All of Me by Jon Schmidt (Advanced)

Hello and welcome. I'm Joseph Hoffman, and in this tutorial I'm going to share some tips for learning to play "All of Me" by John Schmidt. This happens to be the theme song I play at the start of most of my own Hoffman Academy video lessons, and it's been one of our most requested pieces to create a tutorial for. The difficulty level for this piece is early advanced. It's fast and quite challenging, soif you'd like an easier version of this piece please check out my intermediate level tutorial to learn a simplified, but still very exciting version, of "All of me.” But if you're feeling ready for the full, advanced version, let's get started by checking out the score. When I start a new piece, a few things I'm always checking out: the clefs. We would expect to see treble and bass right? But aha, taking the time to double check we see we have treble clef for both hands, and then what is our key signature? Five flats, puts us in the key of D-flat major. Now some people panic when they see a whole bunch of flats or sharps, but I just stay calm and relax, because this is easy. Basically everything is flat except C and F. So rather than stress like, oh what are all the notes that are flat? I just imagine that everything is flat. Parentheses except for C and F, so just kind of assume if you see a note that it's going to be flat except for those C's and F's, and then you'll be in great shape. 4/4 time signature, and also it's very important to check your tempo indication: Freely, like a Fanfare. A Fanfare is like an introduction to something. This is the introduction to the piece, and when a composer says freely, it gives you the liberty to not play like you're playing along with the metronome with a very exact tempo. You might speed some notes up. You might slow some notes down with the flow of the music. Now because of the rhythms of this piece are probably one of its trickiest aspects, I recommend that you take the time to write the counts in your music like this. When you're writing in counts, make sure you're lining up the notes with the correct counts, and then as you're learning it count out loud. 1-& 2-& 3-& 4-&. When you have a fermata you can pause for a moment. 1-& 2-& 3-& 4-&, note on the 16th notes we have to fit both 16th notes inside the &. So at first you'll be very exact with your rhythms, but then once you feel like you have the notes mastered, then try it freely. More like this: Notice how I sped these eighth notes up, and then I slowed these eighth notes down as I came up to the fermata. That's part of playing it freely. There's no one right or wrong, but try to go with the flow of the notes. Usually you're going to build up the energy by going a little faster to the middle of a phrase, and then slow down a little bit at the end of the phrase. Let's also look at the counting for measures five and six. Notice that because we have a 16th note here going to a dotted eighth note, this note will come right in between the 4 and the & And then because this is a triplet, a 16th note triplet, all three fit the & of 2. So again learn with counting out loud at first. 1-& 2-& 3-& 4-&, 1-& 2-& 3-& 4-& And then eventually we’ll get it faster. Now I'm assuming that John Schmidt has big hands like me, and so both of us can reach these bigger chords like this. That's the interval of a ninth from that G-flat up to the A-flat. If that's too big of a stretch for you, you can do a little trick and just It's sometimes marked like this with a little scooped line which says take that note and play it with your left hand. See, the left hand is playing this B-flat which isn't that far away from this G-flat, so your left hand could play both of these notes and your right hand can play these top two notes. and then same thing here. We've got another big hand chord that reaches the interval of a ninth. If that's too far for you to reach, just take this note and this note with your left hand. See, your left hand is on this A-flat so it's really easy to include that D with your left hand. Another place you might want to do that is right here. Okay, so for smaller hands if you can only reach an octave, or not even an octave, you'll definitely want to move those notes down to the left hand.Totally okay to do that. Let's listen to this intro fanfare section. And then, we get to the fun, exciting, fast section. As I mentioned, they're in measure twelve. If you want to take that D-flat in the left hand, see how easy that is to do it like that, otherwise you're doing this bit of a stretch even for me. So I may just do that same adjustment. Take this in the left hand, and then on that next chord as well. No real reason to do that stretch when your left hand can so easily take that. Once we get into measure fifteen, the mood's going to change dramatically, and John Schmidt indicates this with this new tempo indication, fast, put all of yourself into it, this fast metronome speed, and you'll notice all these accents. They're going to be very important for the style and the feel of this piece. Notice we've gone from bass clef back into treble clef here. It's going to be very helpful again towrite in th ...