A Major, A Minor, & Playing Staccato

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!
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