Land of the Silver Birch: Accompaniment

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman,
and in this lesson we're going to learn how to improvise an accompaniment for "Land of the Silver Birch."
You can choose
to either play the accompaniment with your left hand
while your right hand plays the melody,
or you can make this a duet
where you play the accompaniment with one or both hands while a friend plays the melody.
Let's come to the piano,
and we'll take a look at both options.
Alright, first I'd like to show you how
to just use your left hand
to play the accompaniment. So you have the option to
play the melody with your right hand
while you play your own accompaniment
with your left hand.
So take a look at the first chord symbol.
You'll see a capital E, a little m. That stands for E minor.
Little m in chord symbols always
stands for minor. If they don't put the little m,
it automatically makes a major chord,
but with the little m, you know we have a minor chord. So go ahead and find an E minor chord with your left hand.
Now, the style of this song is very flowing and lyrical.
So instead of doing blocked chords,
I think it's going to sound the most beautiful
to use broken chords and to use the damper pedal.
So go ahead and press the damper pedal down
and you'll hear
a very beautiful sound that you can get from just this simple broken chord pattern
of skipping up and then back down. DO ME SO ME DO ME SO ME Try this with me.
Okay, you're just starting on an E and then
just skipping up and down using eighth notes. 1 2
Ready, go:
1-& 2-& 3-& 4-&
See, nice and simple, and this makes very nice accompaniment.
Okay?
So that's our E minor chord,
then we get an A minor chord next. So we could
move our hand down or up to A minor, but if we come all the way up here
we're going to be fighting with the right hand for that E.
So let's come down
or let's use an inversion, better yet,
so remember if we flip this A up to here, now we're in first inversion. Let's flip this C up to here.
Right? Remember how we do inversions?
We take the bottom A, put it
on top, take the bottom C put it on top.
This is also another way to play the A
minor chord. See it's got an A, a C, and an E,
but we've rearranged the notes so we can more smoothly go from this E minor chord to A minor
which you'll recognize as
the IV chord in the key of E minor. So we have
A minor we can just play like
this with these three notes, okay? Try that.
Here's the A minor chord, so when
you get to the start of measure two,
your thumb just has to slide over,
and we can have 'home of the', and then on 'beaver' we go back to E minor.
So with both hands together we get.
♫Land of the silver birch, home of the beaver♫
Okay, now press pause and on your own try
that left-hand accompaniment by itself.
If you'd like an extra challenge, you can
throw in the right hand too,
but if you'd rather just focus on the left hand
accompaniment part today,
and add the right hand later, that's fine, the choice is yours.
Press pause to work on that, then press play to go on.
Okay so we've done our E minor chord,
we've done A minor, then back to E minor,
then we get a C major chord.
Now let's go ahead and choose root position.
I think that will actually sound more beautiful here.
Okay, we could use an inversion, but
sometimes root position has the strongest sound.
and I think right there
that root position sounds more beautiful than say
this inversion. The reason is has to do with that the melody's on the E.
So if our base notes also on the E,
it's a little bit redundant. So I think it sounds stronger to shift down to the C major root position chord.
Okay, try left hand on C major, and try the broken pattern.
I was just going skip up, skip up, skip down, in C major,
and then same thing: I like root position for this G major.
Just gives a nice strong sound here.
See what I mean? So we do C major, then
quickly skip down to G major.
Okay, press pause and practice going from the C
major to this G major.
So just these three notes down to these three notes
using this broken pattern.
Press pause to work on that, then press play to go on.
Now what's our next chord after G major?
If you said A minor you're correct. So we were just right here on G major, so let's step up
to a root position A minor chord,
and then what's our next chord?
If you said B major you're correct. Do you remember how
to do a B major chord?
I'll give you a hint.
it has two black keys in it.
Show me on your piano.
If you're showing me this chord, you're correct. It's these three notes: B D-sharp F-sharp makes a B major chord ...