All the Pretty Horses: Accompaniment

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman. Today we are learning how to improvise or arrange an accompaniment to "All the Pretty Horses" so you can play this as a duet with a friend who already knows how to play the melody. From a past lesson, you probably remember that an accompaniment is music that goes along with a melody. Think of the melody as the main element we listen to in music. It's the part that you sing. The accompaniment adds flavor, support, and mood, complexity to the melody. Creating an accompaniment for a melody is kind of like choosing what kind of clothes to put on. The same melody can be dressed up in so many different ways. All right to improvise our accompaniment, we're going to be reading the chord symbols from up above the staff. Check out this first chord symbol. What do you see? Capital A lowercase m stands for A minor. Can you show me an A minor chord on your piano? An A minor chord looks like this: It's built on A C and E. Those three notes make an a minor triad or chord. All right, now next chord is going to be what? That's right, D minor. Can you show me a D minor chord? It's going to be right here. Let's try to play that. Now to go all the way from A minor to D minor is a whole fourth away. Not a big deal, but there's a smoother way we can do this. I'm about to show you an advanced technique, which makes chord playing a lot smoother, easier, and more musical. It's called doing an inversion. With inversions you take the same three notes, but you place a note that used to be on top down on the bottom. or you can take a note that was on the bottom and put it on top. For example, with this D minor chord, we could take this A and instead place it down here on this A, and it's still a D minor chord. All that you need for a D minor chord is to have a D, an F, and an A. It doesn't really matter the order. So now we've inverted the D minor chord by placing this A down here. The nice thing about that is you'll recall just a second ago we played our A minor chord like this: with those three notes, and then if we use the inversion of D minor, all we have to do is move those two notes up. Some of you may recognize this as the IV chord, and that's exactly right. The D minor chord is our IV chord in this key. It's a fourth. One, two, three, four above A, which is why it's called the IV chord by the way. But we can invert it by putting the A down here, which is a much more natural way to play the IV chord. We've got I chord, then the D minor chord which is the IV chord. So let's try that. Place your right hand in the A minor pentascale, and we'll do 4 beats on each chord, because you'll see one chord symbol per measure. So the A minor chord. Try it with me, go: 1 2 3 4 Now pause to get ready to do the D minor chord. Let's leave our finger 1 on A, and then slide our other fingers up one note so we can have finger 3 on the D, finger 5 on the F. It should sound like that. Try the D minor chord for 4 beats, go: 1 2 3 4 Let's practice going back and forth between the A minor chord and the D minor chord a couple of times in a row. We'll just repeat it three times doing that transition 4 beats on each chord. Ready, go: 1 2 3, prepare, 1 2 3, back to A 1 2 3 4 to D minor, 1 2 3 back to A, 1 2, A minor to D minor, 1 2 3 4. Good job. Now let's keep going. Look at measure three. You'll see that it's just a capital G. What does that mean? That's right, it's a G major chord. Now G major, we can use these three notes here. All just a step below the A minor chord, which we had a moment before. So let's play G major for 4 beats. Ready, go: 1 2 3 4, then in the next measure we go back to A minor for 4 beats. Let's try it. 1 2 3 4 Good now let's try all of line one. Right now we're just doing blocked chords, and holding it for all 4 beats. Ready, go: 1 2 3, D minor, 1 2 3 to G major, 1 2 3 to A minor, 1 2 3 and stop. Good, now press pause and try that three or four times on your own. Count 4 beats for each chord, press play when you feel really comfortable, and you're ready to go on. Okay, now let's make this accompaniment sound a little more interesting by adding in the left hand. What often sounds best for an accompaniment is the right hand doing blocked or possibly broken chords which would mean playing one note at a time like in an arpeggio, but to have the left hand play only the root of the chord. In a chord, the root is the lowest bass note of the chord, assuming the chord is not in an inversion. The root is the lowest note. So for an A minor chord, the root is A. It so happens that the root of the chord is always the name of the chord. So A minor the root is A. For D minor, even though the lowest note is A, remember that's not the root. The original basic position chord is like this so your root is D even though in this case because we've inverted the chord, our lowest note will be A, but our root is D. What our left hand is going to do is play the root. So to make this convenient, let's place our left hand in this D minor pentascale. What that will allow us to do is while the right hand plays the A minor chord, our finger 1 can play A: 1 2 3 4, and then when we go to the D minor chord our finger 5 of left hand will play D while our right hand sh ...