In piano music, it's often the case that the right hand plays the melody. And the left hand plays what we call the accompaniment, which gives the melody some harmony. For example, here's a song happy birthday, and the right hand plays a melody. Which is fine, but it sounds kind of lonely all by itself. If we play some chords in the left hand and put that together, the right hand will have a more full richer sound. So take a listen.
Right. So the left hand accompaniment is pretty important. It gives a context and like a background to the melody It's not always the right hand playing the melody, but for now we'll just assume that that's most of the time that's the case. There are many ways that the left hand accompaniment can be played. So for example, what I just did the left hand played a chord than another chord. I can also do it like this.
Okay, so now we're breaking it up, I can do a fuller chord. Okay, I can do this kind of accompaniment. I can do this. So there are different ways that the left hand can accompany the right hand. In this lesson, we'll learn one of them. So we're not actually learning Happy birthday.
I do have a tutorial on That song If you want to watch it on my YouTube channel, it's there for you. So here's one way the left hand can accompany one accompaniment pattern watch. Okay, so I'm outlining chords. So if you look at the first measure, these are the three notes I'm playing. We've already learned this chord C eg Do you remember what it's called? a C chord.
But now instead of playing all three notes at once, I'm playing the notes one by one. Let's play together. And let's say the note names, even if you're not sure of the note names, say them with me, like, kind of copy me while you say it. Remember, one of the easiest ways that we learn is through copying. Think back to you probably don't remember. But when you were learning to speak whatever language you first spoke, you did it by copying the people around you.
Right? And maybe at first, you didn't even know what you were saying you were just making sounds. And after a while, you didn't copy people anymore. You made your own sentences. So for now, just go ahead and copy me It's okay. We're going to start on C. So here's middle C, we're going down an octave.
Okay, all cows eat grass. This is cows. And we'll play and see the note names is very repetitive too. So Hopefully by the end of this exercise, you'll get to know these names pretty well. 123 C, E, G, then repeat that C, E, G. Now look, the fifth finger moves down one note to be the second finger plays F. First finger still on G. Let's repeat that. B, F, G, we're going back to our C chord C, E, G, C, E, G, C. And now the thumbs up one note a, a. Repeat that C. A, C now are on f f still on a CF a Now look at where your fourth finger is probably right above you.
Let's play it. D, F, A, D, F, a finger reached down to B, B, F, G, repeat that B, F, G, C, A, G, C, G, C. And then if we count all the way down to that note, C, B, A, G, F, E, D, C, we see that we're just going down in Octave. Alright, practice that with me as many times as you need to. And then practice playing and singing the note names out loud on your own. As pianists we're very lucky because we get to play both melody and harmony at the same time, harmony is often called accompaniment, and it can be played by the left hand by the right hand or by both hands at the same time. For now we'll focus on practicing some left hand accompaniment patterns which will also help give our left hand lots of exercise to strengthen and develop into technique.