 Hi guys this is Jason here from the Nathaniel School of Music and in this lesson let's learn all about octaves. An exciting concept to make your melodies sound a lot more richer and fuller so let's get started. So the whole goal of this exercise is to teach you how to get from this melody or this style of melody which is where you play the tune in the right hand and the chord in the left hand right sounds quite pleasant right and how you can get from that way of playing the melody to maybe this way. If you ask me that's a lot richer so if you need that big sound let's learn how to do it and if you haven't already please make it a point to subscribe to our YouTube channel turn on that bell icon as well for a lot of notifications and new lessons which will come your way let's go. B flat major is the scale I'm going to use for this exercise. B flat major as we know has two flats namely B flat and E flat the rest are all white keys and a quick trick when you want to remember something B flat has two flats the fact that you have B flat means that there will not be a B and the fact that you have an E flat means that there will not be an E so the rest of the natural notes so the white notes are there and then you add these two black notes or these two flat notes okay so B flat C D E flat F G A B flat let's get our melody quite easy I hope okay and the chords which go with that melody are B flat major G minor E flat major it's a very standard chord progression right you have your one chord B flat the sixth chord B flat G minor which is the six which is the four E flat the five or the dominant which is F let's play that again together B flat G minor E flat F major G minor you can even replace the E flat and sneak in the C minor if you wish so you can do a lot of things to make this melody a lot more interesting like do passing notes grace notes trills slurs and whatnot but in this lesson let's just focus on the use of octaves so it's quite easy to just think of it you just have to play the note which you were any way playing which is D and decide whether you want to go higher or whether you want to go lower okay and each creates an interesting vibe so you can go and if you use the sustain pedal it can sound even more ambient you get all those overtones sort of coming together to meet in a nice way isn't it so with octaves I'm going to start with a higher octave I'm just holding the chord in my left hand not doing anything fancy but you see how the melody is getting so refined right this is pretty much the trick you just add the octave and you can use these two fingers ideally I don't think you can use anything else your hand will start hurting so you use the thumb and the pinky as much as possible and be a bit careful of these middle fingers you don't want to just hide it too much or you don't want to keep it jutting out in the air like that keep it normal so if your hand was once here the octave just stretches the hand slightly and the other fingers can just be where they were they don't have to go in a weird motion okay so you're here so the challenge with octaves is it may sound a bit cut up if you if you don't use the pedal so a secret which a lot of piano players do and it's like an obvious secret because you can't really see their feet use generally see piano players hands the secret is you use this thing called the sustain pedal which is the right pedal on a like a grand piano alignment the sustain pedal will basically sustain what you play okay and I'd advise you to watch my tutorial on how to use the sustain pedal it'll be linked up in the description do check that out it'll just make your melody sound a lot more refined so if you play there this is with the pedal it sustains but you have to be careful you have to lift it here and there you know so ideally you want to ensure the legato that's without width of course with a little bit of lifting okay so that's one way of using octaves you can either bring up the top note add a higher pitched melody or you can do but of course then your bass is going to go deeper to accommodate so I'd advise you when you play deeper perhaps you could do like an arpeggio in the left hand you know just to add that motion some kind of arpeggio motion will always be preferred in the left hand okay and two tips to make the octave sound even more bigger so first of all the octaves are very important as piano players first of because we can you know it's possible to do it's a lot trickier on other instruments and seemingly impossible on some instruments as well like you can't do this on a monophonic instrument right like a flute or a saxophone it's very I think it's impossible so on a piano you automatically want to capitalize on this octave concept when you play melodies so that it keeps you in the league of all these really sophisticated melodic players like a saxophone or a trumpet or a violin these are huge instruments they sound really thick the piano actually well it's a very simple sound if you ask me the overtones or the harmonics are quite pleasant or quite simple they they don't stand out you know like the trumpet or the sax so one note on a saxophone slash violin versus a piano I think those instruments are going to defeat the piano so you need to figure out a way to kind of add more density and make the sounds which you already can play a little bit more thicker and the octaves can definitely help with this so another way to make the octave sound even more cooler is to sort of do them in a in a delayed manner so if you do sounds quite in quite thicker but if you create a small delayed effect what I call as glass octaves I don't know why I just like the name it doesn't have to always be with that delay you can combine the delay with the no delay you know so maybe when the note is long you could do the delayed octave repeat you can also fill up the the gaps there are sometimes where the note sort of stick you know see there's a lot of gap there so as long as you don't confuse the melody I think it's cool to just add a little bit extra because you can actually play the notes one by one you know you could either play them with a fast delay or a slow delay and the slow delay could be timed with your time feel or time division of the song you know I think a lot more interesting lot more color than maybe the old version or you could use the old simpler version to probably bring down the song at the bridge or maybe start with the simpler version and and then explode with all these techniques okay so the last thing I wanted to mention in this lesson with regards to octaves is how you can also add harmonic octaves or add octaves with thirds so what you're going to do is play the the target melodic note in this case D and play its upper third so what you want to do is write down the B flat major scale theory is very important here so write down the scale B flat C D E flat F G A and under each of those notes you'll find that B flat's third is D okay and so on and so forth so B flat with D C with E flat D with F E flat with G F with A G with B flat A with C B flat with D now we don't need all these third groupings because our melody doesn't have all the seven notes so whenever you encounter the note now you have D so D is upper third this has nothing to do with the left hand this is only right hand and diatonic to the right hand so you go so you add F in between remember what we found with our middle fingers they're pretty much sleeping let's bring them wake them up a bit now so you go same thing for the other notes and if you play that in a flutter or in a delay or in the glass octave way you know it sounds even more even even more beautiful anything you can do this for any melody really so octaves are great techniques great tools to add actually in both hands in today's video we've talked about the right hand but i'd love to talk about this more so if you guys are interested in me teaching you something else or any other topic of music or piano playing or ear training or technology or something which you'd like to learn from us do leave a comment and also follow the description for other links which will help you out with other chapters so that brings me to the final point do subscribe to our channel if you haven't already turn on the bell icon for notifications and you'll get a lot more videos from me and and other performances as well which you should look out for and do support our channel as well by sharing the video with all your musician friends so in this lesson we've learned about octaves first of all it's just an additional note the same pitch into two as we learn in physics class you either play the higher octave or the lower octave then what do you do then you can add some flutter or some excitement by creating more density by adding more of the subdivisions then what did we do we added the thirds we added the upper third from every note you need to write it down neatly in the book get your theory sorted and there we go we've learned it on b-flat major with just a simple melody which i came up with but i hope that you can apply it to some of your own compositions or maybe some songs which you're trying to figure out on your own and i'd love to hear what you've come up with again this is jason here from nathaniel school of music cheers have a good one stay safe and i will catch you soon