D-flat Major Pentascale

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman. Did you know that pentascales can start on a black key? That's right. They can and in this unit we're going to learn several of these new black key pentascales. So let's come to the piano to learn the dark side of the pentascale. It's really important to remember that DO can move depending on the song. Way back a long time ago we learned about the C major pentascale. Where C is DO. You can kind of think of C as like an address, where Mr. DO lives with his family. But, do you always have to live in the same house? No. DO can move his family to D where he's on D and the relationships in his family stay the same. So RE's a step up. MI is another whole step up from RE. MI to FA is a half step of course, and then FA to SO another whole step. Remember the letter names on the piano are fixed they will never move. Just like when you move, your address doesn't move with you. So the letters are like the address, but Mr. DO can move wherever he wants depending on the song. Wherever DO moves though it's always the same formula to build a major pentascale, and that formula is: whole step, whole step, half step, whole step. Now here's a little secret hand sign you can do to remember that. Can you make this shape with your right hand? Notice how I put my fingers 3 and 4 together. That's to remind you where the half step is. So here's DO RE MI FA SO You can see there's a whole step here, a whole step, then a half step, and then a whole step. If you ever forget how to build a major pentascale, just make this hand sign and you've got it. Remember that MI and FA are best friends. They're the half step. Now we can use this to figure out how to move DO to a black key. Let's try it now. What if Mr. DO wanted to live on D-flat. Remember a flat takes you to the nearest key to the left. A half-step below wherever you were before. So here's D-flat. Now let's use our hand sign. Remember that from DO to RE is a whole step. You can remember that because there's this gap here. That gap tells you we have to skip over one key, black or white. So we're going to skip over this white key and land here. That's a whole step because there's one key in between. Okay, now from RE to MI is also a whole step. Can you point to a key that's a whole step above E-flat? If you're pointing here you're correct. Remember, we always have to skip one key, black or white to make it a whole step. Now we're up to MI, and we're ready for the half step. Can you point to a half step above F? If you're pointing here to G-flat you're correct. Now we could have called that an F-sharp, but here's a little trick: In music we try to avoid having the same letter twice in the same scale. So we're going to call this F. We're going to call this G-flat. Technically it could be an F-sharp, but F and F-sharp in the same scale is a little awkward. So we'll call it a G-flat. And then, were from FA to SO. Once again we need a whole step. Can you point to a whole step above G-flat? If you're pointing here to A-flat you're correct. Now this builds our major pentascale. Now if we wanted to keep going, remember that in songs like "Lavender's Blue," sometimes we need a LA. We have DO RE MI FA SO but if we need a LA, we just go another whole step up and that gives us LA. And if we need a TI, we go a half step below DO. So we could go there. Now that's for our more advanced songs where we need to go beyond the pentascale. But if we want just the pentascale, we've got this great pattern of black two black keys, white, and then two black keys on top, which I call an Oreo cookie position because we've got our black cookie, the white cream in the middle, and then the black cookie on top: Oreo cookie. Now can you name these keys with me? D-flat E-flat F G-flat A-flat Now, you might have noticed we could have called this C-sharp, but because we already decided that we needed to call this G-flat to avoid clashing F, F-sharp. If you have some flats, you want to use all flats. In general, we try to stick with either all sharps or all flats within the same pentascale. That's why we chose D-flat in this case. D-flat E-flat F G-flat A-flat. Now when you play a black key pentascale, you'll notice that to reach the black keys your thumb's going to need to come forward. Don't twist your hand, just move your whole hand up into the black keys. You'll notice my finger 3, all my fingers are playing deep into the keys so all of my fingers can comfortably reach DO RE MI FA SO Now your turn. Now let's try stepping back down: SO FA MI RE DO Your turn. Play and sing. Now let's try with our left hand. Go ahead and find the D-flat major pentascale with your left hand. DO RE MI FA SO Your turn. And stepping down: SO FA MI RE DO Your turn. Now how would you play the arpeggio? Now we're going to skip: DO MI SO, Your turn Now, I'd like you to pause the video, and try finding the D-flat major pentascale in four different places on your piano using your right and your left hand, and play stepping up, play stepping down. You can try staccato, you can try legato, high and low on your piano in four different places. Press pause to do that, and then press play to go on. Here's what the D-flat major pentascale looks like on ...