Transcription
It's great to be able to sit down at the piano and improvise. Just making up music off the top of your head without having to read notes is really good fun. And the thing is, many people think that you have to be a really advanced pianist that's been playing for years in order to be able to do this. I thought this too when I first started learning.
The good news is that you don't have to be a crazily talented musician in order to be able to improvise on the piano. In fact, even beginners can do it. You just need a few guidelines and suggestions and you can start doing it straight away. Now, if I were to say to you, "Just improvise something," you may feel a little bit overwhelmed and not know where to start. So, first of all, we're going to hone down the style and go with a Hans Zimmer Interstellar inspired sound. I'm going to give you certain chord progressions, patterns, and scales that you can use, and it's going to build up in levels of difficulty, starting at the stage suitable for beginners like this.
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And building it up to something like this.
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Let's start off with a really common and super simple chord progression in your left hand. And once you've got it, we can start building the improvisation techniques on top. But of course, you can break out of the chord progression I'm about to show you and put your own spin on it. So, here are the chords. Middle C is here. Then you're going to go down a full octave to the left here, and then you're going to play an F major triad chord like this: F, A, C. And then you're going to take that same shape, move it up one step to the right to the G major. And then again up to the A minor triad chord. So, keeping that same shape. And then you're just going to move to the left of the G again. And that is the progression, just alternating between the F major, G major, A minor, and G major. And that progression is going to repeat itself. Later on in the video, I'll show you some patterns that you can apply to this progression to add more rhythm and energy.
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We're going to be using the A natural minor scale in the right hand. And because the A natural minor scale only uses white keys, it's a great scale to start improvising with. Here is the scale.
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So, we can basically play any white key in your right hand on top of those left hand chords, and you can straight away start improvising and making up little tunes and melodies. For example.
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So, before we go on and start thinking about beats per bar and rhythms and harmony and all that kind of stuff, just have a go. Play a chord in your left hand and answering with your right with a few of those white keys. Fancy. Or you can come up. And I will say that I am using the sustain pedal because it makes the notes ring out more and it just makes it sound better. So, if you've got a sustain pedal, try to use it. Now, to suggest for the moment, resetting the pedal according to when the left hand chords change. For the timing, we're going to be going with groupings of three, and we'll be counting six beats per bar. If you apply that to the left hand chord progression, your counting would be: one, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. And if you need to practice playing that left hand chord progression whilst counting out loud those six beats per bar, just so you can get used to it, you can also improvise all the techniques I'm about to show you in other timings as well, for example, four beats per bar. Please.
So, I mentioned that we're going to improvise using influences from Hans Zimmer's music. And here I'm improvising with a simple rhythm that's used a lot in the main theme from Interstellar. And they also said that when you first start, it's nice to have certain guidelines rather than expecting you to run wild with too many choices when you first begin. So, to start off with, we're going to take that rhythm of playing on the first and the second of every three beats, like this: one, two, three. One, two, three. Or, because we're counting six beats per bar, it may be better to think of it as playing on the one and the two, and the four, and the five, like this: one, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. Then you can add the left hand chords underneath. And here I'm just playing one note in the right hand, which you can copy me if you want, just so you can get used to that rhythm. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. It still sounds good. But then, once you're used to that rhythm, you can start to play around with the notes in your right hand, like this: one, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six.
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Another technique you'll see a lot of modern composers do, including people like Hans Zimmer, is using a repeated sequence of notes to create a melodic fill rhythm. For instance, in this example, I was playing these six notes in a sequence: C, B, A, and then going down to the E, D, C. And then I just repeated those same six notes in the same order, like this. And I was doubling up the speed, like this: one and two and three and four and five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. Let's choose another six notes as an example. So, let's go with B, C, B, A, and then we'll jump up to the E and jump back down to the A, like this.
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And we're going to be playing these at twice the speed of the main beats. So, you could count: one and two and three and four and five and six and. And again, if you add that left hand progression, it'll have the same effect. A really cool sequence of notes like this: one and two and three and four and five and six and. I'm gonna speed it up now. One, two and three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. Yeah, you see what I mean? It sounds good, doesn't it? So, if you wanted, you could start off by copying what I just did then. But then, of course, you can choose your own sequence of six notes and try repeating them over that left hand chord progression. Now, I want you to try alternating between that first rhythm we'll be using in the right hand, which was playing any white key on the first, second, and fourth, and fifth beats, and then switching to the sequence of six notes you were just playing, which is what I'm doing here. And just so you can see it in practice, you can start by playing that rhythm with the one, two, and four, five, like this: one, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. And then you can do that as many times as you want, and then you can switch over to the sequence of six notes with that double speed. Carry on going. One more time through. So, we're just methodically building up these techniques and rhythms step by step, and it already sounds good, doesn't it? Then, if you want, you can always try improvising with the notes in that fill rhythm sequence as well, like this.
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Once you've got used to improvising with those more structured rhythms, you can try playing around with the rhythms a bit more. For example.
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So, there I was just playing around with the rhythms. One thing to remember is you don't always have to be playing. You can leave gaps. In fact, it's quite good to leave gaps in your playing. For example, when I went on that run up there, then I played on all the main beats, like this: one, two, three, four, five, six. One. And then I went. And then just let it ring out.
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Yeah, and I played the left hand chord like that. Use some gaps.
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Yeah. So, sometimes it's nice just to play a little melody, leave a gap, leave a space. It's like a musical sentence. It's like talking. You don't always talk all the time. You leave space to breathe. So, it's the same when you're creating melodies, when you're improvising. Play a melody, leave a little gap, leave a breath, and then do another melody and so on. So, have a go at that. Play around with the rhythms and just see what you can come up with.
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It sounds really effective. If you can improvise with harmonies, and a nice simple harmony you can improvise with is a third. This is because when you are using just the white keys, all you need to do is skip a key out. And what I mean by that is, you play, and you skip a white key out, and you play. So, that is a third. And then you can move that same shape up and down, and that is a third harmony. And just move it around.
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Yeah, and if you add that on top of the left hand, it could sound like this.
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When improvising, if you find that you're hearing clashes between the chords and the melody, like this.
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Or this.
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This is because you are playing notes in your right hand very close to the chords in your left hand. So, it's clashing. Here I've got an F, but I was playing a B and a D. So, the notes are so close to the chord, it's just clashing. And when I teach people improvisation, what I find that people sometimes do is they think, "Oh, it's a clash." So, then they therefore maybe panic and try to jump to another note in the right hand, in the hope that it sounds nice and in tune, right? But the reason why it's clashing is because, like I said, it's really close. So, it's creating tension, which can be nice. I mean, it is nice. A lot of composers do it. But then the way to get out of it, or to resolve that tension, is to move up or down by a step, more often than not, because of the reason that what you're playing is very close to the chord. Can you see what I mean? So, if you're playing this clash, it's very close. So, if you move it down one step to the left, it resolves. Can you hear that? And again, if you go to the same clash, we're going to go up. Can you hear it resolves? And sometimes you might find that you have to move more than one step in order to resolve the sound, like this.
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Yeah, so I kept the left hand progression going, and I kept the right hand moving up until it resolved on one of the chords in the left hand.
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Another really nice harmony that you can play around with is a sixth, which is what I'm using here. To find a sixth, you just count up six. For example, if you want a sixth from the C, you'd go, including the C, one, two, three, four, five, six. And it's actually just an inverted third, because the third is there, and just bring that down an octave, and it's a sixth. Yeah. And then it's the same thing. You could just move that sixth up and down, keeping the same distance, and it sounds really nice. And then you can add that over the top of the left hand chords, and again, it sounds great. For anyone wanting even more of a challenge, I'm going to give you three left hand patterns that you can use to add more energy and rhythm to your improvising. If you're a beginner, you may have to start off super slow, just so you can get used to the coordination. But then, once you're used to them, you can gradually speed them up. Here's the first one.
So, this first one, what you're going to do is, rather than playing the full triad chord there, the F major triad, you're going to take out the third, the A, and then you're gonna play the root of the chord, the F, but up and up to that. And that is the pattern. So, it's a root, fifth, and octave. And then the pattern is this: you're going to just go from the bottom to the top, to the left, to the right, like this. And then you're going to repeat it like this for six beats: one, two, two, three, jump back down, four, five, six. And that's all it is. And then you just play that for the rest of the chord progression, like this: one, two, three, four, five, six. So, keep that same shape. Gonna move up to the right again. It's a root, fifth, octave, but just lock that shape into position. Do the same pattern: bottom to top, one, two, three, four, five, six. Again, A minor. So, just gonna take the same shape, move up there to the A, and keep that fifth in the middle. Four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. And that's six. So, just practice that left hand on its own, especially if you're a beginner, just to get used to that movement there from bottom to top there. And if this does feel really new to you and perhaps a challenge, then just so you can get used to playing with both hands, I would suggest playing notes in your right hand. You can again play any white key, but just on the first beat of each bar. And then you can get used to playing with both hands, like this, for instance: one, two, three, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. So, you can have a go at that, keeping the right hand super simple along with that left hand pattern. And then, once you get used to that, you can try playing on the first and the fourth beats in the right hand, like this: one, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. Yeah, and again, that's just getting you used to playing with both hands at the same time with a nice simple rhythm. And then, once you feel more comfortable, you can start to play around more with the right hand. For example, you could introduce that rhythm playing on the one, two, and the four, and the five, like this: one, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. Yeah, and then play around with the rhythms even more.
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This one is based off that first pattern, but it might need a bit more practice because it's twice as fast and the coordination means you're going back and forth a little bit more. There it is. So, it's using the same shape as the previous pattern with the root, fifth, and octave. But here's the pattern: it's going bottom, middle, top, middle, top, middle. And then that is repeated again on the same chord: bottom, middle, top, middle, top, middle. Because, like I said, it's twice as fast. So, the counting here would be: one and two and three and four and five and six and. And then use the same pattern on the other chords: one and two and three and four and five and six and. One and two and three and four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. And again, if you want to get used to playing that left hand pattern along with your right, then you can use the same practice technique as I showed you in the previous one. First of all, starting by playing a single note in your right hand on the first beat of each bar, like this: one, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. And then playing on the first and the fourth beat in your right hand: one, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. And again, once you get used to that, then you can start to play around with the notes even more.
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This left hand is for more advanced players, but I thought I'd throw it in because it sounds great and it's something for you to work towards. So, it starts off with the same shape with the root, fifth, and octave. But then this is what makes it tricky, because you're going to go over the top, skip a third, you're going to skip a white key like that, the top with your second finger, then you come back underneath with your thumb. You kind of keep it there, really, keep it over the right key, and then you come back down to the fifth there. That's the pattern. And again, that is repeated like this.
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And you take that same pattern and you just apply it to the rest of those chords, like this: one and two and three and four and five and six and. On the G: one, two, three, four, five, six. Up to the A minor: one, two, three, and four and five and six. One, two, three, four, five. Sounds good, doesn't it? The flow sounds really nice. Sometimes when you're improvising with this, it can feel quite tricky to do the full pattern on the way down the second time and then get your fifth finger on the right note there. So, what you can do is you can finish at the top at the end, just to make the jump easier, like this.
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That is just an alternative if you feel like you just need to tweak the end to make the joins easier. And again, just so you can get used to playing that left hand pattern along with your right, you can use the same technique. First of all, playing on the first beat of every bar in your right hand: one, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. And then again, you can play on the first and the fourth beats in the right hand. And for this example, I'll just show you the alternate left hand where you're not going all the way back down to make the joins easier: one, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. Once you've got used to all those rhythms, patterns, and techniques, you can bring them all together into one improvisation.
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I really hope you've had fun here and that you now feel comfortable improvising some nice sounding piano. What I'd really like to know is which of those techniques you enjoyed the most, so please do let me know in the comments. For anyone that it may be of use to, I have notated those techniques and put them together in a PDF. I leave a download link in the description. And if you enjoy playing by ear, I do have a range of online courses, including the ultimate piano chord course, that will teach you step by step everything that you need to know in order to be able to play piano using chords and patterns. There's also in-depth courses on blues piano, as well as jazz improvisation. I'll pop a link for those in the description. If you like this lesson, you may be interested in watching my video on creating beautiful piano improvisations, which is here.
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Don't forget to like and subscribe so you don't miss out on any of my videos, which are usually released once a week. I've been Arthur from Birds Piano Academy, and thanks for tuning in.