You Can Make Your Songs More Interesting By Using Melodic Echoes

Good morning. This is Duane. Today I’d like to talk about the easiest kind of filler – melodic echoes. The very easiest thing you could do to add a filler to your songs. It’s called echoes. You simply echo the melody or a sub part of the melody, or a chord, higher or lower. Usually higher because echoes are usually softer than the thing it’s echoing. For example, if you yelled down a canyon, “Hello down there.” Your yell is louder than the echo. You want to remember that when you do it.

There’s a beautiful song called “A Time for Love.” It goes like this. (music) and so on like that, by Johnny Mandel. Just a gorgeous tune. Usually you have to put in chord substitutions into your songs to make them interesting. Not in this one. He’s built in beautiful, unbelievable chords in here.

For example, the first chord after B-flat major 7th, which is nice in itself, is the A-flat chord over B-flat. You’ve got a B-flat base, but you’ve got an A-flat 7th chord over it. What you can do is you can echo that. (music) I played the chord and then I echoed it.

Any echo can be a single note like it was up here, or it can be a chord. Again, (music). See that? I didn’t do it all the time. If you do it to much it’ll sound … Let me over do it. (music) besides being a mistake, I over did it. When you put it in too much, it becomes too heavy. Don’t do that. Just use it once in awhile. It’s a very easy way to create a nice filler. You don’t even have to think about what to do. Al you do is go up an octave and echo what you did down here.

Very short tip today. If you enjoy this kind of free tips, come on over to Playpiano.com and sign up for our free tips. They’re free and you’ll learn a lot if you keep watching them everyday. I hope you’ll do that. We’ll see you there. Bye bye for now.

Here is the YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfNqXOount0&feature=youtu.be” title=”YouTube video” target=”_blank”>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfNqXOount0&feature=youtu.be
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