How To Add Piano Fillers To Most Any Song

You can make any song more interesting by adding piano fillers to the “dead spaces” in the song.

Good morning. This is Duane. We’ve been doing a series called “Good Stuff You Really Ought to Know About Music.” We covered block chords yesterday. I used the tune “Oh Danny Boy” to illustrate that. The original tune was “Londonderry Air,” although the tune itself has been used for several songs. There was a Christian song a number of years ago called “He Looked Beyond my Fault and Saw My Need.” That was set to “Londonderry Air,” too. Probably a zillion titles to the same tune, but anyway, the tune as you know goes like this. Yesterday I talked about block chords on “Oh Danny Boy” and how to create block chords. We said that we play the melody in both hands. Under the right hand melody you put in the chord notes, whatever the chord is. You make that left hand stand out over the right hand. The right hand, the chords and the melody is kind of a shimmering overtone of the melody. You want this to stand out.

We covered that yesterday. Today I’d like to talk about putting fillers in a song like “Londonderry Air.” I’ll play the block chords but then I’m going to put in some fillers and talk about the fillers today. That’s filler number one. We played the block chord like that. Then when I got to that chord there’s several beats where you hold that. One, two, three. There’s three beats. There’s plenty of time to do a filler. What I did is I just took that chord in my right hand, C6 chord, and broke it up. Again. How many octave? One, two, three, four. I had time to go up four octaves. One, two, three, four.

Then we continue. Now there we hold the note. We could do another run like that, but let’s do something different. When I get to that F chord, why don’t we take a F chord and do a 2-1 breakup like that coming down. A 2-1 breakup is where you take only two notes out of the three. There’s three notes generally in a chord. In a triad there’s always three notes. If you’re playing a four-note chord, then it could be a 3-1 breakup, but I’m just playing a three-note chord so I’ll play two notes and then one, then turn the chord upside down. 2-1, 2-1, 2-1 like so.

Again that far. See that? That’s all that I have time. Then I got to continue. Now that’s the next note we hold. I could do a run there but I think I’ll just do an echo. All I did is I played the chord. When I got to the chord, which is a C chord, I put a 2nd in it. I just echoed it one octave and two octaves higher. Let’s take those three fillers so far. First the run, 2-1 2-1, echo echo. Now here the chord is G 7th or G 7th suspension. I’m going to do a half-step slide. Instead of going right to G 7th I’m going to go to A flat 7th and then slide down to the G 7th. I’m playing A flat in my left hand. In my right hand I’m playing some of the notes of A flat 7th, but the melody is D so I’m going to have a B flat 7th chord over A flat. Let’s take it that far, and I’ll slow it down.

Echo echo. Now half-step slide. Instead of going to G 7th I went to A flat 7th and I took that B flat 7th chord over it and broke it up coming down. I’m using a straddle there. A straddle is where you take two notes out of the chord but leave a whole, and then another two notes like so. Again, that far. Echo echo. Now the half-step slide. My left hand is going to play that chord, low A flat and then three of those chords while my right hand comes down in that break up. Once more.

Then it resolves to G 7th. When I got to G 7th I kind of slid off B flat like that, then resumed the block chording, the same thing the first time. Echo echo. Now I get to the end of the phrase so I’m going to play the tonic chord, the C chord. Then I’m going to go down a whole step and walk up my half-steps. I’ll go from C chord to B flat chord up a half-step to B chord, and then to see. It’s kind of a filler. You don’t have to do that. You could go to the F chord and then back to the C chord, do a plagal cadence. There’s lots of things you could do, but I’m just showing you one thing. I went to B flat, B, and then to C.

I think we’ll take the second half of the song tomorrow because this video is already kind of long. We’ll pick it up right there with fillers. We’ll see you tomorrow with the same idea. If you like this sort of thing, come on over to playpiano.com and sign up for our free video series. Hope to see you there. Bye bye for now.

***For lots more good stuff on piano playing come on over to my website at https://www.playpiano.com and sign up for our free piano tips – “Exciting Piano Chords & Sizzling Chord Progressions!”

Here’s a great little book on chords and chord progressions on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Piano-Chords-Chord-Progressions-Exciting-ebook/dp/B0076OUGDE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404158669&sr=1-1&keywords=piano+chords+duane+shinn

Here is the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCkR3qnCbJo&feature=youtu.be

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