Harmonize On Piano Using 3rds & 6ths
Harmonize On Piano Using 3rds & 6ths
Good morning. This is Duane and today I’d like to talk about a technique that beginners can use to harmonize on piano. In other words if you have tune that goes like this (Duane demonstrating) that’s an actual tune but there’s a lot of simple tunes like that and beginners often pick that up with one finger (Duane demonstrating) but you can use a harmonization technique known as thirds and sixths to make that sound a lot fuller.
For example if you’re playing a cord. Let’s take a simple cord (Duane demonstrating) while you make that sound lot fuller if you use thirds under the melody instead of just the melody. A third is three scale notes one two three down from the melody note okay. Under the melody note. (Duane demonstrating).
See how much fuller it sounds and we can use sixths too and I’ll show you that later but that’s just. Let’s go to left hand technique with a [inaudible 00:01:20] sound. (Duane demonstrating) Now that’s a sixth. We got to that point and I knew that third would sound like. You have to do that trial and error but you’re learning that shortly. I tried a sixth instead of a third. if a third doesn’t work, a sixth will okay. (Duane demonstrating) That’s valuable information.
Now the melody goes like this. (Duane demonstrating) and I think I’m going to use the sixth under. (Duane demonstrating) See that? it just makes that melody so much stronger. So next time you pick out a melody with one finger, add a third to it, sixth to it.
Now you can take that a step further. If you can play third then you can play octave thirds as well. An octave third is where you play the melody in octave eight notes apart to put the third under the top note to get this sound. (Duane demonstrating) Okay? You see that by using octave thirds, instead of thirds or sixths or octave sixths for that matter. Another thing you can do is you can offset it. Listen. Instead of just playing octave I can go (Duane demonstrating) to get a little bit of a mandolin kind of sound. I’m just playing in the third and then the octave note.
Lot of things you can develop out of thirds and sixths but if you’re a beginner just start with thirds and sixths and build on that. Right away, it’s not just for beginners, you can get really complex stuff going with thirds and sixths under the melody. I think I’ll save that till tomorrow and make a video on that tomorrow but that’s it for today some ideas about harmonizing on piano using thirds and sixths. I will see you again tomorrow with another piano tip.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tecoz-iLw4Q
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