Dragon Night

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman.
Today I'd love to teach you a piece that I composed called "Dragon Night".
When I composed this song, I intended for it to be performed on a digital piano so I could use a drum loop
and an auto accompaniment feature which is common on many digital pianos.
For example,
we've got this kind of drum loop:
Or this:
Fun, but for "Dragon Night", this is what I wanted:
Now,
an auto accompaniment feature on a digital piano allows you to just play a chord using your left hand on the lower part of the piano.
The digital piano figures out what chord you're playing and adds an accompaniment automatically like this.
All I have to do is play an E minor chord, and you get:
Here's the sheet music for "Dragon Night".
Take a look, and what do you notice?
You might have noticed these chord symbols in the music today.
The chord symbols we will look at at a later lesson. So we can kind of ignore those for now.
Up here, you'll see these rests,
and that means we're not playing a melody here during this intro. Oh, hello Mr. Dragon.
And our melody starts here, and so today that's where we're going to start.
So let's figure out this first note. Can you tell me the letter name?
If you said F-sharp you're correct. Now,
as we get to more advanced music, I'm not always going to be telling you, oh it's in this pentascale or that pentascale.
You're going to be figuring out on your own where to put your hand,
and what positions you're going to be in, and
as we get to more advanced music, it's not going to stay in a pentascale. You're going to be moving around,
but this line does fall in a pentascale, and let's figure it out.
Can you find the lowest note that you play on this line?
And tell me it's letter name.
If you said E, you're correct.
E is the lowest note we play on this phrase, and what's the highest note?
Point to it,
and tell me it's letter name.
If you're pointing right here and said B, you're correct.
So now we've got a lot of clues. We need to figure out the pentascale.
Our lowest note is E. We know we have an F-sharp. I see a G, I see an A, and we have a B.
What pentascale is that?
If you said E minor, you're correct.
Now one note at a time can you practice saying the letter names?
Starting with F-sharp, say them out loud for me, go.
The correct answer is F-sharp, G, E, F-sharp, G, B, A, G, A, A, A, G, F-sharp, F-sharp, G, E.
Now let's practice the rhythm once. Can you count the beat out loud with me?
And we're going to tap the rhythm.
So we'll just count 1 2 3 4, but whenever we have eighth notes we'll add an &. 3-& 4, like right here.
Let's try it together. I'll count 4 beats, then let's tap and count. 1 2, ready, go.
1 2 3 4, 1 2 3-& 4, 1 2 3-& 4, 1 2 3 4.
Great, now I'd like you to pause the video and on your own place your right hand in the E minor pentascale,
and see if you can figure out how to play this on your own, then press play and we'll check it out together.
Here's what the first phrase should sound like. I've got my finger 2 on F-sharp.
1 2 3-& 4
Now, if that matched what you played, great job.
If there are a few little things you need to fix, feel free to pause and fix anything so you can play
line one just awesome like that, and then let's go on when you're ready to check out line two.
Now let's check out line two starting here in measure seven.
What do you notice about line two?
You might notice that a lot of the notes are the same. We start on an F-sharp,
we have this E half note, we have another F-sharp, but there's some things that are different too.
I would call this a parallel phrase, but with some slight variations.
So let's go through and find those variations and circle them. In your own music,
can you circle any notes that are different from line one? Pause and find anything that's different to circle in your own music at home,
then press play and we'll check it out together.
Okay this is what you should have circled in your own music.
Basically, every time we had a G on beat 2 that's been replaced with an F-sharp G.
I wanted to add a little variation to this composition instead of TA TA TWO-OO, this time we have TA TI-TI TWO-OO
TA TI-TI TI-TI TA
Now, pause the video and I'd like you to work on line two on your own, then press play and we'll check it out together.
Here's what the second phrase should sound like:
1 2-& 3-& 4, 1 2 3-& 4, 1 2-& 3 4
Did that match what you played?
If so, great job.
If you need a little extra time to practice you can always pause to work some more.
Now let's check out line three.
So far we've had a phrase that we could call A,
and then this phrase because it's very similar with only slight variation we could cal ...