Are You Sleeping: Right Hand

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman, and today we're going to learn to play the melody of a famous French folk song Frère Jacques or in English, "Are You Sleeping". ♫Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?♫ ♫Sonnez le matines, sonnez le matines, Ding dong ding, ding dong ding♫ ♫Are you sleeping, are you sleeping? Brother John, Brother John, ♫Morning bells are ringing, morning bells are ringing♫ ♫Ding, dong, ding, ding, dong, ding♫ Here's the score for "Are You Sleeping?". Whenever I learn a new piece, one of the first things I like to do is just go through a kind of checklist. I want to check my tempo indication. Andante means what? It's a medium slow a relaxed pace. I like to check my clefs, treble and bass, and then my time signature. What's the time signature? It's 4/4 telling us we'll have 4 beats in every measure. Those are very important things to check before you try playing any new piece, and then I might want to try and see what key we're in. Look at the position, I can see that my finger 1 is going to be on an f, and then looking ahead, I see this flat symbol. Can you tell me the letter name of this note? If you said B, you're correct. So I see that have an F, a G, an A, a B-flat, and then a C. So what pentascale is this? Tells me I'll be in the F major pentascale today. Now, can you tell me how the notes are moving? Let's say the steps, skips, or repeats for each note. Ready, we'll say start on F, step up, now keep going by yourself. You should have said start on F, step up, step up, skip down, or you could have said down a third, repeat, step up, step up, down a third. Now keep going from here. You should have said up a third, step up, step up, down a third, step up, step up, and instead of step up, you could have said up a second, up a second, second or a step, that means the same thing. So how would we sing this in solfège? Since we know we're in the key of F major, F is DO. Can you tell me the solfège for these first four notes if this is DO? The correct answer is: DO RE MI DO. Now let's sing this next measure together. DO RE MI DO and what would the solfège be here? We skipped from DO up to MI FA SO MI FA SO Now, before I show you this on the piano, I think you can figure this out for yourself. I'd like you to pause the video, place finger 1 on F, and don't forget the B-flat, and see if you can teach yourself how to play these first four measures by you reading the notes. Then press play and we'll check it out together. All right, here's what line one of "Are You Sleeping?" sounds like: Is that what it sounded like when you played? If so great, nice work. If not that's fine just press pause and try it again, and then when you're ready, let's try playing it together. Here we go, we're going to start with finger 1 on F. I'll count 1 2 3 4, and then we start. 1 2 3 4 Great, now let's check out line two together. If you look at line two you'll notice something interesting. Look at the first note of line two. Can you tell me the letter name of what it is? If you said C you're correct. Now look at the finger number. If we're in the F major pentascale, it would usually be finger 5 that plays C, but in the score you'll see that it says finger 4. That's because you'll notice that in the second note we actually need to go one above C. And so our fingers are going to shift over to the G pentascale. So now finger 4 is on C, so we can play SO LA SO FA, so now finger 3 is on the B-flat. SO LA SO FA MI. And then we need to play an F. Finger 1 is now on G though, so we're going to have to stretch it down just a little bit one step below to play F. SO LA SO FA MI DO Notice how there's kind of a gap now between these two fingers from MI down to DO. SO LA SO FA MI DO SO LA SO FA MI DO Now I'd like you to press pause, place finger 4 on C, and then practice playing that phrase five times, then press play when you're ready to go on. Notice here how in measure seven the melody goes from the right hand down to this middle C in the left hand, back to F. And the reason we need the help from the left hand, remember, in the right hand when we're on F, that's a finger 1. So we're kind of out of fingers to go any lower, but the melody here goes ♫Ding, dong, ding♫. So we need the left hand's help on that one note for the melody. ♫Ding, dong, ding♫ Also notice for this last measure, our dynamic marking changes to piano. So this will sound kind of like an echo maybe the bells are ringing in the city to wake everyone up, but then we hear an echo off the distant mountains. Now the last two measures of the song are going to need your left hand's help. You'll see that we have finger 1 on F, and then finger 1 of the left hand on C, and we have ♫Ding, dong, ding, ding, dong, ding♫ Now you try. Good, now if we put all of line two together, it will sound like this. I'm going to keep my left hand in position so it's ready when it's time to use it. So I've got my finger 4 on C up here. Here we go. Now I'd like you to press pause and try line two three times by yourself, and then press play when you're ready to go on. Great, now we're ready to try to play the whole piece. If you're up for it, you can try playing along wit ...