Improvisation in A Minor

Hello and welcome back!

I'm Joseph Hoffman, and today we're going to take the A minor scale, which we learned last time, and improvise with it.

Let's come to the piano to get started.

Before we improvise in A minor, let's quickly review the scales.

I'll let you choose which hand you want to use for your improvisation today.

I'll demonstrate with my right hand, but if you'd rather use your left that's fine too.

So, I will turn my metronome on at 84 beats per minute.

Hopefully that's a comfortable speed for you, and place either hand with 1st finger

or finger 1 in right hand or finger 5 in the left hand. Place that on A.

And let's play the natural A minor scale.

1 2 3, go.

Good. Now, if you need to try that again feel free to press pause or rewind. Whatever you need to do. Now, going on let's try the harmonic

A minor scale. A harmonic minor where the G becomes a G-sharp.

Here we go, ready, play.

G-sharp, F.

Good.

Now, turning off the metronome. For our improvisation, I'd like you to try

sometimes using natural minor, sometimes using harmonic. Use your ears and use whatever sounds best to you.

For improvisation today, I'm going to be playing an accompaniment in A minor in kind of a Latin style like this:

So see if as you improvise if your improvisation can match the style

of this kind of Latin sounding accompaniment.

So you might use some staccatos,

and I encourage you to use the full one octave scale. Don't just stay in one pentascale. You could use the A minor pentascale

for part of your improvisation, but then see if you can cross that thumb under,

and get all the way up to that high A.

Now, when you're here on the G, remember you've got natural minor

or,

that harmonic minor with the G-sharp. Use your ears to just see what sounds best to you.
There might be some chords I'm playing, like if I'm on this G chord,

then the G natural probably sounds best, but there will be some times

where I'm on this E major chord in which cases the G-sharp

will sound best.

Now, again don't worry about it. There's no right or wrong notes when you improvise.

Just use your ears and see what sounds good.

If you play a note that you don't like how it sounds, just step down or up to the next note.

Have fun creating.

Let's improvise.

Get your hand ready in the A minor one octave scale.

And whenever you want to begin, just start playing.

Now, if you'd like to improvise some more with that accompaniment,

feel free to rewind and do it as many times as you want,

but next I'm going to show you how to do that accompaniment, and then your job will be to find a friend who can play the melody,

or improvise a melody I should say, while you play the accompaniment.

It'd be really fun to jam with someone, so I encourage you to try this.

So, to do the accompaniment here is the chord progression that we're going to use.

We're in the key of A minor, so we start with a i chord in A minor. Go ahead and place the right hand and left hand

in the A minor pentascale.

The left hand is going to be playing this rhythm:

1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4. Just going up the A minor triad.

Let's try that together. Use your left hand finger 5 on A and just skip up that triad. Ready, go.

1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4. So two measures of the i chord, then in the third measure we go down a step to the G major chord,

which is the VII chord in the key of A minor.

1 2 3 4, and you'll notice we're using natural minor in this case, the G natural. 1 2 3 4, one measure

of G major, then it goes back to A minor for the fourth measure. 1 2 3 4

Okay, let's try putting all of that together. Two measures of A minor, one measure of G, then back to A minor.

Here we go. Count along with me. 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3, to G, 1 2 3 4, back to A, 1 2 3 4, then we do that all over again, go.

1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4, to G, 1 2 3 4, back to A, 1 2 3 4, good.

Now, let's figure out how to add in the right hand.

This is what gives it the real Latin feel.

So on beat 1 the left hand plays, on beat 2 the right hand plays two eighth notes. So it'll be 1 2-&.

I kind of roll the chord, and what that means is instead of playing it exactly in sync like you're used to doing,

like a blocked chord, we're going to quickly play all the notes

kind of like as if you were strumming a guitar, and that's part of what gives it this Latin feel,

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