Today I will cover an easy piano arrangement of that great ballad “The Nearness Of You”

Good morning, this is Duane and we’re doing a series on how to make songs more colorful by adding colorful chords and chord substitutions and so on. We took up, last time we took up It’s the Nearness of You by Hoagie Carmichael and I walked through the chord progressions, so if you haven’t seen that be sure and watch that first. I promised I’d be back today and play it slowly so you can kind of look at the voice again and so on.

I think I’ll just play the melody very simply up high like so for the most part, and then just play the chords, strum the chords with my left hand like that. Okay, so here we go. That’s the F chord. C minor 7th. B flat major 7th. That’s B flat diminished 7th chord. A minor. D 7th, with a flat 5th. G minor 7th. C 7th. A minor. A flat. D flat. C. A minor. D. G 7th. That’s a B flat going to F.

Now this part, we get the bridge part we could do in block chords. Now let me review block chords a little bit, because I don’t think I mentioned that last time. Block chords, there are several styles of block chord but one style is to play the melody on both hands, but under the melody put in the chord notes, so we have the F chord, and then we come to G minor 7th chord, A, again in context. B flat 7th, A minor 7th, D 7th, G 7th, D flat 7th, C 7th suspension, and back to the theme. F major 7th. Now the chord is C minor 7th, but what I’m doing is I’m keeping the F as the low note and it’s almost like a F 7th suspension, in fact it is. Instead of the 3rd I play the 4th, see that? That gives you the same feeling as a C minor 7th chord. That gives you the same feeling as a C minor 7th chord over F.

Then to B flat major 7th. That’s that B flat diminished 7th chord. A minor. Now we could sink down a half step to A flat 7th, and then G minor 7th. That’s A minor 7th, D 7th. We could do the block chord there. Then the final chord of course it goes to F, but I think I’ll go to D flat first. Then G flat major 7th, and then settle back into F.

Okay, now I wasn’t going to put all that commentary in so I’ll play it through again, and I won’t say a word okay? So you can just watch. I’ll play it very slowly. This is a very simple arrangement by the way, we could do a lot more complex. As you know there’s a thousand ways to play the same song, but I’m just playing a simple way so you can kind of follow the chords. Here we go.

Something like that. Notice at the end I went to F, but I used a poly-tonal kind of thing, I went and played the G chord over the F chord, kind of ended it like that. If you don’t like that, just go to a straight F and that’s fine too, okay? Well there’s just a couple ideas on arranging The Nearness of You. So we’ll see you tomorrow with a different song, so hope, if you’re not signed up for our whole series of videos, come on over to playpiano.com and be sure and do that. Okay, thanks. 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=toMH8ed1h1c&feature=youtu.be

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