Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman,
and today we're going to learn what may
become one of the most useful songs you ever learned.
What do you mean useful?
Useful because it's a song most people I know sing every year on a very special day.
"O Christmas Tree"?
"The Star-Spangled Banner"?
No, think of a
song you always sing right before you eat cake.
Oh! "Happy Birthday to You".
You got it!
"Happy Birthday" is a song that you'll
probably be singing your whole life.
Any time you or a friend has a birthday.
And by the end of the lesson today, you'll not just be able to sing to your friend on their birthday,
you'll be able to play "Happy Birthday" on the piano for them.
Let's get started by checking out the sheet music.
Here's the sheet music for a
"Happy Birthday to You".
Take a second and just tell me what you notice.
You might have noticed we have just a treble staff this time.
Usually we'd see a treble staff and a bass staff in what we call the grand staff,
but since we have just
the treble staff only today,
we could call this lead sheet style where we just
see the melody
and chord symbols up above, which we'll use to improvise our own accompaniment.
Today we're just going to learn how to play the melody though.
I always like to check our time signature.
How many beats per measure?
That top
number tells us we'll have 3 beats per measure.
But hey wait a minute.
This
first measure only has 1 beat.
Hey, did somebody steal some beats here?
Oh, don't worry I wasn't blaming you Monkey.
Wait, you didn't take any beats did you?
Oh, good I didn't think so.
You see, this can happen sometime in music where
you have an incomplete measure at the start of a song or piece.
And when you have an
incomplete measure, those notes are called pickup notes.
Pickup notes are
what we call notes at the beginning of a song
before the first full measure, which you can see here we have 1 2 3 beats. Here's our first full measure,
so these are pickup notes.
But why would a composer want to do that?
Why wouldn't we just start here on beat 1?
Well, the answer lies in that sometimes a composer doesn't want to start on a strong beat.
Remember that in music
our beats are arranged in groups of strong and weak,
and in music the
first beat of a measure is always a strong beat,
which we sometimes call the downbeat,
and when we're singing along, there are some words that are more important.
If you're saying happy birthday to someone, what's more
important?
The happy part? Well, you can be happy any day, right?
But the birthday that's the really special part right?
So you say 'happy birthday,'
and then 'to you', 'you' is the next important strong one,
so it creates this pattern of strong notes falling on the downbeat, or beat 1 of the measure.
And so here, how do we know what beat this is?
Well, when you have pick up notes you count backwards from the first full measure. We know that this is beat 1.
What beat comes right before beat 1?
Well, since we're in 3/4 time this has to be beat 3.
♫Happy birthday to you!♫
So that way we have the strong
words or syllables on the strong beats.
And if we were writing the counts we'd
see a beat 3 1 2 3 1 2
Now before we try to play it, anything
else you notice?
You might have noticed these slur or phrase marks.
This phrase mark goes off the edge because we're starting a new phrase. 'Happy'
See it goes off the edge, continues on this line ♫Happy birthday dear♫,
and then you can fill in the blank here whoever's birthday it is. ♫dear Sarah♫
And what do we have here?
It's our fermata. Remember we like to
hold this note extra long ♫Happy birthday dear Sarah♫,
and you hold that extra-long,
and then we start a new phrase for the end. ♫Happy
birthday to you♫
Now what do you notice about this measure?
Well it's also missing beats.
Don't worry Monkey. I know it wasn't you
How many beats do you see in this measure?
That's right, 1 2 beats. It's missing beat 3.
Sometimes when a composer uses pickup notes,
when they place beat three here at the start,
they'll make up for it by only
having 2 beats here. 1 2
beat 3 is up at the beginning.
Let's try to play it.
All right, can you figure out where to place your hand?
Take a look at the first note and check out the finger number over that note.
So it's asking for a finger 1 on middle C.
So on your own piano, can you place a finger 1 on your
middle C.
And now pay attention to the rhythms. We start off with a TIM-KI TA TA TA TWO-OO
I'd like you to pause the video and see if you can figure out these first fo ...