What is Musical Form?

Songs are organized in various ways, and those ways are called musical form.

Good morning. This is Duane and we’re doing a series of videos called “How to Color on the Piano Without Crayons,” creative ways to make your piano-playing sound more interesting. We’re going to begin a series today on the tune “Ain’t She Sweet” and we’re going to take it from several aspects, and we’re going to color it as much as we can in one particular style, roughly known as ragtime or swing bass style.

Today the first day of “Ain’t She Sweet,” I’d like to talk about musical form because every piece of music has a musical form of some sort. Just like your house has a form, whoever laid out the plans for your house, they planned a bedroom here and a bedroom here and a living room here and a bathroom here and a kitchen here, and so on. They didn’t just keep building and adding things on, at least they shouldn’t have, but they had a plan. Music is composed usually with a plan like that. In the tune “Ain’t She Sweet,” let me play the first, the main section. Then it repeats again. Let’s see how many measures that was. I’ll count out, 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and then it goes to a different section.

The theme is 8 bars long or 8 measures long and that’s what we call a Section A.  A is the theme and that was the theme of “Ain’t She Sweet,” what we just played. That’s repeated. After you play it once, you play it another time. We have A,  A,  and then there’s a contrasting section in the middle called Section B, and it goes like this. Then it goes back to A. That was 8 bars long too, so we have 4 sections, 4 rooms to our house. A which is 8 bars long, A which is 8 bars long, B which is 8 bars long, and A which is 8 bars long. We have 8, 8, 8, and 8. We have a 32-bar song.

Why do we want to know that? Well, for one thing, if you learn Section A, how much of the song have you learned? Have you learned 1/4 of the song? No. You’ve learned 3/4 of the song, haven’t you? All you need to do is learn that middle part. That’s a key to learning music faster. Almost always there are themes and variations in pieces, no matter what the form is. If you can figure out the form and what repeats where, you save yourself a lot of time learning it.

That’s the form of “Ain’t She Sweet.” Tomorrow we’ll take up swing bass. There’s a lot of elements that go into that type of playing but we’re going to take up this. Okay, and so on, and the middle section will be a little different. That sort of thing, okay. That’ll contrast with the first part, so we not only have rooms of contrast, A, A, B, A, but we have styles of contrast as well.

Next time, we’ll take up the swing bass, which is where … it’s called swing bass because you swing between a low note and a chord. We’ll take that up tomorrow. Please join me again tomorrow as we continue our series on “Ain’t She Sweet.” If you haven’t already signed up for our whole series of free piano tips, go over to playpiano.com and do that. Thanks. 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=-bHAH15hlZ8&feature=youtu.be

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