London Bridge Is Falling Down - Piano Lessons

Pianolessons.com the #1 Name in Piano Lessons Online London Bridge is Falling Down – Nate Bosch Hi, I’m Nate Bosch with Pianolessons.com. Today I’m going to teach you how to play London Bridge is Falling Down. I want to teach you this so that we can train our ears how to pick up melodies and associate chords with those melodies. So we’re going to start on the G. Now if you sing the song in your head “London bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, falling down, London bridge is falling down my fair lady”. The last note of the song is where your ear trains you and squeezes you towards and that’s going to where we would find our root. Now it’s hard to figure that out right at the beginning so let’s pick the G and we’ll just work thru the melody before we even try and figure out what key we’re playing in or anything like that. So let’s sing along as we play “London bridge is falling, falling down, falling down” it’s just stepping to the melody, sort of the melody is driving around that G, and then we go “my fair lady. Well we end up on the C, seems to be our root. So let’s try if C is going to be our root. Let’s start with the beginning. That’s all seems to work with that C chord. Our ears don’t drive us away from that and now we could do that but there’s probably a better choice so when we want to change here, we go to the D. So we find the D in any key you’ve got four really popular or three really popular chords. You’ve got the root we’ve got our four chord in the key of C, that would be F. And we’ve got our five chord which in the key of C and the G. So using all of those three chords, where is our melody going to? We had a D on the melody line. We don’t find a D in the F chord so let’s try it with the G chord, the five chords. That seems to work and now the E that we find in the C chord, now we’ll play that little line again back to the G and the last notes, three notes of that melody line are basically playing the C major chord. So let’s play that again, play it really slow. Now we know, if you won’t take a look at the song we know that the C is the root. Okay we’re playing in the key of C. The notes in our song are based on the C major scale. So now we know that the melody starts on the fifth note of the scale. So say we move this up one whole step in playing the key of D. So if we know we’re playing in D, and we know that “London Bridge” starts on the fifth note of the scale, we’re going to play 1, 2, 3, 4 back from the start on A. Now we know how the melody moved in the key of C. You heard that too right? Let me try that again. Well that doesn’t work, well that’s because in the key of D it’s not all white notes. We have note one but two black notes in it. So that tells us what note we can actually use when we’re playing this melody. So start again, oh there that sounds better. And now we move to the five chords the A in this key back up to the root chord D. And now we play—going to sharp those last three notes as the D chord. So now we play the same song in two different keys. Now the understanding we have to have here is your ear is driving you most of the way. But it’s nice to know things like in the key of D or in the D major scale, there are two sharps, two black keys. We can do that by just knowing it, you know that F sharp and C sharp were in that key or we go back down the C and listen to the scale. Now in order for the scale starting on D to sound that way you can’t just have all white notes, doesn’t sound the same way. So when you put in those black keys, we have another major scale. So you can figure it out by thumbling your way or you can just really listen so there you’re ear is driving you toward that. So, again we play London Bridge is Falling Down one last time in the key of D. I hope that gave you a little bit of an idea of how we can use our ears to train our fingers where to go. Taking that melody that we hear in our head and putting it through our fingers under the keyboard. Hope that helps a little bit. London Bridge is Falling Down.