The Alberti Bass – An Easy Way To Break Up Chords

There are many ways to break up a chord, and we have talked about many of them.

Today I would like to cover the Alberti Bass broken chord technique for piano. Alberti was a composer. I think he died when he was 30 years old, lived in the 1700s. He used this style a great deal, but, subsequently, a lot of composers like Mozart used it after him. For example : let me just show you what it is first.

You take any chord like this, any three-note chord, and you can make a pattern out of it by playing bottom-top-middle-top. Bottom-top-middle-top. That’s all there is to it. If it was a G chord, you play bottom-top-middle-top. If you have a four-note chord such as G7th, you’ll have to leave one note out. You could go bottom-top and middle-top or bottom-top-middle-top. Doesn’t matter which one you play. It just has to be a chord note. If you were on C, it would be bottom-top-middle-top, bottom-top-middle-top. They can be used to a nice effect : as I said, Mozart used it a great deal, but other composers have as well.

For example, if you were playing Away in a Manger, you could get a nice music box sound by playing : Now, be careful your hands don’t run together like mine just did. I’ll move it down.

You let it wind down like that, like a music box winding down. Another song you might use it on is Angels We Have Heard On High.

Now, it’s best to use it in combination with something else, because it gets kind of boring if you do it over again. If I was playing that, I might do that first section like that and then : In other words, combine it with a bigger sound.

You might fade out, kind of like that. Okay, it’s called the Alberti Bass and it’s very, very usable. Thanks. See you next time. Bye-bye for now.

Here is an article in Wikipedia on the Alberti Bass: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberti_bass

And here is the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbYwQzxriVY&feature=youtu.be
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