Hi, this is the teaching video for lesson one of music artists composing at the keyboard. In it, you learn how to build a performance by using a simple hand position to play a chord sequence. You'll probably get more out of this free sample lesson. If you use the resources link to open the lesson web page, where you can work through the video section by section with text and illustrations to help you You can also download the lesson notes PDF if working with a hardcopy is more convenient. Either way, I hope you'll enjoy learning with music Carter, and then to go on at the end to sample lesson two and find out how what you've learned is just the start of a lifetime of spontaneous keyboard music making The only technical information you need to know in order to start playing the pyramids variations is the names of the white piano keys.

If the keyboard had only white piano keys, it will be very difficult to tell them apart. And in fact, we tell them apart in relation to these groups of three and two black piano keys at the far end of the keyboard. Taking For example, this group with three black piano keys you'll find two white piano keys inside. And the higher one of those the upper one of those is a after that the piano keys the white piano keys are named according to the alphabet written out left to right as you would write it out on a piece of paper. Hey, And here we find we're getting to another key which looks exactly the same as the first one and indeed, that's called a as well. So there are only seven letters in the musical alphabet.

Option A. Unfortunately in pyramids, we actually go down from a, so you need to know the letters going backwards. A just those five a. d. flashcards in your download folder. Drill the names of those five piano keys until you know them inside out. A musical artist basic music making position is a way of getting your hands on the keyboard so that you can play notes that go together quickly and easily. Let's start with the first note that we learned today, the A.

We're going to put our left hand little finger on a and distribute the fingers one finger perky. I'm going to play the bottom finger, the middle one at the top. And you'll find that you're playing a chord already. an A minor chord. It's a play on this one, play one, miss one play Now in order for the right hand to sound good with the left hand, we have to leave two unused between the thumbs and do the same in the right hand. We play what we miss when we play when we miss when we play.

And if we play those two hands together all six notes, we get the A minor chord that you could see in written music in your workbook and a minor chord named after the lowest note. You can practice those notes, running them up from the bottom to the top like this. rhythmically as you can. In this rhythm that's called six eight rhythm you'll see the six eight time signature in the written music for this lesson. Six quavers divided up into two bundles of three, six notes in a bar, then a bar line and another six. You must practice playing that as rhythmically as you can.

Now the great thing about the basic music making position is it allows you to play chord symbols right from the off You can see the chord sequence for pyramids variations on your screen above the keyboard. As you can see, it's just two lines of letters. Some have m behind them for minor, a minor, followed by f, g, e, m, E minor, F, D, D minor, and so on. And those letters simply refer to the lowest key in the basic music paper making position in each and the A, which we found when we started. So for the A minor chord symbol, we simply play our six notes in six eight. In the A minor position.

You then see a little arrow which says go down to f. We do the same there stands for one bar of music minor m Stop there please. Because the next chord symbol in the sequence, he doesn't have the N behind it. But in bar four, we played our six notes on E. noticed a play the E chord without the M for minor, which means it's a major chord, we have to move the middle finger from G up to G sharp into the second line of the chord sequence, a minor, E minor, F major G sharp And that is the first performance of the pyramids core secrets. In order to get your performance, it will pay you to spend a little time memorizing the chord sequence. what I call the tune of the roots, the roots being the main letter in the chord sequence goes like this.

The first half the first line, the second line. So the first half is a pure zigzag path. The second half is the same and so memorize this path. First off the first half. This is the end of the second half. The other thing that will help get your performance is to not wait until you played all six notes to set off for the next position.

For example, if you play all your a minor Then think about where you're going to go. There's likely to be a pause before you get there. So what a better practice performer will do is run to the next position and be there in time. Ready, it's already there, over the next time. Wait until you've made all six dash and be late. The last thing that makes a nice performance is what we call a legato touch.

So instead of playing each note