hello everybody welcome to um a little exercise session we're working this week at the performance arts free school on establishing a really good practice routine and actually fundamentally your practice for any instrument doesn't really change very much over the years you still have to keep dexterous you still have to keep your wing your finger your wings even but your fingers working you still have to warm up and there are certain exercises that you you're going to find useful all of your life especially for the warm up really the only difference is that you're going to become really really quick at them so today i've got uh two little podcasts this is the first one and i'm going to show you a little way of warming up and this is a preliminary exercise for the arpeggios that we're going to be doing later so what i want you to do is i want to get you to get your pinky and play it put it play the c an octave after middle c hopefully your piano is big enough and you have that octave um i know some people join me and they have you know very small pianos but hopefully you've got that you can play hopefully chords at least an octave on pretty much any piano that i've seen um so even if you don't have a piano but you've you know maybe your kids have got one you could use theirs so c hopefully an octave uh to your left of middle c but whatever you've got because we can play it up here you can also play it up here you can play it down here wherever but i'm going to use this one so and i want you to play your c your e and your g but look i want you to do it a bit a bit differently i don't want you to play five three thumb i want you to play five three one okay why am i asking you to do that well that's because when you play an arpeggio we're going to use our thumb for something else but we're not doing that today this is a warm-up exercise that you will hopefully hold on to for the rest of your days as a pianist so we're going to play that try add with three fingers down all at once okay and now separately

together separately

okay it could come back down again but we'll talk about that in a minute and now what i want you to do is move everything up one note now that was a c major triad by the way now if you move everything up a note

it sounds different doesn't it that's because it's a minor it's a d minor triad listen to that again

it's a rattling i think uh it's my glasses i think let's try this again

yes my glasses so let's do that again properly c major tread d minor tread is something different isn't there in the third some different quality about it let's move up another note everything move to the right so now we're on a g an e a g and a b it's another minor it's an e minor e minor tread or e minor chord

let's move up one more to the f ah we're back to majors can you hear it slightly um it's all in the third is that slightly uh um brighter more um whoa here i am sort of sound and it's all to do with that third what it means is the space between the thirds and the first has an extra semitone okay now we're going to go up again towards i'd say my window but you don't actually know where my window is so up coming up towards middle c and this tried this is a g major triad some another major

let's play it separately g b d wonderful now let's come up again ah it's that minor isn't it can you hear it really tell when you when you do all this you know one after the other okay and now we're going to come up another one and this chord is called b minor diminished don't worry about y at the moment just is and then if we come up one more we're back to c

okay let's do that again so what i want you to do is play the chord and then play the three notes and go to the d and then come up to the e and up to the f major

up to the g major up to the a minor

and up to the b diminished okay and then we're back at c again and when we...

hello everybody welcome to um a little exercise session we're working this week at the performance arts free school on establishing a really good practice routine and actually fundamentally your practice for any instrument doesn't really change very much over the years you still have to keep dexterous you still have to keep your wing your finger your wings even but your fingers working you still have to warm up and there are certain exercises that you you're going to find useful all of your life especially for the warm up really the only difference is that you're going to become really really quick at them so today i've got uh two little podcasts this is the first one and i'm going to show you a little way of warming up and this is a preliminary exercise for the arpeggios that we're going to be doing later so what i want you to do is i want to get you to get your pinky and play it put it play the c an octave after middle c hopefully your piano is big enough and you have that octave um i know some people join me and they have you know very small pianos but hopefully you've got that you can play hopefully chords at least an octave on pretty much any piano that i've seen um so even if you don't have a piano but you've you know maybe your kids have got one you could use theirs so c hopefully an octave uh to your left of middle c but whatever you've got because we can play it up here you can also play it up here you can play it down here wherever but i'm going to use this one so and i want you to play your c your e and your g but look i want you to do it a bit a bit differently i don't want you to play five three thumb i want you to play five three one okay why am i asking you to do that well that's because when you play an arpeggio we're going to use our thumb for something else but we're not doing that today this is a warm-up exercise that you will hopefully hold on to for the rest of your days as a pianist so we're going to play that try add with three fingers down all at once okay and now separately

together separately

okay it could come back down again but we'll talk about that in a minute and now what i want you to do is move everything up one note now that was a c major triad by the way now if you move everything up a note

it sounds different doesn't it that's because it's a minor it's a d minor triad listen to that again

it's a rattling i think uh it's my glasses i think let's try this again

yes my glasses so let's do that again properly c major tread d minor tread is something different isn't there in the third some different quality about it let's move up another note everything move to the right so now we're on a g an e a g and a b it's another minor it's an e minor e minor tread or e minor chord

let's move up one more to the f ah we're back to majors can you hear it slightly um it's all in the third is that slightly uh um brighter more um whoa here i am sort of sound and it's all to do with that third what it means is the space between the thirds and the first has an extra semitone okay now we're going to go up again towards i'd say my window but you don't actually know where my window is so up coming up towards middle c and this tried this is a g major triad some another major

let's play it separately g b d wonderful now let's come up again ah it's that minor isn't it can you hear it really tell when you when you do all this you know one after the other okay and now we're going to come up another one and this chord is called b minor diminished don't worry about y at the moment just is and then if we come up one more we're back to c

okay let's do that again so what i want you to do is play the chord and then play the three notes and go to the d and then come up to the e and up to the f major

up to the g major up to the a minor

and up to the b diminished okay and then we're back at c again and when we...

hello tail tellers and mini jazz players and mini blues players welcome to the performing arts free school um now then let me see how are we going to start well i tell you what we're going to spend the next 12 days working on 12 blues scales okay and they're so easy they're so easy and they're going to allow you to improvise really really easily now if you don't know i'm doing the mini jazz classes grade one abrsm um piano uh book we're working through that and this blues scale is going to help you make beautiful music for your solo parts in your exams but we don't have to do all that exam stuff we don't want to we can just do it for our own pleasure these wonderful scales are going to help you make beautiful beautiful music and you're going to be able to make it up as you go along and that's just fantastic because you'll impress even yourself your biggest critic critic is yourself no doubt so let's start with middle c and then we're going to play an e flat with our second finger and an f natural with our third and then we're going to play an f sharp with our fourth okay go do that for me c e flat f f sharp back down uh let's start with the f sharp f sharp f natural e flat c okay don't worry i'm going to give you a backing track in a minute and you can play around and improvise yourselves it's really great fun and then rather than play the g with our pinky we're going to pass our thumb under and we're going to play thumb on the g section of the b flat and third on the c now there are lots and lots of different ways of um you know mapping out how your scales and and the fingering that you're going to use but this is the fingering we're going to use today okay and this is i think the best for our purposes for the time being that doesn't mean to say you'll be doing this all the time because when you get more advanced you become a little bit more uh flexible and you have to sometimes stretch your hand about the place so let's try that all in one go c e flat f f sharp thumb under g b flat c back down again b flat g f sharp f natural e flat and c okay one more time

okay so don't forget to pass your your fourth finger over now let's try it from the middle c

a mirror version okay and then we're going to come back again i'll explain why we're doing this mirror version in a minute

now i just think it's going to be much more useful for us to start that c down there with our third finger so c base c e flat f

f sharp with your fourth g with your third b flat with your second and thumb on that c okay under back up fourth over okay how did you get on well that's it but i do think it's beneficial to go up and down okay so when you're practicing mix it up a bit start on the c and go outwards and then start on the c's and go upwards and back down again whatever you whatever you want to do and as long as you stick to those notes you're going to be absolutely fine so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to get one of my robots to play a c minor backing track with a bass um should we have libby libby is one of my robots okay now you can play double time so you can do one two three four one two three four one two three four or you can speed it up etc entirely up to you but i'm going to let that run and i recommend you practice as as long as you can have some fun with it and we'll be back tomorrow with d flat the d flat minor but we've got some other classes coming up in a minute for the bedford views if you're interested do do

do

do

okay guys i hope that was really really helpful and um yeah just open go keep going back and doing more of the same and then of course you can improvise and you can do these in any order that you want

okay have some fun with it it's great isn't it enjoy

hello tail tellers and mini jazz players and mini blues players welcome to the performing arts free school um now then let me see how are we going to start well i tell you what we're going to spend the next 12 days working on 12 blues scales okay and they're so easy they're so easy and they're going to allow you to improvise really really easily now if you don't know i'm doing the mini jazz classes grade one abrsm um piano uh book we're working through that and this blues scale is going to help you make beautiful music for your solo parts in your exams but we don't have to do all that exam stuff we don't want to we can just do it for our own pleasure these wonderful scales are going to help you make beautiful beautiful music and you're going to be able to make it up as you go along and that's just fantastic because you'll impress even yourself your biggest critic critic is yourself no doubt so let's start with middle c and then we're going to play an e flat with our second finger and an f natural with our third and then we're going to play an f sharp with our fourth okay go do that for me c e flat f f sharp back down uh let's start with the f sharp f sharp f natural e flat c okay don't worry i'm going to give you a backing track in a minute and you can play around and improvise yourselves it's really great fun and then rather than play the g with our pinky we're going to pass our thumb under and we're going to play thumb on the g section of the b flat and third on the c now there are lots and lots of different ways of um you know mapping out how your scales and and the fingering that you're going to use but this is the fingering we're going to use today okay and this is i think the best for our purposes for the time being that doesn't mean to say you'll be doing this all the time because when you get more advanced you become a little bit more uh flexible and you have to sometimes stretch your hand about the place so let's try that all in one go c e flat f f sharp thumb under g b flat c back down again b flat g f sharp f natural e flat and c okay one more time

okay so don't forget to pass your your fourth finger over now let's try it from the middle c

a mirror version okay and then we're going to come back again i'll explain why we're doing this mirror version in a minute

now i just think it's going to be much more useful for us to start that c down there with our third finger so c base c e flat f

f sharp with your fourth g with your third b flat with your second and thumb on that c okay under back up fourth over okay how did you get on well that's it but i do think it's beneficial to go up and down okay so when you're practicing mix it up a bit start on the c and go outwards and then start on the c's and go upwards and back down again whatever you whatever you want to do and as long as you stick to those notes you're going to be absolutely fine so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to get one of my robots to play a c minor backing track with a bass um should we have libby libby is one of my robots okay now you can play double time so you can do one two three four one two three four one two three four or you can speed it up etc entirely up to you but i'm going to let that run and i recommend you practice as as long as you can have some fun with it and we'll be back tomorrow with d flat the d flat minor but we've got some other classes coming up in a minute for the bedford views if you're interested do do

do

do

okay guys i hope that was really really helpful and um yeah just open go keep going back and doing more of the same and then of course you can improvise and you can do these in any order that you want

okay have some fun with it it's great isn't it enjoy

hi guys welcome to um tail teller club and telltale kids actually this is the under 13's class um but of course if you're grown up you're welcome here as well now um the telltale kids uh pops up at least three lessons a day so it's worth following us on the podcast and then you can get updates if you've got the app we're on if itunes and spotify and all over the place all over the place and so i'm sort of doing three a day of our um studies for villanchilo or cello for short and piano and this is a cello class so and what we're doing is we're going through all of the scales very important now i'm just going to talk briefly well i never talk briefly do i i'm probably going to go on a bit but do you know what if you do your scales and your arpeggios it's a bit like cheating because you'll suddenly become really really good at playing anything just because you practiced your scales and your arpeggios it does this weird thing to you it enables you to play really clearly and really in tune without trying so what i recommend you do each day we yesterday we did g d and a the g major d major and the a minor natural from the grade 1 abrsm scales book and what i recommend you do every day every morning or whenever it is that you do your practice you just play them through once that's all you have to do and you know you'll find eventually that you're so incredibly quick at it that you actually don't have to put time aside even but you just do it you know and you can probably get all of your skills that you're working on any one time done in under a minute um how amazing is that to be really good at something in under a minute i mean it's unheard of isn't it you know they do say that to be good at anything takes 10 years well to be good at scales and arpeggios it just takes a couple of days certainly to be good at playing cello or you know really well you will spend a bit longer than a few minutes on it but we're talking about little bite-sized pieces little classes you know little things that are going to improve your skills so today we're going to look at c major and i'm going to pop up three different versions of the c major scale so we're going to do a string section one um a guitar one and then a drum one okay because i really like the percussion and this just gets you in the uh it enables you to play with other people which is quite important you know where if we've been through this very difficult lockdown where we haven't been seeing people and playing with our chums and actually that's um you know it's quite bad for us to not play with other people we get a bit locked into bad habits and a good musician is a good musician wherever they go and whoever they perform with okay so shall we have who should we have today which robot shall i ask clive clive would you consider playing us some c major on your acoustic guitar

and we're going to do um we're going to play each note twice but first of all let's just do the open sleeve and could you use your whole bow from the frog to the tip and keep it there and put your first finger down and play me this little brother glorious e a d spoke on t

and now the e third

all the way down to the tip and now your fourth finger

on the f and now we're going to swap strings and we're going to play an open g all the way to the tip keeping that bow nice and steady right to the tip right to the end really good control one finger down we've got an a three fingers down so that rather glorious b right to the tip do you hear did you hear it i hit the wood and four fingers down for the c now that's one octave right to the frog keep those fingers down now you're going to cross strings and you're going to cross the whole hand over ready to play this next section so we want an open d

first finger down now we're going to put two fingers down this time not three because we're on an f

right to the end keep it there four fingers down so we've missed...

hi guys welcome to um tail teller club and telltale kids actually this is the under 13's class um but of course if you're grown up you're welcome here as well now um the telltale kids uh pops up at least three lessons a day so it's worth following us on the podcast and then you can get updates if you've got the app we're on if itunes and spotify and all over the place all over the place and so i'm sort of doing three a day of our um studies for villanchilo or cello for short and piano and this is a cello class so and what we're doing is we're going through all of the scales very important now i'm just going to talk briefly well i never talk briefly do i i'm probably going to go on a bit but do you know what if you do your scales and your arpeggios it's a bit like cheating because you'll suddenly become really really good at playing anything just because you practiced your scales and your arpeggios it does this weird thing to you it enables you to play really clearly and really in tune without trying so what i recommend you do each day we yesterday we did g d and a the g major d major and the a minor natural from the grade 1 abrsm scales book and what i recommend you do every day every morning or whenever it is that you do your practice you just play them through once that's all you have to do and you know you'll find eventually that you're so incredibly quick at it that you actually don't have to put time aside even but you just do it you know and you can probably get all of your skills that you're working on any one time done in under a minute um how amazing is that to be really good at something in under a minute i mean it's unheard of isn't it you know they do say that to be good at anything takes 10 years well to be good at scales and arpeggios it just takes a couple of days certainly to be good at playing cello or you know really well you will spend a bit longer than a few minutes on it but we're talking about little bite-sized pieces little classes you know little things that are going to improve your skills so today we're going to look at c major and i'm going to pop up three different versions of the c major scale so we're going to do a string section one um a guitar one and then a drum one okay because i really like the percussion and this just gets you in the uh it enables you to play with other people which is quite important you know where if we've been through this very difficult lockdown where we haven't been seeing people and playing with our chums and actually that's um you know it's quite bad for us to not play with other people we get a bit locked into bad habits and a good musician is a good musician wherever they go and whoever they perform with okay so shall we have who should we have today which robot shall i ask clive clive would you consider playing us some c major on your acoustic guitar

and we're going to do um we're going to play each note twice but first of all let's just do the open sleeve and could you use your whole bow from the frog to the tip and keep it there and put your first finger down and play me this little brother glorious e a d spoke on t

and now the e third

all the way down to the tip and now your fourth finger

on the f and now we're going to swap strings and we're going to play an open g all the way to the tip keeping that bow nice and steady right to the tip right to the end really good control one finger down we've got an a three fingers down so that rather glorious b right to the tip do you hear did you hear it i hit the wood and four fingers down for the c now that's one octave right to the frog keep those fingers down now you're going to cross strings and you're going to cross the whole hand over ready to play this next section so we want an open d

first finger down now we're going to put two fingers down this time not three because we're on an f

right to the end keep it there four fingers down so we've missed...

hi guys a very um quick lesson now because i'm hoping that you've already done your c major class with me with um the guitar where we explained in in more detail but i'll i'll quickly go over the fingering so the fingering is open on the c major this is the um c major scale by the way in case you're getting mixed up so open c one on d three on uh e four on f open g one

okay um now what i'm going to do today is i'm just going to talk you through i'll leave the backing on you can do this yourselves but the slurring okay so the slurring option i think the uh the examiner will ask you to play either or it's really important you know so let's let's do this so it's down down up up down down so

okay so let's turn that up and you can play along

okay guys i hope that was um enjoyable um great fun they really are i love scales i love them because i've managed to get quite good at them and of course the better you get the more you just love playing them and we're going to um be doing arpeggios very very soon and as soon as you start doing arpeggios darlings on the especially on the piano um you know you really really do start to become you know quite excellent and you can be very proud of yourself and you start to sound really good um which is the best thing nobody wants to listen to a bad out of tune performer it just hurts too much so the sooner that you know your practice sessions become slightly bearable for everyone around you the better but of course you know learning takes lots of mistakes of course it does of course it does but we have resolve do we not to improve at all um levels but never at the cost of enjoyment so i hope you really enjoyed that i had great fun doing it um now i'm going to do a percussion track next for us for the little ones for our mini learners and uh later on i'll be doing the more advanced classes over at the performing arts free school london so um enjoy darlings but the sun is shining it may be time to take a break

hi guys a very um quick lesson now because i'm hoping that you've already done your c major class with me with um the guitar where we explained in in more detail but i'll i'll quickly go over the fingering so the fingering is open on the c major this is the um c major scale by the way in case you're getting mixed up so open c one on d three on uh e four on f open g one

okay um now what i'm going to do today is i'm just going to talk you through i'll leave the backing on you can do this yourselves but the slurring okay so the slurring option i think the uh the examiner will ask you to play either or it's really important you know so let's let's do this so it's down down up up down down so

okay so let's turn that up and you can play along

okay guys i hope that was um enjoyable um great fun they really are i love scales i love them because i've managed to get quite good at them and of course the better you get the more you just love playing them and we're going to um be doing arpeggios very very soon and as soon as you start doing arpeggios darlings on the especially on the piano um you know you really really do start to become you know quite excellent and you can be very proud of yourself and you start to sound really good um which is the best thing nobody wants to listen to a bad out of tune performer it just hurts too much so the sooner that you know your practice sessions become slightly bearable for everyone around you the better but of course you know learning takes lots of mistakes of course it does of course it does but we have resolve do we not to improve at all um levels but never at the cost of enjoyment so i hope you really enjoyed that i had great fun doing it um now i'm going to do a percussion track next for us for the little ones for our mini learners and uh later on i'll be doing the more advanced classes over at the performing arts free school london so um enjoy darlings but the sun is shining it may be time to take a break

Get your scales right early on.

hi guys welcome to um tail teller club and telltale kids actually this is the under 13's class um but of course if you're grown up you're welcome here as well now um the telltale kids uh pops up at least three lessons a day so it's worth following us on the podcast and then you can get updates if you've got the app we're on if itunes and spotify and all over the place all over the place and so i'm sort of doing three a day of our um studies for villanchilo or cello for short and piano and this is a cello class so and what we're doing is we're going through all of the scales very important now i'm just going to talk briefly well i never talk briefly do i i'm probably going to go on a bit but do you know what if you do your scales and your arpeggios it's a bit like cheating because you'll suddenly become really really good at playing anything just because you practiced your scales and your arpeggios it does this weird thing to you it enables you to play really clearly and really in tune without trying so what i recommend you do each day we yesterday we did g d and a the g major d major and the a minor natural from the grade 1 abrsm scales book and what i recommend you do every day every morning or whenever it is that you do your practice you just play them through once that's all you have to do and you know you'll find eventually that you're so incredibly quick at it that you actually don't have to put time aside even but you just do it you know and you can probably get all of your skills that you're working on any one time done in under a minute um how amazing is that to be really good at something in under a minute i mean it's unheard of isn't it you know they do say that to be good at anything takes 10 years well to be good at scales and arpeggios it just takes a couple of days certainly to be good at playing cello or you know really well you will spend a bit longer than a few minutes on it but we're talking about little bite-sized pieces little classes you know little things that are going to improve your skills so today we're going to look at c major and i'm going to pop up three different versions of the c major scale so we're going to do a string section one um a guitar one and then a drum one okay because i really like the percussion and this just gets you in the uh it enables you to play with other people which is quite important you know where if we've been through this very difficult lockdown where we haven't been seeing people and playing with our chums and actually that's um you know it's quite bad for us to not play with other people we get a bit locked into bad habits and a good musician is a good musician wherever they go and whoever they perform with okay so shall we have who should we have today which robot shall i ask clive clive would you consider playing us some c major on your acoustic guitar

and we're going to do um we're going to play each note twice but first of all let's just do the open sleeve and could you use your whole bow from the frog to the tip and keep it there and put your first finger down and play me this little brother glorious e a d spoke on t

and now the e third

all the way down to the tip and now your fourth finger

on the f and now we're going to swap strings and we're going to play an open g all the way to the tip keeping that bow nice and steady right to the tip right to the end really good control one finger down we've got an a three fingers down so that rather glorious b right to the tip do you hear did you hear it i hit the wood and four fingers down for the c now that's one octave right to the frog keep those fingers down now you're going to cross strings and you're going to cross the whole hand over ready to play this next section so we want an open d

first finger down now we're going to put two fingers down this time not three because we're on an f

right to the end keep...

Get your scales right early on.

hi guys welcome to um tail teller club and telltale kids actually this is the under 13's class um but of course if you're grown up you're welcome here as well now um the telltale kids uh pops up at least three lessons a day so it's worth following us on the podcast and then you can get updates if you've got the app we're on if itunes and spotify and all over the place all over the place and so i'm sort of doing three a day of our um studies for villanchilo or cello for short and piano and this is a cello class so and what we're doing is we're going through all of the scales very important now i'm just going to talk briefly well i never talk briefly do i i'm probably going to go on a bit but do you know what if you do your scales and your arpeggios it's a bit like cheating because you'll suddenly become really really good at playing anything just because you practiced your scales and your arpeggios it does this weird thing to you it enables you to play really clearly and really in tune without trying so what i recommend you do each day we yesterday we did g d and a the g major d major and the a minor natural from the grade 1 abrsm scales book and what i recommend you do every day every morning or whenever it is that you do your practice you just play them through once that's all you have to do and you know you'll find eventually that you're so incredibly quick at it that you actually don't have to put time aside even but you just do it you know and you can probably get all of your skills that you're working on any one time done in under a minute um how amazing is that to be really good at something in under a minute i mean it's unheard of isn't it you know they do say that to be good at anything takes 10 years well to be good at scales and arpeggios it just takes a couple of days certainly to be good at playing cello or you know really well you will spend a bit longer than a few minutes on it but we're talking about little bite-sized pieces little classes you know little things that are going to improve your skills so today we're going to look at c major and i'm going to pop up three different versions of the c major scale so we're going to do a string section one um a guitar one and then a drum one okay because i really like the percussion and this just gets you in the uh it enables you to play with other people which is quite important you know where if we've been through this very difficult lockdown where we haven't been seeing people and playing with our chums and actually that's um you know it's quite bad for us to not play with other people we get a bit locked into bad habits and a good musician is a good musician wherever they go and whoever they perform with okay so shall we have who should we have today which robot shall i ask clive clive would you consider playing us some c major on your acoustic guitar

and we're going to do um we're going to play each note twice but first of all let's just do the open sleeve and could you use your whole bow from the frog to the tip and keep it there and put your first finger down and play me this little brother glorious e a d spoke on t

and now the e third

all the way down to the tip and now your fourth finger

on the f and now we're going to swap strings and we're going to play an open g all the way to the tip keeping that bow nice and steady right to the tip right to the end really good control one finger down we've got an a three fingers down so that rather glorious b right to the tip do you hear did you hear it i hit the wood and four fingers down for the c now that's one octave right to the frog keep those fingers down now you're going to cross strings and you're going to cross the whole hand over ready to play this next section so we want an open d

first finger down now we're going to put two fingers down this time not three because we're on an f

right to the end keep...