C Major Scale for Piano Improvisation in C

Video Transcript

"The first thing we're going to do is introduce C Major and you want to really get this scale under your fingers. We're going to show you it on the keyboard and then the next four chords that we learn are all going to be derived out of the same scale and we're going to show you how to play these different chords and how to accent them so they sound like C Major, A minor or D minor, but right now we're going to show you C Major, so if you zoom in we have C Major starts right here on C, and it's the one right below the group of two black notes here, that's C, and it goes up alphabetically, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. So that's your C Major scale, very easy, all the white keys, and if you go up through 12 keys you'll see all the 12 different Major scales. This is the first one you should probably learn though, and we're going to construct what we call a black chord, a C Major black chord, which is comprised of all thirds. So if we go from here to here, we're skipping the second note, right? That's why it's called a third. This is called a second, a third and a fourth. So what we're doing is going by intervals. So a third, a third and a third and that's your C Major black chord. Sometimes you can crunch the 7th on there down, and we also want to number this scale 1 through 7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and after doing that you can see I'm playing 1, 3, 5, and 7. A black chord is composed of 1, 3, 5, and 7. So as we go through and play all our chords we're going to play all black chords, and when you're playing a stride piano, what you want to do is going root, chord, 5th, chord. So I'm going 1, chord, 5, chord; root, chord, 5th, chord, root, chord, 5th, chord, root, chord, 5th, chord, root, chord, 5th, chord, which is another good technique to get down. And for Major you go between the 1 and the 5 and we'll go over our next couple of chords which are all derived out of the same scale in just a minute."