La Cinquantaine: Accompaniment

Hello and welcome back, and
congratulations on making it to lesson 100!
Screen high-five!
You've worked hard and I'm so proud of all the practice and progress you've made.
I hope you're proud of yourself too,
and I hope you are enjoying the skills
you've learned for making music at the piano.
Today we're going to be learning
how to improvise an accompaniment part for our duet
"La Cinquantaine" let's
come to the piano to get started.
So, accompaniments are usually built on
chords,
and this song "La Cinquantaine" is in the key of A minor, so what is the I
chord?
A I chord's always built on DO, then skip up to ME SO. So these three keys will make our I chord.
Now we're also going to need the IV chord.
For a IV chord
we usually move ME up to FA,
and SO up to LE since we're in a minor key
we don't go a whole step.
If we were in A major we'd go up to F-sharp but we're in
A minor so we use LE which is a half step up.
That makes this really nice sounding IV chord.
Again the I chord is right here, in A minor we have all white keys, then we come up here.
Well, I said all white keys, but there is one
exception to that. When we do the V7 chord
sometimes in minor we use G,
but for the V7 chord we use G-sharp because
that gives us that quintessential F
Sorry, V7 sound okay?
Without that
G-sharp it would sound like this:
Isn't that
classic V7 sound that we're
going for okay?
Let's try all of these chords with the right hand.
We're going to
use right hand for the chords today.
So first try the I chord.
DO ME SO
I'm going to use blocked chords today find the I chord.
Now find the IV chord. To find the IV chord leave your finger one on a but shift all your other fingers up.
Then you use 1 3 5
These three keys make the IV chord.
then shift your fingers back again to the I chord.
And let's just practice
going back and forth. IV chord
I chord.
Pause the video and I just want you to get really comfortable going back and forth
from I chord to IV chord back and
forth a few times then press play to go on.
Now let's practice going back and forth
between the I chord and the V7 chord.
So to have your thumb reach that
black key, I recommend shifting your fingers in. Don't
contort your hand to
get that black key, just shift forward.
That will feel a lot better probably.
Okay, now pause the video and practice going back and forth between the I and V7 chord.
Then press play to go on.
Now when I say improvise an accompaniment,
what I mean is you're going to take the chords of the song or piece,
and use those chord symbols to come up with a fun accompaniment pattern.
and I think for this song where it's a
happy kind of celebration
song maybe they would have used it for dancing.
Let's make it a bouncy staccato feel,
and
to do that let's have the left hand down
here in this A minor pentascale. Here's
my middle C.
So my right hand is here, my left hand is down here.
The root of the I chord is A, and by the root that just means the lowest note.
I chord.
Can you try this? So your left hand plays A, the right hand plays a I chord.
A, I chord, A, I chord. You're just going to go back and forth playing each one staccato.
Now you try.
Let's do it again. 1-& 2-& Your turn.
So while whoever is playing the melody,
your duet partner 1-& 2-& while they play that,
the accompaniment is playing 1-& 2-&
Try it one more time.
Let's do it together. Ready, go: 1-& 2-&
Okay great. Now in the next measure we have a IV chord.
Now the right hand is going to play this
which we practiced just a second ago. The
left hand is going to play the IV
which is, now, the reason it's called the
IV chord is one two three four is the root
of that chord which we'll learn
more about later why it's the root,
if you just go up to the fourth note of
the scale A is 1, B is 2, C is 3, D is 4.
That's called the root of the chord.
So you're going to play D with your left hand.
You're going to play the IV chord with your
right hand. D, IV chord, D, IV chord.
Now you try.
Now let's go back to measure one. We have:
I chord, I chord, then IV chord, IV chord.
The left hand is just playing A A D D
A, I chord, A, I chord, D, IV chord, D, IV chord
Pause the video and I'd like you to
practice that going back and forth
between those two chords, then press play
to go on.
Now just looking in the score you can
see which chord to play.
In measure one we have a I chord. 1-& 2-& , then a IV chord, 1-& 2-&, back to I chord
back to IV chord, and I ...