Row, Row, Row, Your Boat - Piano Lessons

Pianolessons.com the #1 Name in Piano Lessons Online Row, Row, Row Your Boat – Nate Bosch Hi, I’m Nate Bosch with Pianolessons.com. Today we’re going to learn how to play Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Not with a piece of music in front of us but purely by ear. We’re going to pick— we’re going to start with the note G. We’re going to base the song in the G major scale. Whenever you’re trying to figure out a song—probably the best way to do it is to sing it. You don’t sing it out loud, you can sing it in your head but you know where the song is going to go. And so I’ll use these as our—that’s where we going to start from. So row, row, row your boat starts—sing it along, row, row, row your boat. So start with row, row, row your boat it goes up and just nice steps. So you sing the first line row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. You’re working with the first five notes of the G scale. So let’s try it. That’s the first part of the “gently down the stream”. Gently goes back down again, put them back up. So that’s the first part of the song row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Now it all comes down to listening. You’re hearing where the music is going, is it going up? Is it doing big jumps in the melody? Or is it just going up in steps, is it going down? So you’ve got your starting point. We’ll figure that out, G, now we can see. Because we know that scale you hear that scale in your head when you’re listening to the song. Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Now it jumps a little bit, jumps the octave from our starting note. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily well that sounds is rolling that scale, but that sound is just like a G chord. Jump again “life is but a dream”. So we’re all within that scale if you sing it in your head. I sing it out loud. It wasn’t that great as you can hear but it gives you the idea. Based on the scale, based on that chords in that scale. Once you’ve taken that and you’ve got the melody down, you can add to it in the left hand. We can add the chords that go along with the notes that we’re playing. So starting on G—we’re going to start with the root, the G chord. So let’s play the first with just one chord. Row, row, row your boat, so that sounds like that out fit within that chord. Now do we want to change the chord there or do we want to keep that same chord? Well starting note is found in that G chord, it seems like a natural since it’s moving quite quickly “gently down the stream” leave it at the D chord. Now the next part of the song the “merrily” we’re starting on the G again. And that’s where we played the actual G chord in the melody line. So we’ll keep that chord again. Now we can change the chord, now the D is found in the G chord, but it’s also found in the five chord of that G scale. The D chord “life is but a dream”. Well that D is also found in other chord, not only found in the D chord, it’s found in the B minor chord. Let’s see if that’s works “merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily life is but a dream”. Well that doesn’t really sound that we could finish the song. And that’s where that D chord will do it and give you that where you want to finish the song. So play it once more, row, row, row your boat. The song created around the scale is basically just two chords and you could build up from there and there you have row, row, row your boat.