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...