Playing The Melody In Octaves In a Piano Song

Good morning. This is Duane. Today we’re going to look at right hand piano song style number two. If you recall, we went through a whole series of left hand piano styles. Now we’re going to take up right hand piano styles. We’ve already done one but then I got waylayed by Christmas and did a bunch of Christmas videos. I need to get back to that series of right hand piano styles. If you recall, the first right hand piano style we took up is the single finger melody, which is just what it sounds like, and so on. That makes the melody sing, stand out a little more than if you mix it with chords.

Now the second method I’d like to talk about is octaves in the right hand, octaves in the melody. Instead of a single note, play two of those notes. Now you may say that’s very easy. It is unless you’re a beginner. If you’re a beginner it’s a little hard because you got to stretch your hand and make sure you get just eight notes away. It’s easy accept there’s some varieties. You can not only play the notes together like this and so on like that. You can, but you can also offset the notes. You can hit the top note first, then the bottom note, or the bottom note first. It gives a little click to the melody. As you’re playing the notes there’s a little click because of the delay.

Now you don’t want to get in the habit of doing that all the time because it’s a hard habit to break. There’s many times where you won’t that clicking sound so just used to playing the notes at once without offsetting them. But at times for the effect then you can hit the bottom … It’s probably easier to do the bottom note first, then the top note. See that? It gives that little impetus to the melody which helps it along. I’ll do that here.

Sometimes too you can mix it up. You can play just a solid octave and then you can also offset it like that at times. I’m just playing straight here. My first click was there if I want to emphasize that note. That’s probably the best where you mix it up, where you play the straight notes together most of the time, but then certain notes you’ll offset it by hitting the bottom note … excuse me … your thumb before your little finger.

That’s it for today. Very, very simple lesson but it’s one of the important things you need to learn if you’re just learning how to play the piano and various right hand styles. Tomorrow we’ll take up another right hand style, probably thirds in the melody, then sixth and then block chords and so on. So far we have just two though, just the melody, single finger melody, and octaves. Don’t forget about the variety of the click sound by striking them separately. That’s it for today. We’ll see you tomorrow with another right hand style. Bye bye for now.

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