Improvisation with Heart and Soul

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman, and today we are going to do some transposing and improvising with the "Heart and Soul" chord progression. Let's come to the piano to get started. Let's review the chord progression for "Heart and Soul" in the key of C. So, go ahead and get your right hand with finger 1 on middle C, and left hand finger 1 on bass C, and you'll recall that we had a I chord, vi chord, IV chord, V chord. Can you try that with me? 1 2 3 4, I, vi, IV, V, back to I, vi, IV, V. Now, if you're not confident with that yet, go ahead and press pause and practice that a little bit on your own. If you already feel pretty confident with that, then let's go on and work on transposing that chord progression, because we're not always going to be in the key of C. I'd like you to know how to do chord progressions in any of the keys that we know. So let's take the key of G major. Go ahead and place your right hand on a G, and let's review the g major scale, but first let me ask how many sharps are in the key of G major? If you said one, you're correct, and that sharp is F-sharp. On our ladder of fifths as we go up a fifth, the first sharp we always add is F-sharp. So the G major scale can be played like this. Now, will you try that with me? Let's try the G major scale. 1 2, ready, go. Go ahead and press pause if you need more work on that G major scale if you need to review that. Otherwise, let's keep going. We recently learned about diatonic chords, and remember, diatonic just means it belongs to that key. So if we're in the key of G, the only notes that are diatonic are these seven notes. G A B C D E and F-sharp. Those seven notes are the diatonic notes in the key of G. So, what would our diatonic chords be? Well let's try it out. Go ahead and with your right hand, let's play the I chord, which is G major, and let's name these all out loud. So go ahead and repeat after me. G major I chord. Now, if we go up a step, we get to the A minor ii chord. So, say that and play it. A minor ii chord. Now if we want to go up another step to the iii chord, you'll notice that we land on an F, but F is not diatonic in the key of G. So this would not be our iii chord. This would be our three chord, and that's a B minor chord. If we did this, this would actually be B diminished. Again, B diminished is diatonic in the key of C, but it's not diatonic in the key of G major. In G major, F isn't diatonic, it's F-sharp. So this is our iii chord. So try that out and repeat after me. B minor iii chord. And remember the trick I showed you last time. If you're not sure if it's major or minor, you can notice there's two keys in between there, and three keys in between these top two notes. When it's two on the bottom three on the top, that makes a minor chord, or you could tell by the sound. So B minor iii chord. Let's go up another step. Play and repeat after me. C major IV chord. Let's go up another step. You can see I would land on an F if I were in C major, but I have to make that an F-sharp. Go ahead and play and repeat after me. D major V chord. Up another step brings us to E minor vi chord. Play and repeat. Then when we come up another step once again, we've got to change that F to an F-sharp to stay diatonic. This brings us to an interesting chord. It's F sharp diminished. Remember for diminished chords, Let's see how I can do this. With diminished chords, you've got two notes in between and two notes in between. That makes a diminished chord. So this is F-sharp diminished, and it's the vii chord. It so happens that the vii chord is always diminished in a major key. Okay if you're in a major key, G major is a major key, that vii chord's going to be a diminished chord. F-sharp diminished vii chord. Play and repeat. And that brings us to G major I chord. Great, now I'd like you to press pause and do all of that one more time on your own this time. Go through and remember, whenever you get to an F or if you would normally play F, make it an F-sharp. Okay, only use the diatonic notes from G major to play all the diatonic chords. Name them, G major I chord, A minor ii chord, B minor iii chord, just like that all the way up. Press pause to play and name those chords on your own, then press play to go on. Now, let's have some fun with those G-major diatonic chords, and try out the "Heart and Soul" chord progression in the key of G. So, once again we're going to take a right hand finger 1 on G this time, and left hand finger 1 also on G, and let's actually just focus on the right hand for a second. Let's play the I chord. Now we're going to play the vi chord. Remember our chord progression goes I vi IV V. And instead of going up to the vi chord, we're going to find a nearer vi chord by just going down from I to vii to vi. We can go that way. Come down to our E minor chord for the vi chord. Then our C major chord is our IV chord, and then if we go up a step to the V chord, and don't forget the F-sharp. Okay, let's try that together. Just right hand. Play the I chord with me. G major I chord. E minor vi chord, C major IV chord, D major V chord. Now, let's try the left hand. The left hand is going to just play the root. So we have the G major root, then the E minor root, then ...