How To Make A Colorful Arrangement of “Aura Lee” Using Color Tones

Good morning, this is Duane and we’re doing a series called How to Color on the Piano Without Crayons. What we’re doing is we’re showing how to take simple songs that you might run into in any sheet music and add color tones and color runs and fills and things like that to make the song much more colorful. If I played, let’s take that old song Aura Lee that Elvis sang as Love Me Tender. It’s an old tune but he recorded it as that title, Love Me Tender. It just goes like this … You’ve heard that. It’s usually written out something like that. I’m in the key of C, so I need to know first of all what color tones I could put into that to make it more interesting. Color tones are the 6th note of the scale, one, two, three, four, five, six.

The 7th note of the scale which is like that, the 2nd note of the scale, also known as the 9th or any combination thereof. What if I put in a 9th? There’s a 9th, as the melody dips down to B or what if I did this? There I’m playing a full chord, I’m playing the melody of course, but under it I’m playing the 3rd and the 9th or the 2nd. My left hand is arpegging this C chord, C, G, E, G, C. That’s call open voice arpeggios because instead of playing every note of the C chord, I’m skipping a note. I’m playing C, than G, then E, then cross my hand over for the higher intervals. It sounds like this. That sounds a lot fuller already. If we come to the F chord, what if I do this? My left hand can play the arpeggio on for. I’ll slow it down just a second.

The bridge goes like this, that’s the augmented F major, C, A, D, G, or G 7th and home to C. The entire song just uses four chords I think, or maybe five. The C chord, the F chord, and the G chord, those are the primary chords in the key of C and then it uses the C augmented chord that would be four I guess and then F again. Then A, or A 7th, that’s five chords. Then D or D 7th, that’s six chords and then this G 7th again, so there’s six chords in this song and by adding some color tones, we can make it a lot more interesting. Not only color tones but color runs and color fills. Listen to this. See, I had a little period of rest where I’m holding that note?

When I’m holding that note, I take the same chord I’m playing with my right hand and break it up coming down like that as much time as I have. I could do a transition there, the melody goes … one, two, three, four. During that four count period, I could play this. What I’m doing is is called a turn run and I’m descending from the E minor 7th chord to the E flat 7th chord to the D minor 7th chord and then the D flat 7th chord. Once again … C augmented F, I could change that F to D minor if I wanted too because it fits. I did G 7th and then C. C, C augmented, if you want to add a 7th there, that makes it sound a little fuller, a little more pregnant and then F. If you want to change it to F minor there, that would be fine.

C chord or you could put in a 6th chord. That’s an A 7th cord but I’m putting in a flat 9th there. Then when I come to D 7th chord, I’m playing the D 7th chord, my left hand, my right hand I have a 9th there. Then back to G 7th and then home to C. What I did there is I took the C 9th cord and ran it up the keyboard like that. There’s many, many things you can do, that’s just a couple things you could do to fill out a song like that with color tones and color runs and so on to just make it more interesting. If you enjoy this kind of thing, come on over to playpiano.com and we’ll have a whole series of songs like that. We’ll cover how to color them without crayons, I 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=cxvLJWu6gb4&feature=youtu.be

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