Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman,
and today we are expanding our birthday
repertoire even more by learning how to
improvise an accompaniment for "Happy Birthday to You".
Oh boy! Then we'll be able to play happy birthday to you as a duet.
Cool!
That's right. Once you know the accompaniment,
you'll be able to play along with someone who knows the melody and turn it into a piano duet.
Or another thing you can do is play the accompaniment while you or a friend sings the song.
Let's come to the piano to get started.
Now, in order to improvise an accompaniment, it's important to know what key we are in.
Now,
I've usually been
telling you what key a song or a piece is in,
but I'd like you to start learning
how to figure that out for yourself.
So here are two main clues to figure out
what key a song is in.
Clue number one is to look at the last note of the song or
piece.
Can you tell me the letter name of the last note of "Happy Birthday to You"?
What know do we end on? It ends on an F.
Now, not always, but I'd say 95 to 99 percent of the time
the last note of a song is the key that you're in.
So that's one clue.
The other clue is to look for
any sharps or flats.
Now here in this last phrase what do we have? ♫Happy birthday to you!♫ We have a B-flat,
and the fact that we end on an F and we have a B-flat, that tells us that we are in the key of F major.
Now that's very important because
looking at the chord symbols,
if we see a Roman numeral I like
here at the end, we have to know that that means to play an F major chord.
In the key of F, a I
chord means to play DO MI and SO
This is our I chord.
Now since we're going
to be playing this accompaniment as a duet,
your melody player, if you
play it with a partner at the piano,
melody might be playing up here instead of on middle C,
and the accompaniment might be played down on the lower part of the piano. Again here's my middle C.
So let's just work on our right hand chords
using this bass F and middle C position.
Okay, can you play a I chord with your right hand?
Now we're also going to need the V7. chord. Remember for the V7 chord we'll need an E
a B-flat and a C, which you can play with 1 4 5.
Try your V7 chord.
And then back to the I chord.
Now on line two we'll need a IV chord which is F B-flat and D.
Play with fingers 1 3 5 in the right hand.
Can you try that?
Play your IV chord, and then back to the I chord.
Let's review them all one more time. I chord,
let's try V7 chord,
back to the I chord, now a IV chord,
back to the I chord.
Now pause the video if you feel like you want more practice with those. You want to feel pretty comfortable
with all of those
that you can change back and forth.
Otherwise, let's keep going and figure out what we can do with our left hand.
Our left hand will be playing the root of each chord.
How do we know what the
root is? It's just the same as the name of the chord.
So in the F major pentascale, when you see a I play DO, the first note of the scale.
so when the
right hand plays this for I, the left hand will play just F.
♫Happy birthday to♫, and then on V7,
the root of a V7 chord is the fifth note. Five for fifth.
One, two, three, four, five. The fifth note is C
or SO. So the left hand will play C
while the right hand plays that V7
♫Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!♫
♫Happy birthday dear♫ Now what do we need?
IV in Roman numerals stands for four.
So now we need the fourth note for the root. One, two, three, four is B-flat.
So the left hand
plays B-flat, the right hand plays our IV chord.
♫Happy birthday dear Henry♫
I'm thinking about Henry a lot. I guess it's Henry's birthday today.
And then we go back to ♫Happy birthday to you!♫
And notice there on 'to you', the chords change
pretty quickly. We have just 1 beat for the V7 chord
then it goes straight to the I chord.
Okay, now on this very first
beat, which we could call a pickup
beat for these two pick up notes.
On 'happy' you'll notice the V7 is in those parentheses, and that's to tell you you don't have to play a chord there.
But what I like to do for fun
when I'm playing for like someone's birthday that
I know and I want to play piano for them,
I might make it fancy and go like:
I hold
down the pedal on my piano and I might kind of
you know do a little shimmy on those notes, or even go like:
See how I just took some V7 chords,
or you can even:
and see that gives everyone their starting note. I was just playing V7 chords going higher and higher
to make it sound fancy. See how I did that?
♫Happy birthd ...