Deta, Deta: Improvisation

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman.
Today I'm going to show you how to add your own improvisation as a B section to "Deta Deta".
Let's come to the piano, and I'll show you how to do it.
Our "Deta Deta" improvisation is going to be using a new scale called a pentatonic scale.
You know about pentascales. The F major pentascale uses these five pitches DO RE MI FA SO on F G A B-FLAT C,
but a pentatonic scale is built on DO RE MI. It skips FA to SO, and then goes up to LA. So these five pitches DO RE MI
SO LA, build the pentatonic scale. A scale that is actually found in many cultures around the world in their traditional folk music.
Now, for the pentatonic scale because we've got this skip here, we've got to figure out what fingering we want to use.
There are two options. You could do 1 2 3, and then do a skip up like our 3-4 finger skip.
Let's try that once. Go ahead and place your finger 1 on F.
And rather than locking your fingers in this position the whole time, which is going to put a little strain on your hand,
go ahead and just keep your fingers comfortably close together,
and when you get to finger 3, then stretch up and then you can stretch back down only as needed.
Never lock your fingers in a stretched position.
It can create unwanted tension and strain.
Another option would be to put finger 1 anchored on G,
kind of like on line 2 of "Deta Deta", we can have our fingers glide over finger 2 landing on F
with finger 1 remaining on G, so our fingering could be  2
1 2. Notice that two played F, 1 played G, then 2 crosses back over to A
And then we just won't use finger 3 at all. We'll go up to finger 4 and 5. For C and D.
So let's practice the scale this way now. Place your finger 1 on G,
and try this with me. Finger 2 playing F will go F, then finger 1 on G, finger 2 on A,
skip up to finger 4 5, and then back down, 4 2 1 2.
Great, now press pause and practice the pentatonic scale using those two fingerings once. 1 2 3 4 5,
and then again with 2 1 2 4 5,
remember you're only playing these five pitches. Press pause to practice those two fingerings,
then press play when you're ready to go on.
All right, now let's talk about how to add an improvisation to "Deta Deta".
What you'll do is first play "Deta Deta" as originally written.
I'm going to skip to the end.
You won't skip, I'm just saving us time, and then what's going to happen here is the left hand is going to keep going,
and you're going to improvise.
Notice that I just improvised using any notes of the pentatonic scale,
and then once you're done with your improvisation, you'll play "Deta Deta" one last time.
So to summarize, you play "Deta Deta",
then you keep your left hand going using the same chords while you improvise, and then third, you play "Deta Deta" one last time.
Now I'd like to show you how you can take your own improvisation and turn it into a composition by writing it down.
So what you have to do is first experiment a lot with different sounds.
Like for example, let me show you how I might turn one of my improvisations into a composition.
First I'm just going to get my left hand going, and then I might just doodle around in my right hand until I find something I like.
Oh, I kind of like that pattern of the REST TA TA TA.
Stepping up. So I'm going to keep that, and then I'm just going to mess around and until I find something else.
No, I didn't quite like that.
Oh, I like that better. Stepping down to the G instead of skipping down. Remember, this is your improvisation. So when you do this, you'll just be deciding if you like it or not.
Yeah, I like that pattern, so my whole improvisation is:
And then I could go back to playing "Deta Deta"
right from my improvisation into my final round of "Deta Deta".
All right, so let's try writing down my improvisation.
I started off with a rest on beat 1.
And then I played this F.
So I'm going to draw it right there and add a stem,
then my next beat was a G, and now I'm on beat 3, so I need to make sure that I'm lining up with my left hand. I have
this chord on beat 1 2,
and then on beat 3 I'm up here on this chord, and that's where
I play my G in the right hand,
and then I step up to an A.
So we have rest 2 3 4, and then I do that pattern again. Rest
2
3
4
Then the next part I played was:
Let's write that a little bit at a time. I had TA TI-TI
So that's C
and A D
C S D C A G
I'm going to add the C, another quarter note,
then A G, now that I'm below the line, I'm going to make my stems go up.
A G, now I've gone through 4 beats.
Quarter note takes up 1 beat, two eighth notes share a beat. So that's beat 2, here's beat 3, here's 4-&.
So I need to start a new measure, but before we do that looks like I need to add my left hand pa ...