Let’s play with some scales! :O
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| I play one of these - a Casio Privia. |
Well, now we have to play with some scales; what’s a scale you ask?
Google-san gave us this definition, and it works pretty well.
In music, a scale is a group of musical notes collected in ascending and descending order, which provides material for or is used to conveniently represent part or all of a musical work including melody and/or harmony.
Scales are used to represent sound as a whole, hmm; it’s kind of hard to define without you hearing it.
Remember when we played "her hair, her hair" on the last lesson? Well, you used the F scale to "sing" that, we know it was the F major scale because the first chord of the song was F major. The Arpeggio we played was just dancing on the F major scale.
Lets see another example; try to sing the following sentence "Hello random stranger."
Put your right hand on C position (#1 finger in root, and the rest of the fingers on the notes that follow)
No need to find a rythm, just try to play them in order so that you can kind of hear the sentence with the notes.
I played the following notes in order:
C G D C E C (1, 5, 2, 1, 3, 1)
Sounds like I’m singing those words (kind of) right?
Well, we sang “Hello random stranger” inside the C scale. Every note that sounds “good” when you play them in order forms a scale. There are minor and major scales, just like there are chords (because chords are formed with notes of a scale). And you can alter their “note” by just moving your hand to another root note.
Let’s try moving our hand to the F note, and play the whole notes from there (just the white keys that follow the F note).
Play all of the notes until you reach F again (use your pinky #5, to play the C D and the next F), that’s an octave, 8 notes from root to root. But wait, that didn’t sound so pleasant, when you played B it sounded out of place. Explaining scales is tricky, and most beginners just play by ear; but if you learn the scales you will save a lot of time trying to guess the notes of a song.
Normal tutoring makes you spend 1 month on every scale; there are 12 scales, 7 for the white notes, 5 for the black notes.
You can see the list of these scales over at yokewong.net
I recommend you read them and try to learn them once you finish these lessons; playing a scale correctly and accompaning it with chords is what difers pianists from chord pianists.
For now, the easiest scale is the C scale, since it just uses the white notes.
Every song in the world has a root note; if you search for song lyrics with chords you’ll see that every song starts in a specific chord. That chord will define the scale the song is being played at, and that also means that you can “sing” the song with your right hand if you play the scale that defines said chord.
Let’s try something fun then, let’s play a song using the C major scale alone; no chords just right hand playing with the white keys (C major scale is composed of: C D E F G A B C);
Here's Dust in the wind; a song without a piano.
Play with your right hand, random notes from the C scale (any white key), and you’ll notice that most of them sound Ok with the song. Listen carefully though, follow the rhythm and hit the keys softly, be creative feel free to play two keys at the same time or try to move your hand from the root position, just make sure you only hit the notes that are inside the scale (the white keys).
By singing the song along the singer (if you tried to sing the song instead of just accompaniment) you’ll find notes that represent different parts of the lyrics. Those notes will help you find the chords for the song in the future (don’t worry too much about it now); since every chord in the song has to stay Inside the scale, when you press a note, that note is part of a chord that represents that sound.
I play at church, and sometimes the singers bring songs that have no chords or no root note; what I do is just listen to the song when they sing it without music, and just try to imitate their sound with my piano; once I find the correct pattern, I can Identify the scale; once in the scale I can adorn the song with chords.
Since scales are complementary for these posts, you should study them after you finished reading this series. It’ll make your life easier, and it’ll help you play better (way better, than just a chord piano player)
For the lessons, you should only learn the F major scale (to play “just the way you are” by Bruno Mars), and of course at least the C major scale (you already know this one if you studied the last lesson).
Next Stop: Inversions, Sharp and Altered chords.
This section is actually the shortest, but it puts the icing on the cake; this is the semi-penultimate section. After this we’ll be able to play any song we want (we’ll start with “just the way you are”).
Let’s start explaining what these Inversions are.
An inverted chord is a chord that’s not played normally. Remember that in the piano, the notes are repeated in different sets (octaves) so we can combine different notes from different “sets” to create chords that we already know.
For example and altered C major chord would be:
We moved the root, and well, we changed the positioning of our fingers; but this is still a C major chord (we have C, E, and G).
We can make these combinations any time, and they will still sound great; the difference will be in pitch since we are switching the heavy sounds and moving the root.
That’s all there is to inversions, it’s just a different way to play chords; you just have to remember what notes form what chords (that’s why it’s a good idea to memorize the major and minor chords).
You can play these at any time a chord is needed; sometimes you'll form inversions by playing arpeggios on both hands, or by singing in a scale and doing bass with your left hand.
You can play these at any time a chord is needed; sometimes you'll form inversions by playing arpeggios on both hands, or by singing in a scale and doing bass with your left hand.
Our next step is sharp chords (or flat chords):
In case you haven't figured out yet. Just like the white keys, the black keys can create chords as well, and they are formed in the same way; 1st – 5th – 8th half notes from the root.
So a G# chord would look like
Same thing with “Flats”, a Bb chord looks like
Since sharps share the name with the flats, a Bb chord is the same as an A# chord.
Easy enough right? The only hard thing about sharp and flat chords is getting used to the finger positions (find a comfortable way and stick with it) so it gets a bit tricky, just practice hitting the notes softly don’t pound the keyboard just yet.And the last Section for this part is altered chords:
Not really called altered chords, they are additional chords that are identified by their name more than their sound.
If I show you this, can you name this chord?
That’s called a Cmajor7th chord (or C7); can you tell why it’s called 7th? Yup, it adds a 7th whole note to the chord. So a Cm7 would look like this
You can do the math on your own by now, and see the pattern of half notes so you can form the rest of the 7th chords, but if you’re lazy and downloaded Aldo’s Pianito you can see all of the strange chords with the program, and do the math on your own to see how they are formed.
Augmented shortened as Aug are chords with the 8th half tone one half tone higher (so from 8th – to 9th )
Diminished shortened as Dim are chords that lowered the 5th and 8th notes one half tone.
Forths are identified by a 4 by the root name, and are composed of just the root note and a forth whole note (same thing with the fifth and third).
And last but not least the sustained chords: these are bit trickier, they can alter the 3rd whole note of a scale (or 5th half note) one whole note down or one whole note up. A Sus2 chord means that the 3rd note of a chord has to be brought down a whole step, and a Sus4 chord means that the 3rd note of a chord has to be brought Up one whole step.
Notes that appear divided (for example C/D) instruct you to play a C chord and D note with your left hand as bass. Its just chord/bass, or right/left hand.
I know they are confusing; don’t worry too much about it. For all we care, you could play a normal C major chord where a tab or chorded lyrics say Caug7 and most people won’t know the difference, since you want to accompany your playing with the scale.
When you sing a song with a scale, and play the chords with your left hand these alterations will appear naturally.
And that's it for this lesson;
For the next section, we’ll finally play the song “Just the way you are” by Bruno Mars, you'll also find a list of links that where supplied along the lessons and I'll show you how to find chorded songs on the World wide web.
For now, practice your chording with both hands, and while you play the left hand don’t worry if you miss a note with your middle finger; playing the root and the last note is normal, just concentrate on using your right hand to play. Dance around the notes with all of your fingers (right hand of course) without getting out of the scale (its good practice to come back to your root position).
Stay put, practice and don't be lazy (well... actually being lazy's not that bad).
Heh... aside from being lazy; sloth's are kind of funny.
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