Well actually it was 11:50

Thanks Alan! Yep, it's all about using your ears and making a musical judgment.

yes, I appreciated that too!

Glad it helped, Mark! Yes, those so-called "tendency tones" have very specific effects. They can be REALLY useful, but being aware of what they do and how they function in contrast to the notes of the pentatonic really helps!

Thanks Emanuel - I'm really glad you liked it and found it useful!

@@BillHilton question, how do you know which chords are minor and mayor in the pentatonic scale?

You're welcome, Diana!

As a guitar player....The E minor pentatonic or the A minor pentatonic looks exactly the same on the fretboard..it's at a different place of the neck. There's the blues variation 1, ...2, or 3.... I like the Oneeyemonster variation becuase it has 7 passing or OPTION notes.lmao... I like to keep it simple..and all that jazz Pentatonic scales are USEFUL tools ...as a stencil to modulate using various MODES...becuase it's NOT completely define I personally use the DOMINANT pentatonic ( there's 5 modes within it) R...x...2....x....3...............5..............b7..x...R so many damn dominant chords/modes mix mix #2 mix #4 Mix #2, #4 mix b2 mix b6 mix b2, b6 Mix b2, b5, b6 Mix b2, #4 phry b4 loc b4 loc b4, maj6 ion #5, b7 ion #4, #5 b7 Ion #6..... I like to kill 2-3 birds in one stone. Play maj7......walla Ion ish modes. the different between a Dorian and Mix is Maj3 or b3 the only difference between the aeo and dor is...b6 or Maj6 That would be sort of like this ( 10 -ea diatonic scales with 7 modes each) aeo with maj7 = Harmonic min dorian with maj7 = Melodic min Harmonic min b2 melodic min b2 Harmonic min b5 melodic min b5 Harmonic min #4 meloidc min #4 Natural min Ion #6 ---------------------- or like this Mix , maj7 aeo maj7 dor maj7 phry maj7 loc maj7 dor b2, maj7 aeo b5 maj7 dor b5 maj7 aeo #4 maj7 dor #4 maj7

Thanks Sara - really glad it helped you!

Glad it was helpful!

No problem, Simon - glad to be of help!

Thank *you*, Vania - I'm glad you liked it!

No problem, Luis - glad to be of help! Give me a shout if you ever have any questions :)

You're welcome Orlando!

You're really welcome! Give me a shout if you want pointing in direction of any other tutorials - I've got quite a few on music theory, chords and so on. And good luck with the learning!

Thanks Jack - glad to hear it!

Thanks Rachel - I will!

Happy to help!

Thanks very much - you're welcome!

Thanks Jade!

You’re welcome, Violeta! The problem with music theory is that it often sounds really confusing when you read about it, but when it’s demonstrated on a piano - so you can hear the effects of different scales and chords and so on - it suddenly gets a lot easier!

No problem - glad it helped!

Thanks Tim!

Many thanks Frank!

You're very welcome Triston!

No problem Alieu - glad you liked it. Shout if you have any questions!

You're very welcome!

¡muchas gracias!

Thanks - glad it was helpful!

You’re welcome 😊

Thanks very much Amatteus, and welcome to the channel!

You're most welcome!

Glad it helped, Bryan!

You’re welcome!

You're welcome, Van!

Thanks Andre! Hmmm: I don't really have a technique... it just kind of sinks in. Very difficult to describe: I guess it's like learning lines or memorising a poem: it's a case of repetition.

Hi Bill, I was hoping for a magic formula HAHA!.My method is similar to yours, need more repetitions though.

Thank you!

Glad it was helpful, Ramesh!

You're very welcome!

Ha! Quite a lot of stuff is like that with piano improvisation: you do a thing because it sounds cool and then discover it has a name and a bunch of theory behind it. The important lesson to draw from that is that an hour just experimenting with stuff on the piano keyboard is worth about six hours of sitting around memorising bits of theory and then trying to extrapolate from it. Theory is fascinating and massively useful, but practice has to come first! :)

Keep up the great videos! Trying to add to my music theory knowledge this summer. My playing has hit a plateau for awhile

You're welcome, Alexey!

Thanks! I'm really grateful for the subscription, and I'm glad you like my stuff!

Glad you think so!

You're welcome!

Thanks Lucy!

Thanks Barry!

Hi Gary! I'm a bit unsure which bit you're referring to here - could you tell me the time in the video (e.g., 4 mins 32 secs or whatever) that you're looking at? Will do my best to help you if I can get that clarification!

You're welcome, Linda!

You're absolutely right, Mark - the best way to think of it is really just as extending the left hand harmonisation into (part of) the right hand. I've got a dedicated tutorial on it that you might like here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/irucl5V_1am7n4k.html

You're welcome! Yes, it will, depending on the half tones you add - but strictly speaking it will stop being a pentatonic scale and become a hexatonic or heptatonic. In general, when it comes to deciding how anything sounds, trust your own ears: if it sounds stable to you, then run with that. Does that help?

He was talking about the notes of the scale. By 5th he probably didn't mean the dominant chord which is very unstable and wants to go back to a tonic chord.

Soumya is about there with his answer, John: G the chord certainly does have that dominant role, but G the note is part of the tonic chord. When played with a C chord underneath, it's quite stable. A lot of this, of course, is quite subjective, and if I remember correctly from my dim and distant education in tonal theory is the subject of disagreement even among experts (if you'll Google around you'll find *lots* of different explanations of, and terminology for, both tonal and chordal functions).

It's basically because of the way the minor "sound" is constructed in tonal terms: the seventh degree a whole tone below the tonic is kind of an integral part of the minor identity, and the minor and major pentatonics are, if you like, "essentials" scales that contain the most important elements of the tonality in question but fewer of the typically less stable notes (fourth and seventh in the major, second and sixth in the minor). In terms of putting stuff into practice, it's very much a case of remembering that it's a question of establishing different brain circuitry that can deal with improvisation in the context of the keyboard. In some ways you're lucky, because your high achievement in classical terms will means you've already got the circuitry for control, dynamics, fingering and all the rest - it's just a case of laying down new ones for improvisation - which is a very different skill from playing from score (I almost think of the piano as two different instruments when I'm improvising and when I'm reading: I certainly tend to "see" the keyboard differently). Best advice: stick at it - if you keep working very gradually at improvisation skills, they will gradually firm up!

You could use the pentatonic of each chord if you wanted, Paige: it would just have a slightly different effect. Assuming a major key, with some progressions - those that contained only chords diatonic, i.e. naturally occuring in the key you're in, built of notes from the scale of that key - that approach would be a reasonably safe bet. The difficulty you would face is that you'd be mentally orienting around a new scale with every chord change, and in effect you'd not be doing anything much different from simply improvising over the progression with the regular major scale of the key. Doing that is fine, but the aim of using the pentatonic of the key is that it achieves simplicity, which helps with fluency. On the matter of keeping the same scale throughout the progression, you need to watch out for non-diatonic chords: have a search of my channel and elsewhere on YT for a full explanation of what they are - it would need a bit of an essay here!

Thanks Timothy - really glad this helped!

It's basically where you outline a chord playing its upper and lower notes - shells are mostly used in jazz, and mostly on sevenths (so, you'd play C and the B above it to form a Cmaj7 shell). They also often work with sixths, and thirds as long as they're not too far down the keyboard. The work less well with fourths and (especially) fifths, although they do have their place. The problem shells seek to solve is that the further down the keyboard you get the more audible overtones notes have, and, in consequence, the "muddier" full chords sound.

It *is* an obvious pentatonic (as C# is an obvious pentatonic minor) but I usually avoid the comparison because I'm not sure it's information that's easily transferable to other keys, especially for beginners who might be a bit sketchy on things like understanding intervals. Good point, though, Larry!

If I am it's pure accident, as it's not a piece I know!

Ultimately it comes down to pyschoacoustics, Saj (i.e., not my field and way above my pay grade!). They main thing to remember, though, is that it's relative: a B, for example, is a tendency tone in C major (it wants to resolve to C) but the tonal centre in B major.

@@BillHilton Thanks Bill! I'll look into pyschoacoustics. I do feel that in C Major, ending something on a B feels incomplete, so I get the idea of it tending towards C, but I was wondering if there was something more... mathematical, rather than subjective feelings. Although since music itself is a highly subjective field, explaining things in terms of thow they feel should probably suffice.

Fourteenth cousin. She doesn't text me back :(

The same principle, really, except it's the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 7th degrees of the natural minor scale. As with regular major and (natural) minor scales, the notes of the minor pentatonic are the same as its relative major (so C pentatonic has the same notes as A minor pentatonic and so on). Does that make sense?

@@BillHilton No. In music there are too many things than do not make any sense at all and too many people who repeat them like parrots without understanding. Starting by things like calling the notes CDEFGAB.. It´s stupid.. Should be ABCDEFG.. like in the abecedary... Why the hell is CDEFGAB.. And like this the rest.. 99% of music teachers have been trained to be parrots, they are parrots themselves, repeting things they do not understand, and try to teach me to be a parrot as well. I am sick and tired of people teaching me to memorize things without understanding themselves. And I do not say it for you... But why the hell The minor pentatonic is 1,3,4, 5 7h.. and no others?

@@Amatteus I would certainly agree that a lot of people, including a lot of teachers, don't understand things like the origins of note names of the theory underlying pentatonics... but things like that don't really matter, and doesn't actually help you very much, when it comes to learning how to play an instrument well. Or, at least, they can be addressed after one has done the really essential work of learning one's instrument. I know many excellent musicians, far better than me, who have a very weak grasp of theory. I guess it depends how you see the goal of musical education: does every single musician need a deep grasp of theory, right down to understanding things like temperament systems and psycho-acoustics? I would say not. In fact, I would say that such things can often function as distractions: there are plenty of musical learners who spend hours and hours trying to learn the functions of very obscure chords, when their time would be better spend improving their practical skills on their instruments.

@@BillHilton Yes.. Nadal, to play tennis and win tournaments does not need to know the physics involved...with all the data one could recover... like speed, degrees of inclination, distance covered, of each one of his strokes with the racquet, increase of ball´s temperature, etc...That´s practice...

I'm pretty sure you can use them in blues-derived styles like rock as well.

Not at all - they work in all sorts of styles, including folk, country, pop and many others. They also crop up a lot in classical music (eg, the slow theme from Holst's "Jupiter"). Pentatonics are very much a musical universal.

You can admire me (and my kitchen, or at least the kitchen at our old house) two or three minutes into this: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/q7t0pNyBrpesnmg.html - there are a few others in my stunning features in them, if you search around...