How To Arrange a Song Using  Intros & Endings

Our video today is about how to arrange a song to make it unique.

Good morning. This is Duane, and we’ve been doing a series about how to color on the piano without crayons, and the subject is, how to arrange songs and make them more interesting, by adding things, adding chord substitutions, adding rhythmic devices, and so on.

We took the song, “Ain’t She Sweet,” and we talked about it in several aspects. First we said that every song has a form, and “Ain’t She Sweet” has a form of AABA, which means there’s a theme. That’s theme A. Then it repeats. That’s another A. I won’t play it through again. Then, there’s the bridge, which is different in style, and sometimes in tempo, as well. Then we go back to the theme.

We said, in the left hand, there’s many things you can do style wise, but in the left hand, I use the swing base, which we swung back and forth between the low note and the chord, also known as stride piano.

In the right hand, we said we could play the chords with the right hand, and we can just play them as block, but it makes it a little bit more interesting if we add rhythm to the chords and break them up, in other words … See that? Okay.

Then, we took up the bridge last time, and we said the bridge is a constrasting section, so we want to stop the swing base, and do something different, and what I did was called a sustained, playing the chord on every beat like that, okay? That was the contrast.

Now, I want to put it all together, okay? Let’s put a little front door on it. We could do this, and then we’re ready to go. All you do to put a front door on it, is play the fifth of the first chord. The chord is E flat, so play the fifth note in your left hand, and the right hand you can play the one chord and then go to the mini seventh chord, and then go to the five chord, like so, and then begin.

At the end, well let me just play it through like that, okay, and when I get to the end, I’ll show you, a real simple back door, okay? Then back to the theme. When I finished I went, Ain’t She Sweet, and then I played the flat, the fifth flat, and then the fifth, and then the root, and then end with the one chord of some sort.

That’s how to put a whole song together, and arrange it so it has more color. Now, that was really sloppy. I haven’t practiced it or anything, but you get the idea of how to put a front door and a back door on a song, and then create the styles for the left hand, the right hand, and then the contrasting section in the middle.

That’s kind of how to put a song together in an arrangement. Thanks for being with me, and we’ll take up another subject tomorrow, so bye bye for now.

Click on this link to watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2aoNjmp7QM&feature=youtu.be

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