Is how to make your piano sound amazing in the pop and dance music scene and genre. so the three most important elements of of creating a very, very good piano track, is, is these three topics. So it’s harmony, court, voicing, and syncopation. So it’s also in this order as well. It’s good to start with harmony, and we’re gonna start today’s, mass class also with exploring harmony.
And I’ll teach you how to do this without having a single sheet of paper in front of you without having to go through, music theory courses. also without having to practically actually even learn harmony, which is sometimes quite complex. I know some of you will be able to read notes, some of you won’t be able to read notes. Today’s presentation, you don’t need to be able to read notes in order to progress and understand your playing, which is, I feel really great.
There’s very good tips on how to read notes, for people that say, oh, if it’s, I can’t read notes, but I would like to learn. you know, there is, there’s tricks that you can, you know, can learn note reading pretty fast. But again, for today, it’s all about feeling. So we’re gonna feel harmonies and we’re gonna also be able to feel we’re gonna a feeling for court voicing.
And we also gonna be able to get a feeling for single patient. And you’re gonna be able to teach yourself that without basically any aims, but just you and yourself at the piano. So, the first thing that I would like to mention is very important is to stick to fingering. I’m going to switch my camera around, and you’ll be able to see, my hands and we’re gonna go back to full game.
Super. Everything is correct. You’re gonna be able to see the piano. So finger is really important and for yourself to remember that the thumb is always the one. some people know this already very well, but fingering is really important. When I see sometimes people try to play the piano when they play court, they basically press it with like two fingers like this.
Now you’d say, well, Vincent, I pressed the keys. Everything is fine. what’s important is to know that if you take a certain fingering, then stick with it, but also to understand that you know, your fingers fit perfectly. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on the keys. So if you play it a third, you play it with one and three. And if you play it fourth, play it with one and four. And if you play it, play it with one and five. So it’s a very important thing to stick to because fingering is all about what comes next.
So what comes next is always the next chord. And if you keep changing your fingering it, you’re basically teaching your brain all the time to change, which means that your brain cannot absorb it because you keep altering actually your, your way of doing things, which means that your brain never accepts, one way. it’ll accept many different ways, but then we’ll always be permanently confused. So, and that’s always the thing with playing courts is that we get confused once we need to change from one court to the next.
That’s what I’m saying. Stick to your fingering and you will see if you keep checking that the piano plane will become easier and the chord plane will become easier. Okay, so how to find the perfect harmony. So what I’m gonna do is, I’m sure most of you already know, we’re gonna start to see major chord and we’re gonna play that with the fingers one, three, and five. And this is the only thing that I want you to be able to remember when it comes to learning harmony.
And the cool thing is, is that we teach yourselves to play 1, 3, 5. You can see it on the bottom number A, it says start at C Major 1, 3, 5. So we put the thumb on the C3 in the E and the five on the G. And what we are gonna do next is we are gonna continue to C sharp major. So we’re gonna put the thumb on the C sharp and the third finger on the E sharp. And finally, the fifth finger on the G sharp, you can see those on the screen.
And what happens, it’s gonna move chromatically always half on up as you go. And by doing that, you keep seeing actually the chords that we have arrived at G Major. And we have a major, we have major, we have not major major. And then finally after 15 chords back to C Major. So we total have 15, sorry, what am I saying correctly? 12, 12 major chords.
and we have seven on the white keys. We have five on the black keys. Finally, we have 12 notes. The 12 different. So this is a, this is a really, really kind of like important, important way and important, and, and vital way to learn each court. ’cause the cool thing is that all you have to check is that, every nose goes half a step up.
And with this you learn the feeling of each court. With that, we’ve learned all the major courts. Once you can do that well, and you can suddenly, and randomly pick a chord, like F major, then what you can do then is change it to a minor chord by just raise or actually lowering your third finger hand major becomes a minor.
so again, the only thing you have to remove at C major and work your way half a ton. Then what you can do is play that with two hands habits on up. Get this feeling for playing the chords if you’re comfortable with that, which is Maybe then want to do the inversions.
So again, first inversion is that the bottom out, the C goes one up. So we have the first inversion port C major, And the second inversion where the E moves one off to go, and then we return back, we move position major. So hopefully that’s, that’s very clear. The cool thing with this exercise is again, you learn to play every single chord in existence, but only thing you have to remember is to start at C major.
For that, make sure to remember your flats and sharps, and, and learn the notes on the piano. it’s only a, B, C, D, e, G. It’s the first seven letters of the alphabet. and then it starts again with the A. So, note, reading is very easy and there’s another trick which I would love to share with you guys.
Learn how to say the alphabet backwards from G. So learn to say G, f, E, D, C, b, A. So G, f, E, D, C, b, A. It’s a really good way because sometimes if it takes too long for you to think, oh, what becomes before G, you know, it’s very, very, very nice if you be able to flawlessly save the first seven letters of the alphabet backwards. So that’s, that will help your note reading and will also help your playing a lot. again, for people who can already play.
great, the interesting stuff still comes for everybody who still wants to learn how to play. Then I hope that this is good information. now comes actually the cool tip, is what what makes chord playing cool is obviously playing chords. and chords can sound sometimes, you know, bit dull if we play only the one, the three and the five. And the secret is that the third is a very classical interval, but the fourth, the fifth is actually the intervals that we want.
What I’m doing here is I’m in the left hand, four in the right hand.
Now this is my biggest trick for you guys to learn. Once you learn the chords, you will learn the intervals. Once you know the intervals, all you do is play with two fingers in your left hand, two fingers in your right hand, and you literally can experiment. So you have here, all you do is like leave one hand and move the other end head.
Different key. Now for that, of course, we need to learn how to play scales and those will become a lot easier.
Again, when you come back to your harmony, you learn, Be conscious of just playing two notes in one hand. If we then.
