Super Secret Agent

Hello and welcome back. I'm agent Hoffman, and today your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to learn how to play a piece that I composed: "Super Secret Agent." Let's get started with your top secret training by having a listen. Here's the score for "Super Secret Agent." Okay, I think I gotta use my normal voice now. First thing I'd like to check is always our tempo indication, and in this piece the composer, who's me, marked as mysteriously not too fast. but then an interesting happens in this piece. You'll see here this double bar line, and then another tempo indication. A double bar line is a composer's way of saying that a new section is beginning. These first four measures are what you could call an introduction. It's kind of setting the mood, but then at this double bar line, then we get this new mood fast and intense. No swing. Just to remind you that these are even eighth notes not swung eighth notes. Now, once I know the tempo I like to check out the clefs treble and bass, and then time signature and key signature. Let's do key signature first. Three flats, well from our ladder of fifths three flats tells us we'll be in the key of E-flat major or C minor. Well, if we look at the first chord the left hand plays, got a C and a G, and then the right hand goes: That sounds a lot like C minor. And if we look at this last chord, well that's kind of a an unusual jazz chord, but we can always look at the bottom note as a clue because that's usually the root of the chord, and in this case that bottom note is also C, and with this first chord being a C chord we can tell we're in the key of C minor. And then what's our time signature? If you said 4/4, you're correct. Now today I'd like to use one of my very favorite techniques for learning a new piece, and that is actually finding the hardest section, and rather than learning the piece from the beginning, start by learning the hardest section first, and then everything feels easy after that. For this piece, I find that one of the most challenging sections is this ending. These last two measures. So let's start with the very last measure, this interesting jazz chord that I mentioned. We start off with this symbol. Do you remember the name of this? This is a half rest. You'll notice if you see where that black rectangle is sitting it kind of forms the shape of like this top hat. And hat and half sound similar enough. That's the trick I use to remember that this is a half rest which gets 2 beats. So we'll count 1 2, and that kind of creates this moment of drama like, oh is the song over? What's going to happen next? And then boom, we get this sudden chord marked with an accent and a fermata. So you can play it extra loud and hold it extra long. That's kind of the dramatic ending to "Super Secret Agent." Now let's check out this chord. Let's look at the right hand first. Can you name these three notes starting with the bottom note? The bottom note is an E, but because of our key signature we have to remember this is E-flat. That skips up to G, and then the top note is a B. B would normally be flat because of our key signature, but do you see the natural symbol in front of it? Now when you see a natural symbol in a chord, you have to look at what it's lined up with, and you can see that that natural is lined up with the top note, which is a B. The natural doesn't apply to just any old note it has to be the note that it's perfectly in line with, and the natural aligns with that top B, so we know we have a B natural. So let's try to play that. E-flat use finger 1, G in the middle. Use finger 3, and B natural on top use finger 5. 1 3 5, Now that is a really cool chord if you ask me. It's called an E-flat augmented chord. An augmented chord is a rather rare kind of chord. It has a very intense sound. So you've got that chord in the right hand. Let's look at what the left hand is doing. Can you name the two notes the left hand is playing? If you said C and A natural, which cancels the flat from our key signature. Normally that would be A-flat, but this time we have a C, A natural. That's the interval of a sixth. That's what the left hand is playing, and together it's a really cool jazz C minor, major vii chord. If you want to know the technical term. All right, try that chord with both hands now. Now let's look at the penultimate measure. There's your vocabulary word for today. Penultimate means second to last. Right before the last we call penultimate. So the penultimate measure we have this new symbol. Subito fortissimo. Subito means suddenly. We're going to suddenly jump to fortissimo, and that's because up here we had this dim., which stands for diminuendo, which means gradually gets softer. poco a poco is Italian for little by little. So get softer little by little. We were forte, and then we're getting softer, softer, softer, than subito fortissimo. Suddenly fortissimo as we play this chord in the left hand, and then we have this ending. 2 Okay. Now let's look at these notes. What is happening in the right hand? Let's try naming these notes. What do you see? Now, we need to back up and note that we've shifted into bass clef here. Why would a composer put a bass clef right in the middle of a song? We ...