 Hi guys this is Jason from Nathaniel and in this lesson part of our series on how to embellish a melody on the piano we are going to look at octaves which is a very very powerful tool and a very easy tool at least to understand. So an octave first of all is very easy to form you take a D for instance and to find its octave you just go to the next D. Okay I would advise you if you are a newcomer to the instrument try to look at the shape of D. D is formed in between the twins try to play it without any reference point and then you have the octave so otherwise it will become a more one by one or a stepwise or a linear approach which I don't quite recommend so this is D this is D also try to get used to the hand width of playing the octave okay and also relax your hand while playing the octave you don't want to tense your hand I understand some of you may find it difficult but you can also adjust your wrist adjust your wrist so that it's easy and flexible to play and if you're not a really really young kid watching this video I think all of you should be able to play octaves it's a very very important thing on the piano so this is how you do octaves now an octave can either be visualized as something above the root or something below the root that I leave to you but ultimately it's the same thing so first off if you just take anything if you just play anything on the piano it just sounds a lot more richer and fuller and embellished right away using octaves right so I'm taking D major for this demonstration so if I do sounds a lot fuller than doing maybe that so the octaves allow the piano to compete with all the other harmonically dense instruments you know like the saxophone or the flute or the trumpet and so on and so forth so the octave again and let's first look at a few ways in which we can play our octaves one way is of course to play it bang on that's D with D head on the other way is you can sort of echo it okay I also call these as glass octaves right so before you start playing your melodies and stuff like that with the octaves maybe it's nice to do a few exercises first of all yeah as I showed you up and down the scale is nice another thing would be go up the scale and down the scale in threes in sets of three for example and what I'm trying to do here is I'm glassing the first accent and not playing the glass effect or the flam effect for the other one so normal accented flam normal normal flam normal normal flam normal and so on down another nice way to practice octaves is with some skipping in this case I'm skipping thirds I'm going upper third from everywhere D's third is F sharp maybe going down right and a great way to start improvising with octaves is just take that concept and just maintain like a fifth chord played in the pulse so that's one two and try to look at octaves first with maybe minims or even slower whole notes which last four counts you know and just improvise find some notes and change it and then you can go a little faster slowly it becomes very melodic change the left hand maybe do a little faster maybe a pulse any melody you know or enjoy and the more you skip like that's going to be a lot more tricky and while you play octaves another thing which I am doing which a lot of people do and as teachers sometimes we forget to mention it is we are always using that sustain pedal quite cleverly so in other words if I don't use the pedal sounds good but it doesn't have that richness it doesn't have the harmonic content which is needed to make it really rich and full so with the pedal so because there's no way I can kind of make this transition smooth right well I can do something but it it'll really look look and feel very messy so it's always good to use the pedal when you're playing octaves especially when you play it in the right hand and the pedal generally as a rule of thumb can be held on unless you're changing the chord right so just before you change the chord you need to lift the pedal and then play whatever you want with the pedal held and then lift it when the chord changes and the the the process continues and if you practice it hard it will get natural do watch my video on how to use a sustained pedal it'll be very very helpful for you where I've isolated the work of the pedal and what it can do and so on and so forth so if I go with pedal try to improvise I'm on the D major scale right and just practice all sorts of movement you could also move around the left hand to float around and play different fifth chords fifth chords will be a nice start so this is a fifth chord this is another fifth chord fifth root fifth an octave or if you're not so clear you can just play a D fifth right and as always with the octaves I'm either playing it normal or with a flam so improvise okay and another thing you can do with octaves if you watch the earlier lesson is you can add or stack up a third along with the octave and it's going to be a huge sound so if I take D D's third is F sharp right D E F sharp so you could add the F sharp along with the octave and you get a huge sound a very thematic sound and you don't have to play octaves all the time you can go to another section and then at the main part or the main epic chorus like part you can go octaves it really makes that part stand out a lot in that song so well so that's what you can do with octaves was play them you can flam them to make it more unique sounding and you can add third stacking up with the octave and last but not least along with the octaves since you have more notes to play with or at least one note at the bare minimum extra to play with you can add some rhythmic elements or some rhythmic embellishments as well and that should be your main outlook when you're looking to embellish a melody on the piano don't only look at fancy trills and all that which we are anyway is going to do in a future video but just look at the same melody and stack it up harmonically and rhythmically because how many and rhythm are things which our instrument is very very able to do let's now try and work on some rhythmic flavors so I'm just taking a D major chord in the bass and I'm just going to play D as a quarter note or a pulse okay so to make this more groovy I can sort of scatter the two notes and keep the pulse going here right and just add this as an extra almost like a ghost note and I'm also sneaking in another ghost note here you know in the left hand if you can otherwise you could practice something like this right it's still with octaves but octaves with rhythm and mind you I'm just playing one hand the next hand comes into play as well right so I'm just going to improvise a little bit and hopefully try to bring in all the elements which we've discussed in this lesson into some context some thirds so the octave generally will be taking up your thumb and pinky but then you can add some of the other fingers as well to bring in the thirds and then you dissipate the pinky and the thumb to create rhythmic effect so let's recap we started with an octave played around a scale obviously like any music is built on and first of all give yourself a few exercises to get a grip on the subject do some three sets do some thirds and so on and so forth right just get to terms with it then you have certain variations you can either play the octaves in a glassy way or in a flam way like that where you delay it slightly you can also do it with an added third making it a lot more thicker you can even add rhythm to the octaves and even arpeggiate it if you have the thirds in the middle right so this is about octaves yet another exciting way to embellish a melody and don't forget that the sustained pedal also comes into play even though you don't see me using it you don't see a lot of pianists really using it we tend to use it so you need to get used to pressing that and lifting it so stay tuned to the rest of this series on how to embellish a melody and if you haven't already don't forget to subscribe to our channel turn on the bell icon for notifications and also leave us a comment if there's anything you'd like to learn in specific cheers