 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel and in this series we are going to look at various ways to embellish a melody on the piano. I have put together a lot of techniques and I have divided it into various parts. So in the first technique, we are going to look at the third interval. The third interval is very, very popular used by a variety of musicians and let's just get started. For building any kind of thirds, you would need a scale and that's what you could also call as diatonic thirds, diatonic meaning from the scale. So if you take let's say a D minor scale, D minor scale having that one flat, B flat, but also look at D harmonic minor where the seventh note is pretty much the same as the major scale's seventh note which is the major seventh there. So to build a third, you basically have to cross two diatonic steps. So in other words, if you take D here, one step will be E, the next step will be F. So when you're going up two steps from anywhere, you build a third because the first step is called as a second interval and the next step from the second will be called as the third interval and there are two kinds of thirds. You'll develop the major thirds as well as the minor thirds, but that's not the main concern with this lesson is just to play and embellish the melody. So if you take D, its third will be F, diatonically because I'm on D minor, then what's the next note? It's third, diatonically, G, then F, it's third, diatonically, A, G, it's third, diatonically not B, B flat, A, it's third, C, LC sharp if you're looking at the harmonic or whichever works, then B flat with its third D and then C with its third E or if you're on the harmonic minor, C sharp with its third E and finally you have the root. So you have your third pairs as we call them and just go up and down the scale if you'd like, maybe the harmonic minor. So those are your thirds. Now the technique which I have to embellish the melody would be anytime you have a melody on the piano, let's say something as simple as I'm just doing D, E, G, F and the melody can be embellished using the thirds from every one of these notes. So if I take D, it's third F, E, G, F, one more time, D, E, G, F. Now here's the challenge on an instrument like the piano, both the notes are tonally the same because you're playing them on the piano. So it's very different from maybe an orchestra or a choir where each individual musician or singer will perform one part each. So one person will do the main part which is the soprano, then the other person does the alto and the tenor and so on and then if this is performed live at a concert, a sound engineer has the power to control the level of each person. On a piano we can't do that because everything pretty much sounds tonally the same. So you don't want to play the third above the root. So if I take D's third which is F, you don't want to play the F above the D. The main reason being because it's going to take over the melody, the F will start dominating the melody or the third will sort of be the new melody which you don't want because my melody is D, E, G, F in this example. So the technique here is whatever the third is, you write it down and then play that third which is above the root, one octave lower. And because of that pitch wise it holds a lower position. The higher position tends to impact our ear a lot more, tends to hit us a lot harder than the lower pitched note even though I play them both at the same volume. So higher third not played there, instead it's taken down here and played. So you don't want to obviously play it like that. So reorder your fingers, you can probably play the root now or the target melody note with the pinky finger and maybe the ring finger in some instances and D's third F will now come here. So this is also what I call as a spread third or you can even look at this as a sixth interval with respect to F, D is a sixth. But let's not bother about that too much. I think let's just call it a third played an octave below or a spread third. That's the name I've come up with for this third. So D's third is F, playing it down here. Now E's third, that's my next note, E's third is G, playing that G down here. It used to be there, we're bringing it here. So D, E, now I'm skipping to G. What is G's third? B flat. I'm gonna play it there, bring it here. B flat, F, back to F's third which is A. So I go, see your melody is still, right? So whatever you play in the top end, will still sound as impactful as ever. It's just a lot more thicker because you're stacking that third in the melody line. And this is another very important strategy while playing melodies on the piano because the piano as an instrument doesn't give us a lot of melodic flavor. What I mean by that is once I play a key or a note, there's nothing great which is happening to this note. I can't do anything more after I've pressed it unless I have like a rolly C board or some fancy electronic gadget which can take the piano to the next level. So assuming it's a real piano, you can't do much to a note, right? Imagine what a violinist can do. They can add vibrato, they can add glide, they can add all sorts of things, right? Or a flute can do all sorts of articulations because it's a wind-based instrument. The sound is changed and modified with your mouth, with your breath and so on and so forth. Imagine what vocalists can do with melodies. So in a sense the piano is a very simple instrument when playing a melody. Once you play a note, there's nothing much you can do. You just wait for it to end. The volume will gradually drop and it's over. So that's why we need to embellish melodies more so that we can compete with all these other bigger, heavier sounding instruments like a saxophone or a vina or a violin or a flute or the human voice. So these are spread thirds again. That was the scale. We do this in the right hand. That's where the melodies normally are formed. So let me just improvise a bit on this and let's see how it goes, right? And if you observe what I'm doing with my voice, I was always singing the melody line. So if you develop that ability as you're improvising to sing and come up with the melody sort of as a spontaneous reaction to your voice, it can be a great way to further train your ear and be very creative. But while you play what you sing, you need to always try and stack it up with the thirds. Now here's the challenge. If the melody is a bit fast, may not be able to play the thirds there. So that's an obvious challenge and we will get by the challenge with the future videos which we are going to do on this subject of embellishing a melody, right? Guys, so this is the thirds concept. Let's just recap the whole lesson. I've taken the D harmonic minor or the D natural minor for our study. To build a third, you just go two steps up from anywhere, diatonically, that means from the scale, you get its third F. Then you don't want to play that third up top because it'll dominate the melody. So then you take that third and bring it up down and then you take and then you take the third and bring it to the bottom end. Okay, so what was once here comes here. And I would highly recommend that you write down all the available thirds and then start playing actually look at it in a book. It can be very helpful guessing your notes while playing the piano is not a very advisable thing. Always be clear of what you have to play and then of course play it. Okay, and then you come up with a very thick sounding melody, if you will, right? So hope you guys found that lesson useful. Once you've got a grip of this exercise, perhaps check out the other videos in our series on how to embellish a melody. And I will catch you in the next one. Cheers.