all your Fs have been ripped off the piano and replaced with F sharp. At no point do you want to play an F? You might. There's a very good chance you might play an F, but try not to. We want to make sure it's F sharp, just to the right of that F. For our left hand, we're going to do the same type of chord progression. We're going to do E minor, which is our one, two, one, two, three, four, A minor, which is our four chord. We can move back and forth between those in root position, basic shapes or using an inversion of the four chord like we did in the last two classes. A minor has an E, so we just bring the E down to the bottom and we can move back and forth, again, visually freeing up ourselves to focus on the right hand. Now, before we get playing an improv hands together, I want you just playing around on the set of notes from this E minor scale and playing a bunch of the F sharps so that when you do put it hands together, you're quite ready for the F sharp, and you're not accidentally playing a bunch of Fs. So even if we just use finger two, you can play around like this. Just playing around, but making sure you hit some of those F sharps, no Fs. Try to make sure you cover all the notes, not missing any. And then once you feel really comfortable with that set of notes, then you can jump into the improv. So first, let's try an improv using just root position cords where we're jumping a little bit more. But we have very clear cut cords, E minor, couple of skips, and A minor is A, couple of skips. Let's try some right hand material. Let's try pulsing the left hand. And again, octaves in the right hand can be a fun thing to try out as well. Next up, let's take the left hand and use the inversions, very similar approach, but watch out for those F sharps. Here we go. It sounds like this. Maybe with a pulse. Okay. Noticing I'm finishing on E as a nice, safe finish. Now, for those of you that want to try out a chord that has a black note, there's actually one right beside E minor. It's D major with an F sharp in the middle. So we can try out the same sort of approach. We're not going to use any inversions for this just a basic E minor, basic D major, and we can play around with the right hand on the same selection of notes. And this can also be a very fun sound. If you want to start to get the left hand, used to playing some black notes. I would sound like this. Maybe with a pulse. Okay. So I was using some slightly more advanced right hand parts where I'm moving up through a wider set of notes. But to the keen eye, you might have noticed I was just moving up the notes of an E minor chord. And again, our chord notes are super safe. So when I'm playing E minor, I can play any sets of Es, Bs, and Gs. It'll sound fine anywhere on the piano. So that's us dipping our toes into an improv that uses white keys and black keys. Our left hand is mostly focused on white note chords. But again, we've opened up this possibility of playing this D major chord with an F sharp in the middle. So even your left hand is getting more used to those black keys. From here, we're going to start to dive into pentatonic scales. While they may only have five notes instead of seven, they're actually a little bit more difficult because the notes that you've eliminated, at that point, we're trying not to play. So you have to be aware of what notes you can play, what notes you're not supposed to be playing to stay true to that pentatonic scale. We'll cover major pentatonic scales and minor pentatonic scales. Let's start with the major. In the next class. I'll see you there. 13. Major Pentatonic Explained: All right, let's get talking about the major pentatonic scale. Now, sure, the major pentatonic scale does come from a major scale, and penta, meaning five, it does have five notes. But I want to kind of lift the hood a little bit and explain how this scale is formed and why it's formed the way that it is. Let's use friendly old C major, CDEFG ABC as our starting point. Now, just to quickly clarify, any major scale, if you start on a note and move up one tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone or all step, pull step, half step, full step, full step, pull step, half step, you get a major scale. So you can figure out any major scale. You can start on any note on the piano that gives you the major scale. From there, we're going to get rid of the fourth note and the seventh note. So this is how we're left with five different notes, CDE, G and A. But why did I get rid of F and B? That's the question. Well, what chord am I going to use the most when I'm in C major? If I'm improvising, composing, answer is, C major. So we have to ask, when I play any note from the C major scale, how does it sound against or with my chord in the left hand? We already know a C is going to sound fine with the C major chord. In fact, CE and G, any of the notes from the chord, will sound fine. After all, I could play the same chord in both hands. That sounds okay. So that right away should tell you that CE and G would sound fine with the C major chord. So that leaves us with D, F, A, and B. What we're going to do is play every one of those notes with the left hand chord playing and see how they sound. But we need to keep something in mind. A tone, for example, C to D sounds quite colorful. There are some Cs and Ds just playing. But a semitone, E to F, for example, it's a little more crunchy and dissonant, and it doesn't necessarily sound very major. So anytime that there is a semitone clash, we're going to find a way to alleviate that tension. Now a semitone can't be E to F, but we're also working in this case with displaced semitones. In this case, the F might be up and octave and this still represents this semitone crunch or sort dissonance that we're talking about. So we have E to F or E to F or E to F. Any of those count as semitones for the sake of this. Okay. So we have a C major chord. We know C sounds fine. D is okay. It's colorful if you just listen to it. Sounds fine. Like the sun has come out. D is a tone away from E and D is a tone away from C, so we get to keep it. E is fine. It's in my cord. F, we're going to get rid of. It clashes with a semitone against this E from my cord. And I can't get rid of the E. It's part of my chord. So in terms of getting rid of this semitone, I will get rid of the F. If you listen to the F with the cord in the left hand, It's quite crunchy and quite tense. Now, I'm not saying there's no room for this F. If you want to improvise in a C major scale, that's totally fine. But you have to understand that is one of the notes that's going to give you some tension. In terms of where the F can resolve, it's very close to E. It's a semitone away, so it's a very common resolution. It's a tone away from G. So that's another pretty common resolution, but down to E tends to be the way to go. Moving forward, G is in my chord, so I can keep it. A is a tone away from G, right? It's right here a tone away, and it's a skip a third away from C. So that's fine. We can keep A. And then we're up to B, the seventh note. That is clashing with our C from our chord. If I keep moving that B down by octaves, so C it eventually does reach this semitone sort of cluster. So am I going to get rid of C from my C major pentatonic scale? No, definitely not. So we get rid of the B. So that's why we get rid of the fourth note and seventh note of a major pentatonic scale. It's to alleviate this rub that we get from semitones so that all we're hearing are tones and skips. It's a very sort of smooth, colorful sort of sound. And that is the C major pentatonic scale explained. Now, one thing that's a little more tough about it, is you have to make sure you're skipping the right notes. For example, if I play this sort of descending pattern, we call these descending broken thirds. It's relatively simple in C major. But when you're doing this in C major pentatonic, it's not always third, sometimes it's fourth, and you have to know which notes to skip. So despite us having less notes, it can be a more difficult scale to play around with, but it's very rewarding because no matter what notes you land on or start on, it sounds at least half decent, and most of the time it actually sounds quite good. So the last thing I want to mention is there are also penta scales, the first five notes of a major scale, and the first five notes of a minor scale, but this is not the same as a pentatonic scale. So for the sake of this class, we talked about the C major pentatonic scale, and we're going to be using that within an improvisation in the next class. I'll see you there. 14. Major Pentatonic Applied: All right, so let's try out an improvisation using your C major pentatonic scale. In the last class, we outlined how the scale is made, but in short, it's the notes CD, E, G and A, and then we can put our extra C back up on top. You don't have to stop there. You can keep going. All scales are true in that regard. Now, because we're skipping a B and an F, you're going to have to really mentally make sure you don't play those, and as a result of that, I'm going to give you a bit of an easier progression. The progression is quite simple. It's one, two, three, four. So just working up one step at a time. You should be able to, for the most part, feel moving up one note without really having to look at that left hand. Now, resetting back to see you might want to double check. And then, again, you should be able to kind of use your visual real estate, we'll say to watch what's happening up in the right hand. Let's just try playing through the chords for these each, three, four, two, three, four, one, two, three. Let's try adding in a melody improvised using our C major pentatonic scale. You tried pulsing the left hand? Oh So you can see all the notes that I selected in the right hand felt safe. I could start or finish on any notes from that scale, and it's going to sound like it makes sense like it was intentional. An extra little thing you can try out is give me a P sign and put it on any two notes that are right beside each other from that major pentatonic scale. And try playing both and then quickly letting go of finger two. Sounds like this. You can just the same play two and three quickly in succession, but sometimes it's easier to smash both and then just let go of two. What you get is something called a grace note, and it sounds really cool within this particular improvisation, but generally within all improvs, it can sound quite amazing. So it's try it again with some grace notes. I would sound like this. So you can try out those grace notes as a fun way to add ornamentation to your melodies. This was a pretty quick class. It wasn't meant to be anything too extreme. We have a simple chord progression. We have a pentatonic scale in our right hand C major pentatonic. And when you put them together, they sound fantastic. Now, any chord progression that you enjoy in C major, maybe it's one, five, six, four, one of the world's most common chord progressions. Whatever it happens to be, you can use this major pentatonic scale. In pretty much any major song, you can use the major pentatonic. And in any minor song or in this case, improvisation, you can use the minor pentatonic scale. They're very safe. They're great starting points. And when you hear someone ripping a guitar solo, it's almost surely going to use some of this pentatonic or the elaborated version, the blues scale. We don't need to dive into that, but it's basically the pentatonic scale. So if you like the sound of improvisation within jazz, blues, R&B, soul, funk, hip hop, you've almost surely, at some point, come across these pentatonic scale. So get used to them, get comfortable with them, try improvising with them. I hope you enjoyed that, and I'll see you in the next class. 15. Minor Pentatonic Explained: Alright, let's get talking about the minor pentatonic scale. So if you start with any old minor scale, we're going to use a minor because it's friendly. In fact, we're using something called a natural minor, and a natural minor scale is simply you play a note, you go up a tone, a semitone, a tone, a tone, a semitone and then two more tones. Tone. Tone. You get a natural minor scale. You can also think of it two other ways. You can find a major scale that you know, start on the sixth note and go all the way up to the sixth note, or you can take a major scale that you know and flatten the third, sixth and seventh notes. Whatever makes the most sense to you, you can use that to find your minor scale. And then from there, just like the major pentatonic scale, we're going to eliminate a couple of notes. For the minor pentatonic, we're going to eliminate the second note and the sixth note. Now you might notice that this actually gives us the same collection of notes as C major pentatonic. But instead of C being on top, we have A on top, instead of C on the bottom, we add the A down on the bottom. So it's the same notes as the C major pentatonic, and it works the same in that a C major scale has the same notes as an A minor scale. A relative major and a relative minor scale have the same notes, but that's also true for these pentatonic scales. Now, the same way in the major pentatonic explanation class, we talked about why we got rid of a couple of notes. We're going to take that same approach. We want to try to avoid semitone clashes. Tons are totally fine. The distance of two notes with one in between, that's okay. But two notes right beside each other, we don't want that. So what's the main chord that we have in our A minor scale? A minor. So everything that we do in this scale, for now, we're really considering how does it sound against my home base chord. Let's see which notes we can keep and which notes we need to eliminate. A is a keeper. It's an A minor chord. We have an A in it, and A can't sound bad with discord. B, I love the sound of this, but for the sake of the pentatonic scale, we're not going to keep it because B clashes with C by a displaced semitone. You can see if I move this up in octave. It looks fine, looks friendly, but if I move it back down, there's that semitone. So we get rid of B. C is a keeper, it's within our cord. D lands right in between the C and E separated by a tone on either side, and tones are fine. You can see if I put the D here, up a tone is E or down a tone is C. E is a keeper. It's in my cord. F is a semitone away from E if I move it down, so a displaced semitone so we don't want to keep the F. Why don't I get rid of the E? That would also eliminate this semitone this rub, but E is in my cord, so I need to keep it. It's foundational. G is a skip away from E, so we're really not worrying about it, and it is A, tone away from this next A. So it's fine. It's colorful, and we get to keep it. Leaves us with. Sounds quite nice. So remember, we're not talking about penta scales. The first five notes of the A minor scale. This is called a pentatonic scale. We actually started with a pentatonic scale when we were playing up on these black notes because F sharp major is not just this set of notes. There's a B and an E sharp, which looks like an F. Here's our full major scale, and we got rid of four and seven. Just like we talked about in the major pentatonic explanation class, four and seven are not keepers. Or if I start on the second note that we played out of this two note pattern, E flat, and I play E flat minor, you can see there's also the same white notes. Getting rid of those, we got rid of the second and the sixth note. Like we just talked about, now we would have E flat minor pentatonic. So I kind of tricked you in that we started with pentatonic scales, but it's easy on the black notes because you don't have to consider what notes to skip. When we're playing a minor pentatonic, you have to think, Okay, no Bs, no Fs. But when we start up on these black note F sharp major pentatonic, and B flat minor pentatonic scales, we don't really have to worry about what notes to skip because it's baked into the scale itself. Like, just playing all black notes, just kind of works out. So we started with a very easy pentatonic scale, then some pretty easy major and minor scales. Now we're beefing it up a little bit by getting rid of some notes to make the scales a little more safe to improvise within. And now we have our major and minor pentatonic scales. So to try out this minor pentatonic scale, in the next class, we're going to try some chords in the left hand. We're going to try improvising some melodies in the right hand using that minor pentatonic scale. So I'll see you there. 16. Minor Pentatonic Applied: All right, let's try out an improvisation using the A minor pentatonic scale. In the last class, I went over the scale in great detail, but to summarize, we were left with the notes, A, C, D, E, G and A. No B, no F. And that's actually what makes it a little bit tougher. Having less notes doesn't necessarily make it easier. Like, if I said go through your day, but you're not allowed to use the word the, you would really have to think about everything you did to avoid that word. Just because there's less doesn't mean it's easier. So avoiding the B and avoiding the F can be quite tough. So make sure you're practicing this scale on its own, play around at it, and then we can try a little improvisation using these chords. We're going to try a one flat seven, flat six, five chord progression. You don't need to understand exactly why I'm calling it that. For people that have taken my chords and chord progression courses, that'll make sense to you, all you need to know is you're playing A minor, stepping down, stepping down, stepping down one more time with a black in the middle. A G sharp gives you this E major chord. Now, something worth mentioning is that this G sharp does not really come from our A minor pentatonic scale. And we're going to be thinking temporarily like jazz musicians. When we have a chord that supplies notes that are not within our scale, it temporarily allows us to be able to access that note in a way that makes sense. And that's not just true for the G sharp. Like what I'm saying is on this chord, in your melody, you could play a G sharp, and it sounds fine because it's in the chord. It's not going to conflict. But if we go back, for example, to the F major chord, does that mean that I can play an F, one of the notes not from a minor pentatonic? Sure, you can play an F at that point. But for now, what I would say is try to stay true to the A minor pentatonic, basically the whole way through. If you want to play some of that G sharp on this E major chord, feel free. And if you really want to loosen the reins a little bit on this exercise, you could play the other notes, again, like F that have been eliminated as long as it's within the chord. So again, we can have four beats or we can do a pulse of four beats. We're going to get things going here, holding for four. And in the right hand, we're going to do the A minor pentatonic, here we go. Trip passing. Alright, so even at the end, you can see how I used the G sharp and the B from this E major chord, both are not notes within A minor pentatonic, but it sounded fine, right? So these pentatonic scales are used a lot. Also in pop vocal melodies, like Duipa and Ed Sheeran come to mind. But you can go into Lady Gaga or Christina Aguilar sort of, like, vocal runs. It's really, really popular to use these pentatonic scales in pop melodies. And if pop music is supposed to sound good to a great number of ears, a large populus, if it's supposed to be popular, then of course, they want to stick with something safe, and that's why they use these pentatonic scales so much. If you like the sound of these pentatonic scales and you want to learn more about them, I do have a class that's all on blues scales and pentatonic scales, which will take this knowledge a little bit further. And if you want to develop your ear around the sound of these scales, I also have soul fetch courses on the major blues and pentatonic, and the minor blues and pentatonic scales. So that other set of courses could be great if you really like this sound. I'm not trying to funnel you there, but at the same time, this is a beginner's course, so I can only go so deep. If you want to specialize within these pentatonic and blue scales, then feel free to check those courses. Notice that in the major pentatonic scale improv, we went up by steps. Now we're going down by steps, keeping it relatively simple. But again, any minor chord progression that you like, let's say it's one, six, four, five, one of my favorites. You can even add color to it, one, six, four, five. This A minor pentatonic scale will sound fantastic when you're improvising over it. Whether you're ripping a keyboard or guitar solo or playing something thoughtful and melodic, I promise you you will get a lot of mileage out of these pentatonic scales. So that's it for this class. On the A minor pentatonic scale being applied, I'll catch you in the next class. 17. Slow and Reflective: Alright, next up, we're going to chill things out and try a bit more of a reflective improvisation. We're gonna go to just finger two in both hands, index fingers only to start. If you want to use all your fingers, you're more than welcome to, but you don't need anything more than this. What we're going to do is pick two chords that you like the sound of in terms of the progression between the two. If you like the sound of a C major to an F major, like we talked about before, one to four, then we can use that. I'm going to be using C major to F major, but I want you to also feel free to use any other set of chords that you enjoy together. So what you're going to do is hold down your pedal. Hopefully, you do have a pedal on your piano. And you're just going to start randomly playing notes of a C major chord using both hands all over the piano. But I would recommend that your lowest most note is a C, and you play it pretty early on, if not as your first note. So we can try it as our first note. C. And then we're gonna be playing G, G, C, C, G, C. And then as we move to our next chord, F major, I'll lift the pedal and press it back down. So lift press. There's our F A C AFF CAF, a CFF. You're essentially just sort of floating around on the notes of whatever two chords you've selected. So you're moving around. You're just playing the notes from a C major chord and then from an F major chord. Now, without me speaking, here's how it sounds. I finished with, like, a C major chord. But you can continue on and use larger progressions as well, too. But we're really not trying to map out a very specific sounding chord progression. It's really just about keeping things as sort of background music. So that's why C major to F major works so well because it's just two nice floating chords we can expect. There's no big surprises. We're just kind of moving back and forth between those two chords. Now the way I just played was a little more sort of tightly voiced. But again, with the approach that I'm showing you at the pedal down, you can be all over the piano, and it's really simple and it's a lot of fun. Now, we can keep things sort of slow and reflective, but instead of playing something that sounds almost like a meditative sort of improv, we could go for something with a cinematic progression, like C major to F sharp. It's a very cinematic progression. Let's try that same approach with this set of chords. Here we go. Okay, so that's the general idea. I would generally recommend only choosing a small handful of chords. Again, you don't want to be like, Okay, this bach piece has 80 chords. Let's use this approach for the harmony within that Bach prelude or whatever it might be. Keep it really simple. The idea is, this is a more reflective, sort of meditative improv. But I'm keeping this class pretty short because after all, this technique is relatively simple, and it's great if you just sit down at a piano and you don't really play a whole lot, but you know a couple of chords, you don't even have to go through this fast, while I was doing CEG, and kind of flipping through these, you can go really slow. He it still sounds fine. You're outlining harmony in a way that reminds you that it doesn't matter if I play a C major chord here, here, here, here, here, or here. It sounds fine on all areas of the piano. Now instead of a full chord in all of these spots, maybe I'm just playing one note from here and then from this chord, just the middle note, and then from this chord, just the thumb and from this chord, maybe pinky thumb. And it really gets you thinking outside of this narrow box of the range of the treble clef and bass clef, which is about this area of the piano. And it gets us out into the more sort of affected area of the piano, where we're playing for effects. Maybe it's sort of raindrops or thunder, that sort of idea. So this improv will get you thinking of the full span of the piano. I'll get you thinking about chords in a broken way. It's simple, it's effective. There it is a slow, reflective way to improvise on the piano. I hope you enjoyed that one and had some fun. I'll catch you in the next class. 18. Open-Voiced Chords: All right, so for this final technical class, I want to advance our left hand part a little bit more. We've done tight close chord voicings. We've done things that are very loose like in the last class where we're kind of all over the place. But what if we kind of cut the difference a little bit and find something that's sort of medium sized in terms of its spread on the piano? So if we take a C major chord, our middle note is E, and we call this a close or closed voiced chord. We're going to take the middle note and bring it up one octave. Now the way we're going to play this is pinky on the root C. Finger two or index on the fifth, which is G, and swing our thumb up. We're going to let finger two sort of work like a pendulum for this pinky and thumb sort of swinging back and forth. Now, if I play a C major chord, close or open. It has a very similar feel. It's still a C major chord. Again, we sow C G and E. We've just reordered it, and it's not so random and chaotic. It's very methodical. We're taking the middle note of the chord and bringing it up one octave. Now, what's great about this is if you play low, middle, high, middle, you end up getting four counts, whether it's four quarter notes or four eighth notes, you have four and four is super important in music. We see it all the time. One and two, and three and four. Sounds quite nice. I want you to try it out on every all white chord. Eventually, you could expand into all the other chords on the piano, but that's a bit more advanced. Let's take a D minor chord and bring our F up one octave. That sounds nice. Same with E minor, F major, G major, A minor, and remember the B chord, which is B diminished. For now, just avoid it. So here's what I want you to try. When you get comfortable playing this left hand part, I want you to start to add in some notes from your C major scale. Don't even move the left hand to a different cord yet. When you get comfortable with that, try out the C major pentatonic scale. Okay. So just taking that C major chord, open voiced in the left hand, playing around just with that, you're going to need some muscle memory for this. You're going to need to kind of play around with it for a couple of days before you get more adventurous with it. But once you're ready to be more adventurous, here's what I'd recommend. Take your C major chord and select any of the other chords that I gave you, D minor, E minor, F major, G major, or A minor. We're going to pick E minor. This is maybe a little bit more cinematic sounding. It's a little less sort of classical or traditional sounding, but it still works. So here's our C chord. Here's our E. It ends up just sounding quite sad, but with a C major scale with it, it complements very well. Okay, so that's moving to E minor. Let's try moving to F major, the 14 chord progression that we've worked with before. But instead of playing basic chords, we're playing open voiced. Let's try it out. So you can see that C major to E minor one to three had a very different feel than C major to F major, one to four. Working with this open voice on all white notes as any combination of two, C major two D minor, C major two E minor. Try them all out, again, except for the B, and you'll see they give you a different sort of feeling. This is really fundamental for when you want to expand on progressions. If you know how 15 sounds to start a progression, then you might know a couple other chords that you want to move to from that point. This is actually the same approach that I took in the pop chord progressions course that I taught, which is instead of thinking of how chord progressions end, which is very common in, like, Western classical music theory, we talk about how they start. Whether you take that course or not, the point here is to really know these combinations of two chords, one to two, one to three, one to four as a starting point that you can expand on. Let's try one of the other progressions that we did earlier C major to A minor. Let's give that one a try. Sounds like this. Also sounds fine. So for this class, what I want you doing is trying out just C major, open voice, left hand, no right hand. Then add the major scale, then add the pentatonic scale, and then try in combinations of two chords. What I'd recommend is playing either two patterns on C and then two patterns on your next chord or four patterns, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, so two and four Times through those patterns are going to be your best friend. Now, as you get to be a more advanced player, let's say you're playing in a D major scale, and that's a scale that your teacher has taught you and you're getting interested in it. Go through the D major scale and add two skips above every note from that scale. It'll give you some great chords to work with. Again, the seventh gives you a diminished chord. So for now, you'll have to know how to deal with that separately. But all the other chords leading up to that sound fine. And the open voiced concept works the same way. You just get some very different shapes like F sharp from the middle up octave. Now I have this F sharp with my thumb, all whites. This one's with a white on top, a blacks on the bottom, so you get a lot of different sort of combinations. So, in short, I don't want to limit you to C major, but because it's a beginner course, it's a nice, easy place to start. But as you're learning new scales, feel free to go through, explore what chords are available, and try them as open voiced chords. Eventually, these chords do get simple because D major, let's say that's totally new to you as a one chord. But it's also the four chord of A major and the five chord of G major. So you'll start to see these chords in multiple scales, and eventually those patterns just sort of start to sink in. So I've given you a couple of left hand approaches throughout this course. Really, it's going to be about applying those to get the fundamentals and really heavily exploring your melodic playing in the right hand. Try different rhythms, try different note combinations, make all the mistakes that are available because you have to kind of fail forward with improvisation a little bit. I mean, you can start so simple that it's impossible to play wrong notes. But as soon as you want to venture off and try something more difficult, there's going to need to be some room for error. So allow yourself to make those mistakes. Have fun with them. Like, get playful with them. If you make a mistake, sidestep to a note that works. If a rhythm didn't work, follow up with a rhythm that does. But most importantly, make sure you're having fun with this stuff. After all, this is really about being playful on your instrument. I hope you enjoyed that class on left hand open voice chords, and I'll see you in the next one. 19. Outro: Congratulations on finishing this course on piano improvisation for beginners. Even if you're not a beginner pianist, but you haven't improvised in the past, it's so awesome that you came here to dive into improvisation. I want to say congratulations for getting through the course. I also want to thank you for taking the course. Quite honestly, most of the income I make from courses I put back into courses to develop them and make them better, and I'm always listening to the notes that students have. So do feel free to give a review and preferably a good rating if you thought you enjoyed the course because that really does help propel these courses forward so they're accessible to other students like yourself. By now, you should be comfortable playing around with major sounds and a happy improvisation, minor sounds. Improvisations that are more sort of sad or even cool sounding, as well as reflective improvisations, something almost meditative or something that you could use within a production of some sort. Always feel free to play around with sounds other than piano sounds. If you're playing only with piano sounds and you're starting to feel kind of bored with the material, it might just be the sound that you're using. I know for me personally, I've always been a keyboardist at heart, and I've always used tons of different sampled sounds and synthesizer sounds and whatever's available on my keyboards, so I recommend you do the same. Don't forget there is a class project where you're going to be recording yourself, playing an improvisation that was inspired from your favorite class within this course. Make sure you do upload it, and I'll review it for you. If you don't know the details, make sure you do go back to the class that outlines all of the class project details for you. If you want to learn more about me personally as a teacher and a composer, you can head over to Cook hyphenmusic.ca. There you can find me on social media and you can even link to my YouTube channel. I also have a store where I sell my own sheet music of original compositions, Cookmusic dot store. But again, all of this is linked through my main website, so feel free to check it out. There's tons of compositions, work I've done for film and video games. So if you really want to see kind of the music that I like to create, that's where you want to go. One last time, I want to say, congratulations. And, of course, feel free to review this material as many times as you think you need so that you can really get the most out of this course. Also, if you have a music teacher, bring some of this material to them so that you can develop it, and maybe they understand your learning style better than I do on the other side of the Internet. So they'll be able to help you learn this material in a way that's best suited for you. Now, if you don't already have a teacher, I might have you covered. I do run a small music school of like minded teachers, and they do teach virtually. Also, I'm located in Toronto, so a lot of these teachers can teach in person in Toronto, but I don't expect a lot of the students studying my online courses to be based out of Toronto. So these teachers do teach online as well. You can find out more about those teachers at Cookmusicschool dot c. Most importantly, don't forget to practice this material regularly. I usually recommend about five days of practice a week, just 20 minutes a day. If you can put that time aside, you'll make some great progress. Thank you for taking this course, and hopefully I'll catch you in the next one.