hello tellers and mini jazz players and anyone else who's popped by to the performing arts free school welcome to my uh little nightly class um i'm going to work through lots of exercises in the coming weeks and these are exercises and tips and tricks and things that are going to really benefit you not just if you're a jazz improv student of mine or if you're um you know working with the blues or if you're improvising or any of that although it's very helpful and uh or a necessity actually let's face it this is also really good if you're just a plain old classical musician and if you're doing any of the graded exams you're doing suzuki whatever it is that you're doing these are really really good classes to um just you know give it some advantage really but the other thing about these warm-ups is they're really useful for sounding pretty good you sound pretty good pretty quick that's very important for the neighbors i think so what are we going to do we're going to do a flowing arpeggio a sweep of the keys we'll do it really slowly i don't recommend that you speed these things up for a very long time because when you start rushing you make mistakes and what happens is when you learn a mistake when you do it more than once or twice or three times it becomes so ingrained you can't get rid of it so we're going to start well i've got a quite a small yamaha a yamaha what is it an e353 my baby crayon baby ground arrives thursday apparently it's been delayed in bath but anyway i'm digressing um so i haven't got that many octaves i've got my middle c and then uh two other c's and then i've got three uh in the other direction so for today that's i'm afraid that's the best i can do but hope uh you know one would hope that you've got a bigger keyboard than i if you only get one you can do it with one you can just um repeat rather than doing the sweep you can just repeat as i go up and down the keyboard okay so i'm not going to hold having a small one against you whatsoever we can make do we all do we all make do us musicians so let's start on whatever c you've got i'm starting two octaves to the left of middle c and i want you to spread your whole hand out to the next c now if you're a little person you may or may not be able to manage that if you can't reach you're just going to have to move and you know sometimes small hands are a bit of a hindrance to pianists and cellists actually um and we just have to work ways around uh the problem of distance and often that means shifting we have to be shifty shifty little characters that's what we have to be if we have small um digits so um let's let's start on that base c and then i want you to play your e with your third or fourth whichever is more comfortable personally i use my third on the e and then the second with the g and we've got this big scoop in our hands look it's rather generous spacing that means we can miss two notes out now and we can go back to the c well not back to the c where it's another c so let me play that um that's familiar isn't it yes of course it is because it's the third fifth and root note and this is so much music today is made up of those chords but we'll talk about that another time so c e g c c e g c

okay now i want you to practice that over and over and over again and be nice and fluid about it make sure your pinky and your thirds or your fourth uh are pressing nicely and evenly and you can play the whole chord if you like but now what we're going to do this is something really oh it's quite exciting a bit of a new thing we're going to come over with our third and play that e again now what happened there your pinkies landed on the c don't play it but look you're in perfect position to play the arpeggio an octave higher that's how does that work when you're putting your third over well think about it

it makes perfect sense so if we came over with our fifth

that would be really difficult and clumsy so we don't we come over...