 Hi guys this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson we are going to dive into piano octaves. We are going to look at what it is, how you play them, some technical aspects, what are the advantages of playing them which you need to know otherwise sometimes people avoid them because octaves pretty much sound the same. You are taking a G and stacking it with another G so why do you need to bother? It's the same note isn't it? Same color and so on. So we look at some applications of octaves where all you can use them in different genres and also the posture when you play octaves technically it's a bit different than playing linear scales you know okay and through the lesson we are going to look at two exercises one exercise for the left hand and one for the right hand which involve octaves. So before we get started it'll be awesome if you could turn on the subscribe button and hit the bell icon for regular notifications. Also the notation for this lesson is waiting for you on Patreon along with my handwritten notes, midi files, backing tracks for a lot of the lessons which we've been doing on our YouTube channel for all these years. So let's get cracking. So first of all what is an octave? An octave is not playing a scale and then reaching the octave. No an octave is the distance it's an interval between two notes and those two notes are any note any of the 12 notes on the piano keyboard or guitar or whatever instrument you play and in addition to that you stack it up with either the same note but higher pitch. One octave higher or one octave lower and incidentally the frequency the vibrating frequencies of these notes get doubled up. For example if you play an A here which is at 220 Hertz you can octave it to play 440 octave it again to play 880 Hertz octave that to play 1,760 Hertz and so on and so forth but then beyond a point you lose notes on the piano and a human ear cannot even make out stuff so it doesn't even matter. Now if you're half if you want to go below the octave you have the frequency so that's 440 that's 220, 110, 55 and then 27.5 Hertz which you can barely hear right. So that's the fundamental frequency and it doubles. So octave is kind of the way they used to calibrate instruments in the first place back in the day. Few things while playing the octaves which I find some students doing even I used to do by the way and then kind of fixed along the way because it gets very tough if you don't follow the right posture and the finger technique while playing the octave. So if you play like this in either hand what tends to happen is these three fingers the ring finger middle and index they tend to either they tend to lock themselves to each other or they tend to just go in the air they just tend to be in the air and if you have to reuse them for some other note you know you're gonna find that process very difficult because you develop the wrong muscle memory to keep these in the air. So I would say try to imagine yourself holding something round like an orange or a ball and keep your hand like this whether you're playing close stuff or whether you're playing things as wide as octaves. So this is the gentle technique which you should follow keeping your other fingers not in the air but and not even and not keeping it flat. Don't play flat like this. You don't want your hand to be like this. You want a small curve when you're playing octaves. This seems to work well. You also reduce the strain on your fingers. See here there is a lot of strain as I'm finding if I play like this there's almost no strain sort of like you're eating a meal so with your hands. So octaves with the pinky and the thumb and with the thumb what people tend to do is sometimes we keep the thumb in a kind of a chopping style like you're trying to chop thumb something with your thumb rather than that give your thumb a slight curve a slight curve and you can play it with the bony a part of the thumb rather than from the tip you can play it from the bony a part around here so you'll also get more power okay and don't be afraid of if you're playing a black note you don't have to hit it with the pinky on the tip you can hit it slightly curved as well because some of you I'm sure cannot stretch that much so if you try to play like this then you're putting a lot of pressure on the stretching so try to play with as much of ease as possible so if you take this octave I'm not bending the fingers like this in a claw shape or anything I'm just keeping it naturally down and another thing some people do is we push our entire arm to play the octave because it gets a bit tricky and con and constrained for our fingers so I would encourage you to not use your shoulder just use either your fingers only fingers or if you're not getting any power with the fingers then check this out you can get more power through your wrist as you can see the shoulder is fine and I'm not some people tend to push it this way this is an absolute no it's okay fine use a bit of your shoulder I would encourage no shoulder but more forearm and wrist see and you get some volume as well zero shoulder my shoulder is just there to support the body the upper body so let's try that with the right hand now don't keep your fingers in the air right and there's something your mind also has to think I've talked about the technicality your mind has to always think of this distance and it should not leave this distance because we are in luck you can go you can do any of the 12 notes on the piano with the same distance so it's almost like a divider which you have in a geometry class which we use to kind of remember distances so f to f that distance try to remember and just push it here and you can kind of play a lot of things you don't really need your eyes or at the most you would need your eyes for just one of the notes of the octave so if you take D flat I'm only looking I'm only looking at here and then when I go to a flat I'm still looking here I'm not looking at the top one so I'm trusting my distance I'm like how we trust a divider in the geometry class we measure it there take it and then go somewhere else and then do whatever we have to do so I'm going to give you some exercises as well so do stay tuned first off if you're playing contemporary music like rock music dance music you know Latin salsa that sort of stuff you'll do a lot of octave movement in the left hand to mimic the drum kit or to mimic the primary percussion instrument in the ensemble so if you take a note like E flat find its octave E flat that's here you can play it with your pinky and your thumb and normally if you play this over a ballad style chord progression the left hand just holding the roots just holding the roots how do you make this more interesting what if the drummer is doing something now what what could that be equated to kick drum snare drum now the drummer is hitting those instruments they are very percussive instruments they don't really produce an audible pitch you can't make out oh the kick is playing an F sharp and there's no point of that the drums are to make people dance not to sing now if you follow the drummer and do something like this let's say the pattern is doop and if you do you're playing a melody so that's counterproductive you're trying to copy a rhythm instrument and then play a melody over that it may be an overkill also of data because everyone should have a different role melody does melody and rhythm does rhythm they don't they shouldn't fight with each other so a good way to compliment the drummer would be to use octaves because it doesn't overdose the notes you're just taking maybe the chord root at the time which let's say if it's E flat taking E flat adding the octave and then like a traditional bass player in a in an ensemble you're just following the drums so there's a very useful use case or advantage of an octave on the piano you can always follow the drummer and the right hand what should it do just the chords I guess what if the chords change and the groove stays the same no problem just go to the root of the new chord and keep the same groove which is kick snare kick kick snare kick snare kick kick snare something like that could also consider a couple of dance grooves maybe you know so this is the support for that groove so in a sense you don't even need a drummer now you are the drummer you can do rock you can do dance you can even do basic disco with octaves you just have to kind of automatically provides energy instead of just doing the pulse which is nice if you split that up you split up the root and the octave you get eight notes one generally a nice disco pattern some right hand chord it's or a melody okay so rock dance disco definitely very useful and it makes everything thicker so if you take even melodies sounds a lot better I think with octaves makes everything a lot thicker even in the bass even in the left hand so it's very important that you learn them and you with octave playing you have the opportunity to do a lot more with your harmony and melody so what I mean by that is a simple a simple trick if you take an e major chord or an e minor chord let's say I'm playing it with an inversion GbE which ends up being the first inversion this is your root if I just stack an octave the nearest note of the chord and add from this G to that it makes the chord a lot thicker and B if I'm a pageating this I have the opportunity to make a melody out of all this stuff by just floating the top note stuff like that maybe a G major so it can be useful when you're trying to bring in a melody line while there are chords already like maybe this pattern like a Montuno Latin salsa kind of pattern really need octaves to be able to play that so octaves are very useful you have to learn them and we are going to now do two exercises one for the left hand and the other for the right hand so for the left hand I'm just going to consider something very bluesy and rock and roll like I'm starting on a and here's your drill a a c d e these are your notes so you go with a little bit of swing I think that sounds pretty good a c d so the challenge is a c you have to immediately go to see you don't want to do a c d you don't want to have that gap no one's going to allow you to play in their band if you have that gap so while you're playing a you need to think oh I have to now play c so a c d e a c d e a c d e a c and you can pretty much play anything in your right hand which suits this if you want a variation we can do a slide from the D sharp to the E which is a tritone going to the perfect fifth speed this up maybe we can start in the right end with a simple chord a minor should work build from there and play any of your favorite songs or destroy some of your favorite songs like sorry about that but you get the idea so you have you can even use this over a 12 bar blues you can transpose this back it's a nice pattern to get your octaves going now it also may cause a little bit of hand burning what happens when your hands hurt is generally it's your forearms which will hurt the most so my advice to you is if you're playing for 10 minutes take a break for five minutes sort of like that especially at the earlier stages or another way to put this in your practice routine is use this as your warm-up you always if ever you want to warm up on an instrument you need to literally warm up the the you you have to be warm your hands have to be capable to play anything so especially if you're playing a gig your outdoor it's cold these sort of exercises are nice I tend to practice this before a gig I will probably just do a kind of a shiver as I call it I will shiver on the on the root and octave after I've done a little bit of warm-up like this so let's say I do this shows starting in about 10 minutes and I'll just keep doing this speed it up a bit more and then shiver a bit you feel pretty warmed up right you don't want to overdo it otherwise your forearm will get busted you it'll be a lot of strain so do it you'll have to know so you have to experiment octaves are going to stretch out your hand so you don't have that freedom to kind of relax your fingers your fingers are always kind of stretched out so you need to practice with breaks that is very important now let's move on to a right hand melody which I've composed and I'm also going to teach you a nice chord progression which will go with that so then you've got a left hand octave pattern and we've got a right hand melody to be played with octaves then we are going to conclude the lesson with a lot of interesting tricks with octaves so I'll play you the melody it's on E minor and then we'll break it down so the melody goes so that's E G F sharp D B E D D G B A you could argue that this is in the G major scale E G F sharp D B E D D G B A you could read the notation it's available for you E G F sharp D B E D D G B G F sharp D B now let's stack each of these notes with octaves and see how we go from there definitely sounds a lot a lot more impactful now you can play this the normal way just with the thumb and the pinky thumb for the low one and pinky for the high octave but to make right hand melodies sound more usable with octaves especially for a non groovy genre like a more ballad style which I'm trying now you hold down your sustain pedal the sustain pedal is a double-edged sword because if you hold it down it's gonna sustain everything as you can hear so be a bit careful it can also make you sound even worse than where you started so you want to lift the pedal just before or at the point of the next chord so if ever you're using the pedal you have to be responsible and lift it before the next chord otherwise you defeat the purpose so E minor B minor lift and press lift every time the chord changes and now your melody gets that sustain and not just sustain it gets this resonance as well that additional resonance which the actual acoustic piano offers because a hammer is hitting two strings or sometimes three strings in a grand piano they will resonate with each other and then that has to be amplified through the soundboard the sustain pedal makes that come out a lot more grander it adds more of the harmonic content of the vibrations it's gonna bring out the harmonics of the sound and you're gonna hear those harmonics play almost like an electronic pad or a string chord it will sound see you can hear that sustain it's almost like you have another patch like a pad or a some ooo of a choir kind of playing for you so the pedal is very powerful but use it wisely so the melody is there we go let's use let's play that together forget the left hand I'm going to teach you the left hand shortly E G F sharp D B with the pedal for the most part now let's get the chords first chord is E minor B minor C major G major if you can do D major over F sharp at the very end so B minor C major G major D over F sharp you can also break break up your chord like this maybe an arpeggio so E minor B minor C major G D are your left hand chords so in the lesson we've covered a left hand pattern and a right hand melody both using octaves and hopefully showing you the importance of octaves now let's conclude our discussion by looking at the challenges of playing octaves first of all we looked at the posture and all that there are challenges you know but there are some musical challenges so we look at the challenges and how to overcome them of course and what happens if octaves get boring I don't think they generally do but if ever they do let's figure out a few solutions for that problem as well so if things I think the main challenge is what if things are too fast what if you know it just gets too fast on the piano so here's what you could try and do let's say you take a melody like this is near impossible at least for me to play as octaves very tough needs a lot of training so you don't have to do all the notes as octaves you can do something like like that stuff like that versus that sounds quite plain and simple but with octaves well I could do for the whole tune this is like some serious you know workout is happening for my hand so you may not want to shock your hand so much and it's too much so a good way to have a good way to play octaves but not burn your hand would be use octaves only when you when you need to like maybe the first note or wherever the important notes are maybe maybe not all those five but at the land maybe just at the e and then drop them you need that divider with your hand you can't lose that shape or that distance so when things get fast you have to pick and choose which notes you need to kind of octave and this could serve to our advantage in in case of songs with lyrics because the important words of the song maybe the word better in he jude for example you don't have to play octaves for all that you can do or not play octaves at all for that one word whenever notes are simple or long in duration see I didn't use any octaves there because it's too fast for me so that works so you can pick and choose so when the melody gets too linear too technical too fast you don't need octaves so that's generally the way you would overcome the challenge of playing octaves but keep the right posture that is the geometrical the divider shape of your hand is very important not straining your fingers don't keep it flat keep it curved and lastly I wanted to address the question what happens if octaves get boring so you could do a couple of things which will make it a lot more interesting let's say we'll go back to the melody we learnt earlier which is when I played flat I'm striking both the notes together at the same time but one technique you would apply is this flamming octave technique I call it flam because that's what we say on a snare drum as opposed to it's not one hit so they use both the sticks and hit the same drum just a little a few milliseconds apart this is the flam octaves as I call it so I think that automatically sounds a lot more human lot more interesting I think and wherever you have these long notes you can use what I could call as a fluttered octave technique or I also sometimes call it shivering octaves okay that adds a very sitar like vibe to it because they they'll be picking the stringed instruments both down stroke and up stroke so they can go really fast there you can kind of add some dynamics around that shiver maybe you need to play in an environment which is about 15 or 10 degrees maybe you'll get the shiver automatically who knows you can add the shiver everywhere if you want but you don't want to over have an overkill there now if you feel there's not enough harmonic content in the melody what you can do is stack up a third alongside the octave so if you take you can add a third to each of the notes so what's a third from E you can refer to this E diatonic third would be G because I'm in the E minor scale so that definitely makes it a lot thicker but again you don't want to overdo it so maybe a combination of all three flutter then third in the second bar shiver thirds shiver and something like that so these things should not happen as a specific plan as you play a song it should just kind of organically flow through it just happens so with your experience practicing these techniques you will kind of bring it out based on your natural inclination based on the emotion of the song it should just happen automatically but the techniques are flaming fluttering or shivering very flamenco guitar like and then adding thirds if ever you want to if you want to add more thickness thickness or harmonic flavor right guys so this was an octave lesson there are a couple of other octave lessons we've done on our YouTube channel over the years we'll put them in the description those will give you more technical workouts like scale exercises practicing octaves in thirds you know like all these things are very important so you can check out some of those exercises to go forward with octaves all the best and do consider getting the notation on patreon and let us know what you thought about the video in the comments give the video a like share and don't forget to hit that subscribe if you haven't already cheers and catch you in the next video