Improv For Beginners - Piano Lessons (Pianote)

[Music] hey everybody jordan leibel with piano here this lesson is for anyone who's started out at the piano they learn some new concepts and they want to start improvising how do you take some of the scales and chords and neat little phrases you may have been working out on your own and how you get to a place where you can start making your own music spontaneously so if you want to start out just playing some cool licks and then you want to move into just free-flowing creativity at the piano this lesson is for you so the first thing that we're going to do is pick a key now you want to pick a key that's nice and comfortable for you that you know all the ins and outs in that you're comfortable playing all the scales and chords in so we're going to start with a nice simple key we're actually going to play in the key of a minor and a minor is the relative minor of c major [Music] so here's a minor here so that means that the only notes in the key of a minor are the white keys so that's the key of a minor the next thing that we want to do is pick a chord progression for our left hand to play again this should be something nice and simple something that you can sort of just play without having to think about all that much so we're gonna do just a basic one four five progression and we're gonna make that into minor sevenths so we're playing the notes a c e and g and that's our one chord and then we're going to go up to the four chord which is going to be in d so this is a d minor but we're going to make a 7 so we're going to play the c on top so that's d f a c and then we're going to move up one note to play r5 chord so that's going to be an e minor 7 e g b and d and then back down and just for simplicity's sake i'm just demonstrating all these chords in their root position but there's always opportunities to invert those chords as well to make your chord progression a little more fluid and now the next thing that you want to do is pick a lick or just pick a little phrase at the keyboard and it should be something really really simple so i'll show you an example of a nice little lick to work with um we're just going to start off with this phrase right here [Music] so that's in the key of a and we're playing a c g a and this lick is going to become the signature kind of phrase for your improvisation a lot of times when you're improvising you want to have something to structure all your playing around again we're just we are just improvising here so we're not having to stick totally note for note to this phrase but it's always nice to have something to structure your playing around so [Music] that's our little phrase and we want to really get to know that phrase so we're going to take a look nice and close at what we're playing and what our interval jumps are and that's going to allow us to play the same lick at any place on the keyboard so we have a minor third jump from a to c so that's a minor third right there and then so we jump up a minor third and then we go down a perfect fourth from c to g and then to complete that lick we just go back up [Music] to our starting note a so [Music] and now that we know that we take a minor third up and then a perfect fourth down and then one key up again to get to our starting position we can take this same phrase and we can put it up a fourth so that when we go to change chords to our d minor seven we can take that same phrase and this time we're starting on d and we go up a third or up a minor third here so here's our minor third jump from d to f and then down a fourth to c so we have our a version of that lick and then we can go to d [Music] back to a and then we want to go up to the five chord which is that e minor seven and then we want to play that lick up in our fifth position so we start on e make that minor third jump there's our minor third then we go down a fourth to d and then up to our starting point down to d so now we have this lick that we can use to give ourselves some melodic consistency think of it as your signature in your improvisation it doesn't have to be this lick specifically but it's just a nice easy one to start with and now you just want to [Music] play nice simple chords in your left hand and just mess around with that phrase try to keep it in time but there's really no rules here you just want to discover some of the things you can do with this little lick try to just keep your improvisation to just three notes of that lick do so that's a really easy first starting kind of taste that you can get of improvising and then you can start messing around with ways to change that maybe you want to start doing some more scale stuff in between but try to keep everything in line with that phrase that's the phrase that kind of anchors everything together so you maybe want to always have that phrase happen at least once in your in each chord change but in between that lick you can kind of stretch out a little bit and try some other notes again we're just playing with the white keys for now so just up to the d here and to the e [Music] so now that you have that lick and you're starting to feel confident that that lick is your home base and you have that chord progression the next step is just to stretch out and realize that there really is no rules to improv the only thing you want to make sure you don't do is stop or get too timid or be too afraid to stretch out and make mistakes or make notes that sound really weird but really there is no rule book here you can play you know you can stretch out and play some of the black keys and you've always got that riff to fall back on in case you ever feel like oh i'm getting to this place where i don't know what i'm doing or i'm starting to make some funky sounding notes and i don't know why they sound funky you've got this nice phrase to fall back on so just experiment pick pick a chord progression pick a key that you're comfortable with choose a lick that is going to be comfortable and sounds cool and you can work with and just stretch out and explore it's one of the funnest things to do at the piano i love to improvise it's a great way to generate a lot of cool ideas and this is a great starting way to do it so think of phrases think of ways to incorporate that lick and you'll be jamming out and making music in no time if you want to learn anything more about songwriting about scales chords practice techniques and more stuff about improvising and jamming we've got a ton of stuff to show you at pianote.com check it out sign up and we'll see you there [Music] you

Channel: Pianote

Views: 193,172

Keywords: Piano, Piano Lessons, Free Piano Lessons, Pianote, Piano Chords, Piano Scales, Music Theory, How To Play Piano, Beginner Piano Lessons, Intermediate Piano Lessons, Advanced Piano Lessons, Jordan Leibel, Improv Piano, Improv For Beginners - Piano Lessons (Pianote), piano improv, piano tutorial, piano improvisation, piano tutorial easy, piano exercises, piano tutorial easy slow beginner, major pentatonic, pentatonic scale, piano lesson, how to improvise on piano, piano

Id: k1N4UA5y5kE

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2017