Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman,
and today we're going to be improvising together in A minor.
Let's come to the piano to get started.
Since we're improvising in A minor, let's quickly review the A minor pentascale.
Go ahead and place both hands in A minor.
Let's also review staccato while we're at it
Remember, to do a good staccato you want a quick lift of the wrist,
keeping your fingers close to the keys, not flying up like that.
A little lift
to make a light, crisp sound.
Can you try "Stepping and Skipping" with me an A minor?
Ready,
and we're going to do it staccato. Sorry to fake you out there.
Ready, go:
♫Stepping up, and stepping down, and skipping up and down♫
Then a I chord.
Great.
Okay, like I said today we're doing an improvisation, so choose left hand or right hand,
because you're going to be making the melody.
So, you're probably just playing one note at a time,
and again, you can feel free to move around
to different A minor pentascales to add some variety.
To add a little more interest to this improvisation,
I encourage you to try not just staying in the A minor pentascale,
but feeling free to extend up a note to this F,
which can sound really cool with
the A minor pentascale is just DO RE ME FA SO, and then this one extra note would be
LE, So when you want to use that note, just scoot your fingers up
one extra key,
and then when you want you can shift back down.
And feel free to add in that extra note
to your improvisation. I think you'll really like the sound, and then you'll get used to
this concept of having your hand being more free to move around on the keys
rather than just staying in one position the whole time.
My accompaniment is going to sound like this,
and I call this "Dancing in Moonlight.
You could call that kind of a jazz waltz feel.
Okay, now I would recommend doing some legato notes,
which means the notes are connected and some
some staccato notes mixed in
to add variety.
Try not to do all staccato or all legato, because that would get boring.
The great thing about music is its variety and its interest
So, have some fun improvising. You can start playing whenever you feel like it,
but see if you can also try ending with me so be listening
and responding to what I'm doing in the accompaniment.
get ready to improvise.
Now, remember from our website you can also get an audio backing track with a similar accompaniment
that you can improvise along with.
So I encourage you to practice improvising in A minor or using
our A major improvisation from the last lesson.
Have fun improvising a little bit every day to develop that skill.
Now, let me also show you how you can improvise or compose your own A minor song
without an accompaniment. In fact, you're going to be making your own accompaniment
using some chords you know.
We've got our I chord in A minor,
our IV chord, or our V7 chord. Let's take a quick look at those.
In A minor, this would be our I chord DO ME SO.
the IV chord is formed by just having both of these notes step up.
That gives us our IV chord, which has a slightly different flavor.
It's a really great companion to the I chord.
You can hear that makes a pretty nice sound
to contrast with the I chord, and then of course our very familiar V7 chord
provides some nice contrast and tension as well.
That's kind of, maybe you could call, the tension chord that resolves
to the I chord.
All these chords provide balance
and variety to each other.
So, with your left hand let's practice these chords. Try a I chord.
Now, to form the IV chord just let your thumb glide over one key.
In minor, you just go up a half step. If we were in major you'd have to go up a whole step, but in minor
just move that thumb up a half step for the IV chord.
So it's DO FA LE,
then back to the I chord, now try the V7 chord.
Now, I'd like you to press pause and just get comfortable with those chords, and you can
kind of improvise different rhythms.
You can even break the chord.
Play around with those chords, and then press play when you're ready to go on.
Now with your left hand providing the chords, your right hand can improvise a melody.
I was just using those different chords, and then my right hand was adding a melody.
So, on your own you can have endless fun with those chords,
and making up a melody in your right hand.
Challenge yourself and see what you can come up with.
The possibilities are endless.
Nice job improvising with me today in A minor.
High-five to the screen!
Yeah!
I hope you'll continue to practice your improvisation skills a little bit every day.
Happy practicing, and see you next time!
♫Cold, cross, buns♫
♫One a penny--♫
(crying)
Chef! What's wrong?
No one wants to buy my cold, cross buns.
Oh, well,
it might work better if you actually made them hot, cross buns,
and try A major instead of A minor.
Minor can kind of sound sad, you know.
Hmm, good idea. Let's try it.
♫Hot cross buns, hot cross buns♫
Oh! It worked!
Here you go, that would be one penny, please.
Well, see ya later Chef!
Thanks again Princess!
Next we need to work on his pricing model.