This video is here to help you give the tools you need to tackle some of the challenging songs or pieces that you’re trying to play. This video is divided into chapters it’s best if you watch it the whole way through but if you’re looking for something specific or if you know most of these Concepts and just want a refresher feel free to skip ahead to the chapter that you need in today’s lesson.
We are learning about chords, chord inversions, scales arpeggios as well as chromatic notes and playing separate things with your hands at the same time we’re going to start with chords, in the previous lesson you did learn about chords how to play major and minor chords and we also learned that chords don’t change regardless of what order you put the notes in which means for example if I take a C major chord C E and G and I switch those notes up and
I play them in a different order E G and C the name of the chord doesn’t change it’s still a C major chord it still serves the same function the voices are just a little bit different which means I can play this chord in three different ways across the entire keyboard this is called a chord inversion or these are called chord inversions these are extremely useful to add color to your music to make it sound a lot more interesting so when you’re playing or practicing chords practice their inversions as well you can do this for any chord.
In an F major chord, we see the notes F A and C and then I switch them up to A C and F or C F and A, so I have all of these chords foreign all of those are an F major chords and I can do this again with any chord A B flat major.
So when you’re practicing make sure you get those changes you know those movements as smoothly as you can because the smoother you are the more efficient you’re playing and the better it sounds when you play. You must be wondering where all these chords come from we have touched upon it in a previous video but today we’re going to learn about scales the building block of all of western music, a scale is a rule or a set of notes that you follow to play any song or any piece of the music that you want, it’s almost like a Raga in a hindustani or a Carnatic music context, so I’m sure all of you have heard a scale before whether or not you know what it is I’ll play one for you and see if you know what this is.
The most common set of notes in music across the world it’s your sarigama or whatever you want to call it, in western music we call this a major scale now notice how I started on C I went up to C and I came back I can do that on any node I want to. I can do that on a flat and why this works because there’s a pattern of distances between notes that creates the same sound regardless of what note I start on. We’re going to learn that pattern for how to play a major scale as well as a minor scale so to play the major scale what you need is to start on any note of your choice.
I’m starting on C that’s the easiest one and from there I follow this pattern of tones and semitones so from C I skip a tone which means I skip one note and go to D from D I skip another tone and go to E from D I move a semitone to go to F from F I go with tone to play G from G and another tone to a from another tone to B and from B A semitone to get back to C and when I go back I don’t follow the same formula I go back playing the same notes I played going up, So let’s recap that formula we start on any note tone another tone and then a semitone and then three tones one after another and we finish with a semitone let me try this on a flat the other scale that I played so I start on a flat I go with two into B flat another tone to see a semitone to d flat tone to E flat another tone to F another tone to G and then a semitone to a flat and come back playing those same notes, I can play a major scale on any
note of the keyboard with just this formula so let’s try learning a major scale let’s try learning the D major scale with both of our hands because it’s important to play these up and down the keyboard to give you a lot of confidence and flow when you’re playing so we start on D and let’s do the same formula D a tone another tone F sharp here a semitone to G a tone d a tone to B a tune to C sharp and a semitone to D and we go back playing the same note.
Here I use my middle finger as a pivot to bring my thumb underneath to G and then the rest of my fingers take up the remaining notes all the way up to D and I come back down with the same sort of idea middle pointer thumb use my thumb as a pivot this time turn to my middle finger again.
Let’s try that with our left hand the scale stays the same so I start with my pinky on D E F sharp with my middle finger pointer on G this time I pivot on the A note with my thumb so turn with your middle finger to be pointer finger on C sharp and come back the same way C sharp with my pointer my middle finger on B uses this as a pivot with the thumb on a G F sharp A and D and you can play this with your hands at the same time once you’re confident with each hand separately.
That’s the formula for a major scale, let’s get into What a minor scale is now the minor scale or the harmonic minor scale which is what we’re learning now has its own formula so let’s try and figure out that formula now so we start before we do that have we even heard a harmonic minor scale let me play one for you and see if you recognize this sound this has a very different sound from a major scale. A major scale is more positive it’s happy but a minor scale
has a more sort of Evil dark or foreboding kind of sound now music is of course an expression of mood and feeling so you need to be able to express all these different moods you can use these scales depending on what song you want to play if you want to create a song that has cyber tones in it try and use a minor scale and see how that works.
Let’s go back into learning that formula, to figure out any minor scale we want to, so let’s start here with the thumb of our right hand you can use the same set of fingers as the ones that we used for D major so notice in the video how I’m using my middle as a pivot my thumb has a pivot on the way back and the same thing with my left hand and pivot, so let’s see that formula now so I start with an I move a tone up to B followed by a semitone to see this is where I pivot a tone to D another tone to e this time is semitone to F and here I have a stretch which is more than a tone it’s a two and a half a tone plus a semitone so it’s a big jump and then I finish off on another semitone.
So let’s do that again so start on a note don’t semitone tone distance don’t semitone a tone and a half and then a semitone and come back playing the same notes these two can be played on any note on the keyboard so let’s start at something random let’s see an F so if I start on F again I have to follow a tone a semitone a tone another tone a semitone a two and a half now and then a semitone and I can come back playing those same notes and that’s my F minor scale.
So let’s learn that a minor scale which we played so many times with both of our hands right so you use those same fingers that we use for the D major scale the same thing on the left hand to start with your pinky and middle on C your pointer on D your thumb on E you turn this is where you pivot your middle on F your pointer on G sharp and your thumb on a again come back with those same fingers so your pointer middle on F this is where you pivot your thumb on E pointer on D middle on C your ring on B and your pinky on E and as you get more confident playing the scale you can play with both your hands together again that’s it.
So now we’ve learned how to play a major scale and a harmonic minor scale and how to find any major or minor scale that we want to and this is where we derive everything in western music all of our chords all of those ideas come from this basic building block the scale.So now you know that chords come from scales but when we play them sometimes they do sound a little bit boring or drap because if I play a Melody with some chords behind it
, while that sounds nice it could sound a lot better a lot more colorful if I added some Rhythm some movement in the left hand instead of just these blocks so suppose I used my ideas my knowledge of what chords are and how I can change them up into playing the notes separately instead of all of them as one block so suppose instead of just these three notes what is that D F and A.
So that’s D A D and F is still the same chord right but it sounds so much better when I play this now and now with my melody that’s going to sound so good so I have something like that sounds so much better now right so much fluent so much color in that music so to do this you need to practice a lot with an understanding of the separate notes of any chord if I know the notes of a C major chord I can break those notes up and play arpeggios up and down the keyboard if I want to that’s an entire C major chord you hear this in a lot of famous songs if you’ve heard Bohemian Rhapsody for example because that uses a B flat major chord right I think I messed that part up let’s do that again that’s just all the notes of a B flat major chord but it sounds so good or a C minor chord all he’s doing is breaking up those notes off those chords to play these smooth flowing movements of music that sound so beautiful so practice especially with your left hand because your left-hand does a lot of accompaniment and once you’re confident you can try adding these into any of the other songs you’ve learned that use block chords so change that up and use arpeggios instead and see how it makes your music that much better sometimes songs don’t have to follow that set rule of only seven notes of a scale sometimes you use notes outside the scale these are called chromatics or chromatic notes and to play them we have to go through all the notes on the keyboard at the same time it’s quite helpful actually when you learn to play this chromatic scale right sounds quite complicated but we have a lot of drills to help you with this if you need them so all you’ve gotto do is start with your thumb on any note that you want to any white note that you want to so I start to say on F I put my middle finger on every black key that I play thumb again over here because there are two white keys I put my pointer finger on that y key and then again we go middle thumb middle thumb two white keys so I put my index finger middle thumb middle thumb middle thumb and on and on I can come back the same way middle thumb middle thumb middle my pointer finger here because there’s two white keys middle thumb middle pointer sorry pointer thumb middle thumb middle thumb and on and on I can go up and down like this now refer to the video. Practicing this is useful but it doesn’t really help your music that much until you start applying these small chromatic patterns so sometimes you might play a chord so that change here I followed a chromatic pattern to go into the next chord that I wanted to again another chromatic pattern here so adding these small licks these small fills into your music adds a lot of color to your music as well so practice these chromatic scales and start adding them into your music where and when you can now when we’re playing level 3 songs pieces at this level use melodies or flowy music ideas on both hands at the same time so you might have to get used to playing something with your left hand and something entirely different with your right hand simultaneously that’s quite difficult to get down so we have a lot of drills to help you practice this stuff which you can check out on our Channel.
LEARN: How to play Chord and Arpeggios pattern on the Keyboard! from the video below