Stuff An Octave With Chord Notes – Octave Chord Technique

Good morning. This is Duane and today we’re going to take a look at another right hand technique we can use – the octave chord technique. We have a whole series. I think we’ve done six already. We talked about single finger technique. We’re using the same melody using an old tune; I think it’s a Roger & Hart tune called “You Are So Beautiful” or “You Are Too Beautiful,” I think it is. We talked about a single finger technique and then we talked about playing it in octaves to give it a little bigger sounds. We said sometimes on the octave notes you can hit the bottom note before the top note. Don’t do it all the time. Just do it to emphasize certain notes like maybe there. Hear that little click? Maybe on just the long notes, the notes that you’d hold for two beats or more, say.

Then we talked about thirds, put 3rds under the melody. We said of course we can play it in a different octave of course, but the principle is the same. Then we talked about combining octaves and thirds, playing an octave but putting a 3rd under the top octave note. Then we talked about 6ths under the melody note, maybe move it up a little bit. We said 6ths won’t work all the time. Nothing will work all the time but most of the time it will work. We also said that anytime a 6th won’t work a 3rd will work, because they’re inversions of one another, aren’t they? You turn a 3rd upside down and you get a 6th.

Then, let’s see, what did we do after that? We had single note, octave, 3rds, octave 3rds, 6ths. Then we said that we can play a block chord under the melody, and so on. Now this time we’re going to cover another style. I call it stuffed octaves. Some people call it super octaves but in any case you just put chord notes between the octave notes, between the melody. Here’s the melody. You got to know what the chord is. The chord’s D minor there so you fill in the notes of the D minor chord as much as you can until the chord changes, and then the chord is G 7th so you fill in those notes. Then the chord is E minor and then you fill in the notes of the E minor chord. That’s an A 7th with a flat 9th. D minor 7th, F minor. The idea is to fill in the notes of the chord whenever possible between the octave notes. As usual, it’s not always possible. Erroll Garner did that a lot. That was terrible but that’s kind of style he used by filling in the notes of the chord between the octave.

That’s another technique that you can plug in. That’s seven right hand techniques that we’ve covered so far. I think we’re going to do a couple little showing how to combine left hand and right hand techniques. In fact, we’re going to do several that way because that’s really the name of the game, combining right hand styles with left hand styles to create really an infinite number of styles. Just the law of averages, if you had seven styles in the right hand and seven styles in the left hand, that’s 49 styles by mixing it up, isn’t it? You never use the same style all the way through so you can combine this with that for one phrase and combine this with that for another phrase, or the bridge of a song, or whatever. You got a lot of variety there. Hope you do that. Thanks for being with me, and again, I apologize for my voice but such is life. See you tomorrow. Bye bye for now.

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