Lesson 260

Super Secret Agent: Part 3

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Hello and welcome back. I'm Agent Hoffman, and today your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to complete learning "Super Secret Agent." Let's get started by checking out the score. Okay, today we're going to be starting here at the double bar lines learning the left hand part. And tell me what you notice about these notes here in measure five. We've got a piano, a legato. Have we seen these notes before? Yeah, this is a pattern we saw in a previous lesson. We've got our G, low C, A-flat, C, A natural, C, A-flat, C. Remember that? It's a really cool pattern. Okay now, once you have a pattern established, it's so tempting to just assume that's going to continue forever. Not a good idea. Composers will change things on you, so check every measure and tell me where this pattern changes for the first time. Can you find it? If you're pointing here in measure ten, you're correct. This is the first time the pattern changes, and it changes right in the middle of the measure, which might make it easy to miss. It starts off the same: G C A-flat C, and then A natural, and then suddenly what's happening? Can you name these next three notes for me? We start with an A natural. What comes next? A-flat, then what? G G-flat What does that look like? A-flat or A natural, A-flat, G G-flat What do you notice about that? Aha! It's the chromatic scale again. Okay, and how far does it go? Let's go to the next note as well. What's this next note? F, which is also part of the chromatic scale. We're going to use our standard chromatic scale fingering 1 3 1 3 1. So here in measure ten take your left hand. Here's my middle C, so bring your finger 1 all the way down to ground G. Your 5's on that low C. We come into the A-flat, we come up to the A natural, and then our finger 3 has to kind of shift up so it's ready on that A-flat, G, G-flat, F. So we've got that little chromatic scale right there in the left hand. Okay, let's start right here on the A natural, and try 1 3 1 3 1 going down the chromatic scale. Now your turn. Good, try that again. Your turn, go. Now let's put that together with the start of measure ten. So we have G, C, A-flat, C, A natural, then down the chromatic scale, stop on F. Pause the video and play measure ten to the first note. Stop on the first note of measure eleven. Do that a few times until you're confident, then press play to go on. Now let's look at what happens in measure eleven. We have F, and then tell me the letter name of this next note in measure eleven. If you said B-flat, you're correct, and then it goes up to G, B-flat, A-flat, B-flat, G, B-flat. See that pattern? So we have F G A-flat G Now pause the video and work on measures eleven and twelve left hand alone, then press play to go on. Now let's put all of this together. We're going to start in measure ten. And let's stop on the first note of measure thirteen. It's really good when you're practicing a section to stop on the first note of the next section, and that helps link all the sections together. So I'd like you to pause the video now and work on measures ten, eleven, and twelve, and stop as you play the first chord in measure thirteen. Press pause to work on that section, then press play to go on. Now if we come all the way back up to measure five, you'll see the left hand's just playing this pattern that we've done before. Right? Where that top note is just going G, A-flat, A natural, A-flat, just going up and down by half steps there with a C on the bottom in between each one. Right, so over the next day or two I'd like you to make sure you're really confident with the left hand alone for this section from measure five through measure twelve going into the measure thirteen. Make sure your right hand is really confident, and then go into super slow motion and start putting it hands together. Here in measure seven you're going to go super slow. Right? It's going to feel kind of ridiculously slow, but that's how you're going to first get it hands together, and then you'll gradually be able to speed it up. The metronome can be a great tool to help you slow it down. You might put it on 80 beats per minute at first. Once you have it mastered at a slow speed, you can gradually speed that up until you're at your full performance tempo. Now we're finally ready to tackle this intro section. I saved this for the end because the intro actually isn't that hard. So I think it will be a fun way to finish this up. Let's start by looking at the rhythm. You probably noticed that we have a rhythm that we've learned recently. What is this bracket with the 3 over three eighth notes mean? That's a triplet. So how does this sound? We've got: REST TRI-PL-ET REST TRI-PL-ET REST TRI-PL-ET TRI-PL-ET TRI-PL-ET Can you tap that with me and we'll whisper REST for the rest, and then tap or clap. You can tap it on your lap or clap your hands TRI-PL-ET. Okay let's try it together, go: REST TRI-PL-ET REST TRI-PL-ET REST TRI-PL-ET TRI-PL-ET TRI-PL-ET, REST TRI-PL-ET REST TRI-PL-ET REST now pause here because we've got a new term. molto ritardando. molto is an Italian word that means a lot. kind of like the Spanish word mucho. Mucho or molto both means a lot of it, and ritardando you may recall means to gradua ...