For the last section of this video, I'm going to include some excerpts of when I worked with Yosh on ways that he could develop this further. We consider this initial material to be like a verse, and then I improvised some ideas that might work for chorus. Let me talk to you a couple things that came to mind when I played that chorus. If you look at your initial piece here, looking here, every two measures, you're changing a chord, there's two measures. Here's another chord change, except for this little section here maybe changes a little bit faster, but for the most part, it feels drawn out. You're landing on this chord and you're sitting on it.

And what I thought is if we're going to get to the chorus, let's change that every measure to change it up. What that's going to do is it's going to create more emotion and emotion. Getting one. Also, yeah, we're we're moving it forward, there's more changes that are happening, it's going to increase the amount of drama that's coming in that particular section. So I might take the rhythmical element of this second motif, and develop that into a chorus, maybe incorporating some of the leaps that are there. So I'll play this chorus and have it be written out here so people could see what it looks like.

Was playing that last bit at the end. So this time that I played Through it is more similar and more derivative of the second motif versus the first one. When I tried this the first time, I made the course a little bit more similar to the first motif and let's listen to that here. That's a bit more similar to the first motif, and I tried playing through it again, or here. This time I made it more similar the rhythmical structure to the second motif. on which way you wanted to go.

But that's two different options for you tell me what you think about, you know which one you maybe prefer or, you know, maybe don't like him at all, I'm just giving you some examples of where you might build on. I think I like the second one more. I don't know why, but I like that one a bit more. It also has a nice alternation between like the what you play with the left hand and the right hand. So that's that also has like more turbulence, like, it adds more emotion to the song. So I like that more.

Yeah, I like that one a little better, as well. What I would say is some of the reason for that is, when I did it the first time we already played through this first motif a number of times, you've heard it three times here. We've heard it three times again, and then we get to the chorus, if we're playing the same rhythmical idea again, it's just starting to get a little bit tired at this point. And what I think makes The second version I came up with here, I'll work a little bit better is that your second motif and the rhythmical structure of that, really, we've only heard it twice, and it leads right into the chorus. So taking this motif here and this rhythmical structure and just continuing it on some different notes, allows us to have a little bit more variation to that. And we're building upon the second motif.

It's like the verses about the first motif with a little hint to the second here, and then we get the course. And it might be a great idea to flip that and make the chorus mostly about the second motif, and then maybe throw in a tiny bit of the first rhythmical element from the first motif, just to kind of tie them together. And then when we get back around to the verse again, we're going to be ready to hear that motif because we've already exhausted the second one a little bit more. Now this peak here definitely feels like it's got a lot of energy to it because it's so high and we're repeating it several times, you know the exact same phrase. That'd be one way of doing it, is to maybe make the course a little bit longer and go up here. Make it even higher.

Let me play that as a course. Try that again. Kiss it up pends on the range. Nice thing about the pianos you don't have a limit from a singing standpoint. You can melody line could keep going up and up and up. But we tend to respond to pop music even if it's with the piano, something that feels a little bit singable.

Maybe like this I like it when it goes up to this note here, gives it even takes a chorus that already feels dramatic and pushes it up even higher. Now that may not be the direction you want to go with your piece, you may want it to be a little bit more subdued. But I'm just trying to experiment with let's take it even further. And you can always pull it back a little bit if you're like, yeah, maybe that was a little bit too much. So that's why I'm pushing it a little bit higher up in its range and seeing like could the melody line even go higher? Far Am I go.

So when you write what I'm hoping you're getting From this is to try pushing yourself even further sometimes in terms of the range by repeating the motif more times than you think, then you might like, and you can hear it and then if it starts to tire on you pull it back or change it up in some way. But don't be afraid to take your motifs and go crazy with them, pushing the range much higher, adding some more turbulence to the rhythm. Taking away turbulence and taking away range and seeing if that works. Most pop songs have verse one, chorus, verse two. And so you're coming back to the same melody line in the second verse, but you're using different words. And so that will provide some amount of variation to the second verse, if it's just going to be on the piano.

You're going to come back to the second verse that presents a lot more challenge to not get tired by the fact that you're using all this repetition. If you're adding drums or strings, or something else to it, that can help to create some variation. solo piano pieces by themselves are very difficult because you don't have any words that you can use to change it. You don't have any other instruments to bring in. So ways to provide variation would be potentially in the company meant or by changing the octave, like I said before. Even just changing it to like taking up really high.

That helps to provide some of that variation and change to it. And that's sometimes two different Things, mostly, what we've been looking at is the basic structure of your melody line, not the arrangement. Because you don't have an arrangement, you just have the basic structure. So in some ways, those are two different things when you're thinking about developing your piece. Do you have any other questions about this? I think one thing I was thinking is like, do I start with like a chord progression first, or like how like that getting that first idea out is like, I found the most challenging, because once you have like a basic structure, then you can play around with it.

But getting that first thing out is I found it a bit hard. And like for me, it helped me to have like some sort of chord progression and then melody around it, but I don't know is that like a common thing to do? Definitely, I would say for myself, I'm probably doing some of those things, more or less at the same time, because I've been doing it for a long, long period of time because I've been doing this For a while. And so I'm oftentimes hearing the chord progression and the melody line happening simultaneously. However, there are many times that I sit down, and maybe I'm just playing through some chords, I could sing something over the top of that, that would be different from the notes that I'm playing on the piano. Sometimes there's a melody line, and then I'm trying to change up the chords by it.

There's no real right or wrong way to go about it. I would encourage you to push yourself to try both ways. So create some chord progressions that you like. And then see if you can develop a melody line on top of that. And then sometimes sit down and try to write a melody line, and then add chords to that and see if you can figure out something unique to support that. The more that you spend time doing both of those things, you might find that you end up doing it simultaneously because you've done them in isolation.

But again, even I would say that I, I swing across that full spectrum. And really, when you're trying to develop your composition skills, you don't want to do it one way too much, I would definitely encourage you to, again, push yourself to create variations on what you're doing and try it out in different ways. Just simply to strengthen your skill set. And when I created this class, and I provided some of these examples to show how you could take a melody line and push it further than even what you might like. So the version that that really added a lot of turbulence to it, or really changed the motif. You may in the end, decide.

Yeah, I don't really like that version. But the more that you can spread out in front of you a lot of different options. It'll help you pick the one that you end up liking the best