How Do You Make a Piano Melody Stand Out?

Here is a transcript of the video in case you would like to follow along:

Good morning. This is Duane. In previous videos I talked about playing a single finger melody and how beautiful that can be by just making the piano melody stand out with one finger like that. Like so.

Last time we talked about parallel thirds. Now I am playing the same kind of thing but with a third under the melody.

This time I would like to take it just a step farther and talk about parallel octave thirds. Octave thirds. An octave third is just what it says. It’s a third, but you’re playing the melody in an octave. Below the top octave note you put in the third below, 1, 2, 3. That will usually work, it won’t always work. If a third doesn’t work, usually a fourth does, but for now just try octave thirds and you get the hang of it, like this. Let’s try it with both hands.

See, I use octave thirds all the time and sometimes it didn’t quite work, but it wasn’t bad either. You can try it. If you discover a clunker there, just leave a third out and play an octave, okay? You can always do that. Notice sometimes I use some blue notes too. When it’s convenient I slide off the black note below the third. Could have done it there. Don’t want to overdo that though.

Let’s take all three ways here, just so you can see the whole contrast, okay. Now in octave thirds. I didn’t play it all the way through. Now, octave thirds. And so on. There’s the contrast between a single finger melody, a melody with thirds below the melody, and an octave third.

Which way is best? The answer is, there’s no best. It’s just whatever you like at the time. It just gives you more variety as you play through a song. For example, you might do that single finger the first time and then the second time go to octave thirds or thirds or whatever you want. You can use a variety of things.

That’s it for today and tomorrow we’ll take that a step further as well. We’ll see you Monday with another free video from playpiano.com. Come on over and sign up for our free videos if you haven’t already. Thanks and see you next time. Bye bye for now.

On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ugjCwO-PI&feature=youtu.be
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