hello and welcome! today I have a special
guest for you guys – not everyone is lucky to have musical companions around
especially in these times of social distancing so today we invite you to
play together with us we want to play a Norwegian song called "Sulla Lulla" with you which my wife Milena arranged for two handpan players. we will show you the two different parts and later in the video there are play along sections where we play one of the parts and you can join in to play the other let's get her in here hi! so nice to have you – thank you – what
can you tell us about this song "Sulla Lulla"? So "Sulla Lulla" a is lullaby from Norway which I
often sing for our daughter Frida when I put her to bed I know the song from from
my favorite CD with children songs from all over the world and what I like
about it is that the melody is very simple and short but beautiful so when I
sing that song for Frida I repeat it many times and it starts to
feel like a mantra after a while when you repeat it you automatically
start to add little variations and that's what we did in this arrangement
as well awesome! okay – usually we play the song on different instruments and we
use a different structure with improvised sections if you want to check
out our original there should be a pop-up window now and also a link in the
video description for today's video we arranged it for two Kurd 9
instruments in D so that hopefully you can play along lets have a listen okay! our arrangement for "Sulla Lulla" has
three different sections let's call them A, B and C and then the first section "A" is repeated let's start with the part that I play the accompaniment – it starts with a baseline and this baseline goes throughout the whole piece, later we play melodies as well but keep the baseline going at the same time it has only two notes D and C, and for the C I have a second instrument next to me if you don't have a second instrument in C available don't worry you can still play the accompaniment I will show you later how you can substitute this note.
The piece is in three beats and the bass notes always fall on the first beat one two three this whole sequence is repeated and
that's the "A" section of the piece if you don't have that low C available you can
substitute it with tone field 1 on your main instrument which is an A. I'll
show you what it sounds like playing this A instead of the C changes the
harmony a bit but it still works nicely in the piece in the next section "B" we
start to play melody lines which harmonize the main melody in a really
nice way if you're missing the second base note in this part you can
substitute the first of the C's with an A and the second one you can just leave out so just like in the first section of the
piece also here we have a sequence which is repeated – the second time around we play a little transition towards the end which leads to section C in the last part the accompanying player
starts with one cycle of section "A" and then instead of repeating it like the lead player does finishes with one cycle of section B now that you know my part you can take
my role and play the piece together with Milena you will see two notation boxes
on the screen the bigger one on the left is your part have fun! by the way I also have online courses
which provide you with a step by step method to develop your handpan and
music skills from the very beginnings to quite a high level – check them out at
handpandojo.com and if you like working with my youtube videos you can support me on
patreon and get access to some additional material, thank you! now I want to show you the lead part of the piece which is the main melody with variations we created our version mostly by improvising and the harmony in our version is very simple it has just two chords, so if you're like me and you don't
feel so comfortable with improvising this song could be a good one to start
with and to jump over your shadow after you've learned the song you can
improvise to David's accompaniment and that way it creates your own version.
Oh
by the way, of course you can also sing the song if you want so we will write
the lyrics in the description they are only three words and have fun! let's start with the first part of the piece which presents the main theme – we play this
part two times, the first time we end on tone field number 8 the second time
on tone field number 4 the second part is a variation of the first one let's add some notes to make our lullaby a bit more lively the third part is the climax of our
piece we add even more notes and little phrases but you can still feel the
original melody now you know the lead part and can take
my place in the arrangement don't let David confuse you he plays his
part a little different every time he just never does what I tell him okay I hope you enjoyed today's video
for me it was a lot of fun it was nice not to be alone in front of the camera
for a change! let us know in the comments if the virtual duo approach works for
you or which obstacles you encounter maybe you want to record yourself
playing with one of our play backs and send us your version, that would be a lot
of fun to see! looking forward to see you next week until then have a good practice and stay healthy!