playing something like that sound like something you'd like to do
well I'm Scott Houston I'm going to show you how to do it in this quick video I
actually did another video previously to this about kind of just shoving you off
the cliff just a little bit into the world of improvisation and it was super
well received so I decided to do another one and this one we're also gonna teach
you a really often used little chord progression it's just going to be a
nice easy way to have really pain-free kind of you know noodling around without
any wrong notes I promise so before we get into that though I do want to
mention if you like these kind of videos and you like what I'm doing I do
encourage you to go ahead and subscribe to this channel it's PianoGuyTV my
youtube channel you'll see hopefully by now some little bugs some little button
or something right around here somewhere and that'll allow you to subscribe to
the channel and if you do hit that little bell that's next to it that way
you'll get notified every time I do a new video also if you want to get a
little bit deeper and you really think this is something that might be up your
alley I would encourage you to to go check out my online course at Pianoinaflash.com
so let's dig right into this now then I'll go and switch to the piano
shot what we're gonna do with our left hand and again the whole goal here is to
give you something really easy to do with your left hand so that you can
think about starting to just make up your own melody in your right hand and
improvise a little bit I need to apologize I've just just scraped the
heck out of the top of my hand about a week and a half ago and it's still not
quite there yet so anyway here's what we're going to do and I can tell you
what these chords are but I really would rather you just kind of learn
this by rote but we're going to play what's called a two-five one let me just
explain this one thing this is a C on a piano right to Cs so if you just
count up we're gonna do this in the key of C cuz it's easier to explain but you
can do everything I'm teaching you in any other key and just move it up there
once we get down with this so anyway if you have just a C it's C D E F G A B C
right so there we go so one two three four five six seven eight well if you
just use those numbers and say two five one right do like that if you use that
numbering scheme and play all white notes play some chords on top of it
it'll be sound like this there's the two chord alright there's the five chord
that's a G major and down to C which is the one well we're gonna add a fourth
note to each one of these chords and make them 7th chords so the two is a D
minor seven again you don't know the chords just blindly memorize what I'm
showing you here well I guess if I was showing you you wouldn't be able to
blindly memorize it now would you all right so there's a D minor 7
there's a g7 and don't worry about tucking your finger down I'm just trying
to get my hands out of the way here so you can see the notes G B D F and then to a C
major seven so again here it is but we're gonna make it easier cuz this is
kind of a big jump right this you're gonna have all this target practice to
like oh oh oh you know you may not get it right so let's make it a lot easier
check this out in the g7 if I want to put these two fingers instead of playing
them in this order one two three four say I take these two notes and I move
down an octave and play em here alright so now I've got those four notes so
again same notes right there's G B D and F well now we're gonna play
B F G B same four notes we're just doing them in a different order we're just
stacking the notes down that's what we're gonna do for the middle chord so
the first one is here here's the next one and you'll notice that all I'm doing
is taking the top two notes and moving down one white note right so from here
to here and now to get to the final one look all
we have to do to go from here did you take the bottom two and move down one
white note so here we go haha easiness D minor seven move the top tw down g7 and
move the bottom two down to get to the third one so that's it alright that's
all we're gonna do over and over I'm gonna teach you actually one more here
in a minute but for now this is it so that's a 2 to the 5 7 to the 1
actually i'm playing a 2 7 2 - but don't need to know that - 2 5 1 is what everybody calls
this I mean you'll just recognize this there's just it's just used so often in
so many tunes well here if any of you have seen the movie LaLa Land recently
I think that's it something real close to that you know there's just a
million yeah sorry here's autumn leaves I never play it in this key but
there's then it goes on and on and on but that's it all right so that's what
you need to do spend a couple minutes getting comfortable doing that with your
left hand now here's the beauty of that with your right hand you can pretty much
play any white note and it will sound okay all right some a little bit better
than others but for the most part it's kind of like you know I think I said
this in the other video wrong note list noodling right you just can't you can't
really play wrong note so you could just play up the up the scales if you will
it's not a terrifically exciting way to do it but just to prove my point
say i'm playing this
see that worked or you know
all right whatever you're going to do well let me give you just a couple tips
to make that a little bit more interesting and this is where kind of
the improvisational tricks come in what always sounds good if you want to like
you've got to think about a note that you kind of want to land on or
kind of a target if you will and what's always a good target is one of the notes
that's in the chord you're playing so at the beginning one of the great targets
is either write the same that's the four notes that are in the chord D F A and C
you know pick one of those chord tones it's kind of the note you want to to
focus on now when I get ready to move to this chord I'm probably not going to
stay on that a at least right now because that's not one of the notes in
the chord but I'd move up and find another one to kind of mentally and
again you're not just playing it to death but you just want to kind of
mentally hang your hat on one of these chord tones and then I could stay on it
for the third because it's that that B is in the C major seven
right so if you can start thinking about playing you know targeting some
chord tones I think that helps so you
all right I was playing chord tones
alright but I was like thinking I was here on a chord tone I'm thinking I want
to get to the G so I'm just kind of working my way down I could have done
that or you know you can use what's called a chromatic run meaning you're
using the sharps and flats you're getting to it just one half step at a
time so maybe you're playing and now I want to get here so I'm gonna run up to
it right and then I'm gonna get to the C and then a something like that that
sounded kind of bad
all right so do that for a while now to take it a step further and again the
whole idea is for you just to to just be free and I know that probably really
just is totally freaking out a lot of you that are serious classical pianist
they're like ah you mean it's not written how am I supposed to know what
to play got I need to see it notation right well that's kind of the whole
purpose of this is just just let your brain do it the whole idea this is not
to need any written notation to kind of you know let yourself get to the point
where you realize wow I'm just kind of creating this on the fly alright so I
want to give you one more little chord here that'll kind of make a nice
turn around if you will or transition to just keep doing this over and over it'll just
sound a lot hipper let me show you one other thing okay so we were on a D
minor seven right there let me just show you this one if you want to it's a nice
transition to get back to the D is to play it's actually a C sharp
diminished chord is what it is but it's these notes it's
c-sharp E G and A sharp or B flat depending on which way you want to think
of it so you play
and then up to the D so again the whole progression goes see how it kind of
leads up you know it kind of feels like it wants to go
there so just get to the point where you could do that in your sleep or you could
do that while you're watching a TV show or something then you don't have to
panic about that and you can think about your right hand improvisational
playing which is really why we're doing this so again think about maybe um you
know a simple melodic line that uses primarily chord tones and again that
actually now that I've got that in my brain from lala land is a good one
example right so lands on a chord tone then you go
so make up your own
maybe you just play down the chord tone
right
those were notes right out of that diminished chord right I was in a very smulty way
doing my best to figure out a way to to show you guys
some of these chromatic runs maybe you know I'm thinking I want to get down
here to the G who knows I mean these sound pretty funny and stilted when I'm
thinking about saying them explicitly to you but but that's really the whole idea
behind this thing so its a 2 5 1 progression just get that down and you
can do that one C sharp diminished chord to make it kind of a little transition
back into it and just do that over and over there's no need for speed there's
no need for I don't know accuracy if you will this is all about giving yourself
something harmonically giving yourself something harmonically that then with
your right hand you can really use your brain to create music yeah you become a
music maker not just a note reader or not a note regurgitator of what
something someone else has written right that's really starts to swing open the
door into all these styles that we work on in my online method and really and
everything I've done for the last 20 years so so there you have it another
chance to kind of just have fun without any fear of failure right if you've got
headphones put them on so you know if you're nervous about that or if not I
think you'll just find this is a very sonically pleasing thing to play in a
nice little chord change and it'll also get your ears really well tuned to
hearing 2 5 1s which is a critical part of almost all the music
that we're playing in these styles so I hope that helps right now again if you
have fun with this and it sounds like something you may be interested in I
hope you'd go check out my online course at pianoinaflash.com we always have
an absolutely free intro course that's available for you to kind of dip your
toes in the water if that's something and see if maybe we're a good fit one
way or the other so I hope to see in the course someday
if not I hope this helps and as always have fun playing piano