Lady, Lady: Left Hand (Unit 5)

Hello and welcome back I'm Joseph Hoffman. Today we're going to be learning how to play the left hand part for "Lady, Lady." Let's get started by checking out the score. So you'll recall that with the grand staff, you've got one staff for the right hand on top. One staff for the left hand on the bottom. Since today we're learning the left hand part, we're going to be focusing on the notes down here. We're in the bass clef. Can you tell me the letter name of the first note we're going to play? If you said E-flat you're correct. And you'll notice we have this kind of pattern here. What does it look like these notes are doing? They're skipping up. So since we know we're an E-flat major, We know this is DO. What would that make these two notes? We'd have a DO MI SO What about this measure? DO MI SO What do you notice about all of these notes in the first four measures? We kind of have a pattern don't we? When we have DO MI and SO together you'll recall we call that a I chord. We use Roman numerals for chords. DO MI SO builds a I chord, and we see this pattern again and again and again when they're played one at a time that can be called a broken chord because instead of playing it in a block altogether, we play them one at a time in an arpeggio DO MI SO DO MI SO Can you find the first time that pattern changes? If you're pointing right here you're correct. I'm going to take a different color You'll notice that this first note is a step below E-flat, or even just a half-step below. So that's TI, and then this one is FA because it's on that A-flat. SO You'll notice that that B-flat didn't change. What chord do we have with TI FA SO? If you said a V7 chord you are correct. So we have our good old faithful I and V7 chords. Here we have our good old E-flat major pentascale. Our double stuffed Oreo cookie. Now, can you point to the three notes the three keys that we use to build the I chord. If you're pointing to these three you are correct. E-flat G B-flat or DO MI SO makes our I chord. With your left hand, can you find and play a I chord let's try blocked and then broken. Try it with me, go. Blocked first, and now broken DO MI SO Now for the V7 chord remember DO moves down a half step to TI and MI moves up a half step to FA. and this gives us the V7 chord. D A-flat B-flat Let's try to play the V7 chord first blocked, and now let's try broken TI FA SO One more time play it blocked Now let's try broken TI FA SO Those are the two chords we're going to need for the "Lady, Lady": the I chord and the V7 chord. Now let's come back to the sheet music. Now I'd like you for fun to choose two different colors and this will help you play it as well. I choose purple and this kind of orange color, and let's find and circle all of your I and V7 chords. You can choose any color you want. The colors don't really matter just be sure to use a different color for the V7 chords. Now I'd like you to pause the video and see if you can figure out the rest. Look very carefully because each line might not follow this exact same pattern. If you see DO MI SO like this it's a I chord. If you see TI FA SO, circle it a different color, and then press play and we'll check your answer. Here's what it should look like: It's mostly I chords, but we've got V7 chords here, here, here, and here, and then here at the very end of the song what do we have? Can you tell me the letter name for this note? If you said E-flat you're correct. So I'm just going to write E-flat there so I remember when I get there DO MI SO DO Now to play "Lady, Lady" successfully we're using broken chords. Sometimes we can call this an arpeggio. We're going through a chord one note at a time. And we're going to need to be able to smoothly shift between the I chord and the V7 chord. So what I'd like you to do is pause the video and you're going to practice just going back and forth. You're going to play a I chord broken, then a V7 chord broken. DO MI SO TI FA SO and just go back and forth until you feel like you can do that smoothly without a pause. That's going to really help as we learn "Lady, Lady". So pause the video and just practice going back and forth between the I and V7 chord over and over, and then press play to go on. Now let's try to play the actual left-hand part of "Lady, Lady." So we're looking at the notes down here in the bass staff, and you'll recall we have four I chords in a row. So let's try that now. Ready, go: DO MI SO DO MI SO, another I chord, another I chord and now pause. It switches to a V7 chord and there are two of them. So let's try two V7 chords, go: TI FA SO TI FA SO Pause and then we go back and we play two more I chords. DO MI SO DO MI SO, and then repeat sign sends us back to measure one Now this time let's try it without a pause. You'll notice I said pause when we needed to shift. But what I'd like you to do is look ahead in your music. So as you get to the fourth I chord, here's number three, here's number four. Without a pause you're just going to slide straight to the V7 two times, and then without a pause you're going to just slide straight back to that I chord. Okay? To do those shifts on time and without a pause you have to look ahead in your music. You can't get there and then be l ...