Chords for Erik Satie - Gymnopedie No.1 Tutorial

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Welcome to ProPractice, your guide to piano mastery.
I'm Josh Wright, and today's episode is [G] based on
one of the most famous pieces in the piano repertoire,
and I feel like this could be used
at the late beginner level all the way through advanced.
It would be acceptable to put on a program.
This is the first Gymnopédie by Eric Zati.
It's spelled like gym-nop-ed-ee if you're an English speaker,
but I looked up how to say that,
so hopefully I'm saying that right,
gym-nop-ed-ee.
So this goes, let me just go ahead and play a bit.
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_ Okay, and obviously nothing too technically difficult at all
and you might be wondering,
well, why are you doing a tutorial on this?
It's pretty much sight-readable.
The reason is I don't want you to fall into the trap
of playing everything like a robot,
everything completely stagnant.
There are a lot of varieties that you can explore dynamically
and some things with voicing
that we will be going over today.
So let's just dive right in.
A lot of people might question,
why would you take this in the [D] right hand
[G] if you're going to just be taking [D] it in the left hand there?
Anytime [G] I can promote further control in my hand
[E] to produce a better sound, I will.
The only exception would be like an etude.
So, Sergei Babayan, _ one of the teachers I studied with,
he said _ something to the effect of,
[E]
you can cheat anytime you want except in a place
where the composer is purposely having you
learn a technique.
So he said, _ redistribute all you want,
but you can't play the double thirds etude _ _
between two hands like that to start out with.
You actually have to do it in one hand.
So having said that,
so that's why I take that in the right hand.
You can feel free to put your una corda pedal down,
which is your far left pedal, often called the soft pedal.
As you can see from this above camera,
I can shift my keyboard this way with that pedal.
What that does is you play on less strings.
Ideally, you'd be playing on one string,
which is where the term comes from, una corda,
one chord, or you can think of it as one string.
_ _ _ I probably is that.
I haven't looked that [F#] Italian word up
for a really long time.
And then lent a dollaro, however you say that.
So slowly and painfully is what that translates [G] to. _ _ _ _ _
[D] _ _ _ _ [G] One, two, three, [D] one.
_ _ So it's in the same time signature [G] as a waltz.
It's [G] not, _ _
[D] _ _ _ but I think [G] that you can,
one, two, three.
It has kind of that same lifting effect as a waltz.
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_ _ _ _ [G] _ _ Okay, now let's talk about starting in measure five,
and I don't have all the measures
throughout this piece numbered,
so you're just gonna have to kind of follow along
with where I'm at. _
_ But starting in measure five,
since it's right towards the beginning,
we know the measure numbers.
_ To get this left hand in control
and to be able to jump up and hit that accurately each time,
I have a couple of exercises that you can do.
The first thing is just to practice eyes closed.
[F] Now you might think, how in the world
am I going to orient myself if my eyes are closed?
You orient yourself by feeling around
for the two and three sets of black [G] keys.
So _ as you come up here, you'll feel,
okay, this [D#] is my set of two black [F#] keys.
This is the bottom of the set of three black keys.
[B] So [Bm] _ there we [G] go.
_ That's how I find my [D] chord.
And do quite a bit of this practice.
You don't have to go fast.
As you get better and better,
I would _ encourage you to _
[D] _ _ [G] _ _ [D] practice really fast like that,
[G] because then when you go back to this,
there's almost no chance that you're gonna [E] miss it.
Another exercise that I would have you do
is something I call the chord combinations exercise.
And I originally [B] demonstrated this for Scarbo. _ _
_ _ _ _ Those crazy passages,
one of the hardest pieces in the piano repertoire,
if not the hardest.
I don't think it's the hardest, but a lot of people do.
I think something like Prokofiev Two is much harder.
Anyway, _ so you practice every combination
of the chord that you can.
So just go to the bottom note.
So G to the B, and then G to the D.
You can do this eyes closed.
I'm continuing to do eyes closed.
And then just to the F sharp.
And then do all combinations of two notes
that you can think of.
So the [G] top two, the bottom two, the outsides,
and then all three.
If you do that, that will really help.
[E] Let's talk about how we can get the color.
Color in music refers to _ _ timbre. _
So kind of the quality of the tone.
So it has a lot to do with dynamics at the very core of it.
How do we get that really velvety sound?
First of all, you can feel free to use the soft pedal
if the piano you're on isn't so incredibly dull.
Even if it is dull, maybe you want that
at certain points in this piece, just very piece.
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_ But you [C#m] don't want that everywhere.
[G] _ What you wanna do is pull back slightly,
kind of stroke those notes.
What that does, I've thought about this for a lot of years,
and this is a perfect video to talk [G#] about this.
I thought, [Bm] you know, _ we're kind of slowing down
the hammer speed, but why is that?
Why does pulling back [E] give us that?
If you think of an attack [F#m] on a note,
how much travel distance do we have when we're doing that?
We might [Gm] only have that much travel distance.
[F#] _
However, if we kind of pull back,
_ that extends the travel distance,
so it gives us a little bit more of a gauge
_ to control that sound.
[G] So that's, _ you can start with really big swipes
[G] _ [D] and just get that as soft as you can, _ _ [G] _ _ _ [D] _ _
so that feels good.
Now, let's talk about variety with shape. _ _ _ _ _ _
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