Chord Underwear In The Right Hand On “Ain’t She Sweet”

Today we are going to look at chord underwear – right hand chords under the melody of a song.

Click on this link to watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt4pBI8n3AY&feature=youtu.be

Good morning. This is Duane. We have been doing a series about coloring on the piano without crayons. How to make songs more colorful by adding runs, and fills, and chord subs, and all kinds of things like that. We took the tune Ain’t She Sweet. The first week we demonstrated how that all songs have musical form and we divided that piece Ain’t She Sweet into four sections. The A section was eight bars long. The B section was eight bars long. The C section, which was a contrast, or the bridge, was eight bars long, and then the final section was eight bars long, as well. We said, “Once you find the form of a song, and songs do have form, ” it speeds up your memorization time one for thing and your knowledge of what’s going on.

Last time we took up swing bass. How to swing back and forth between the low note and the chord. That’s also known as stride piano. You take a stride like that. It is also known as boom-chick piano.  Boom-chick, boom-chick, boom-chick, boom-chick, that sort of thing. Today I would like to switch to the right hand and talk about the under notes of a chord as the melody is being played. The melody of Ain’t She Sweet goes like this. What we’re going to do is we’re going to put the chord under the melody and then we’re going to break up that chord in various ways.

I’ll call it chord underwear. It goes like this. Notice what I did. The chord is E flat. After I play the melody I held the melody and broke up the notes of the E flat chord. The next chord is E  diminished and so I played the notes of that chord. The next chord is F minor seventh. The melody is B flat, though. I could go, or I could go. I could do it from the bottom up or the top down. Either way is fine. Or, like I did the first time, I could crunch it. I play the melody and then instead of breaking it up like that, I went. Just play it kind of rapidly as one chord but broken chord. Let’s do it again.

Okay, so it’s simply breaking up the notes of the chord. You have to know the chord, of course, but once you do then you can break it from the top down or the bottom up, and we’ll call that chord underwear, okay, for lack of a better word. Then, in the bridge we’re going to do something different but that’s what you do, probably, in the right hand. One thing you can do in the right hand, while your left hand is doing that swing bass. We simultaneously have the swing bass and then the chord underwear in the right hand. By the way, if the melody is busy, not holding the note, then you don’t break those up, because you don’t have a lot of time. You do what you can do.

That’s it for today. Breaking up the right-hand chords under the melody. Tune in tomorrow and we are going to take up the bridge and change styles in the bridge and why that’s necessary to change styles. Okay – see you then. If you haven’t signed up for our free newsletter and free videos, come on over to playpiano.com and do so. Hope to see you there. Bye-bye for now.

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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

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