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Developing the Pyramids Chord Melody

Chord tones are first choice when it comes to writing your chord melody. But melodies also uses the notes in between the chord tones. In Lesson Five of The Pyramids Variations, we give the simple chord-tone melody of Lesson Three more character with those 'in-between' non-chord tones.

This is Lesson Five of The Pyramids Variations, a graded series of free online piano lessons from Musicarta.com. To benefit fully from the following material, you need to have completed the previous lessons in the series. Visit the series covering page for an overview and to get started.

To find more free piano lessons online from Musicarta.com, go to the Musicarta.com home page via the navigation bar on the left.

Here are the audio and MIDI files of the ‘Pyramids: Developing the Melody’ performance:

Pyramids_L5_M1

The file named in the right hand cell of the table above is the MIDI file of the performance you will learn in this module. Played on MidiPiano, Musicarta's recommended 'virtual keyboard', it will look-and-sound like this:

This text you don’t see

If you download and install MidiPiano - it's quick, easy and safe! - you can see what to play and use the application's slow-down, repeat and zoom features to help you learn more quickly.

Learn more about playing Musicarta MIDI files here.

Download the MIDI files for the series here.

The Pyramids melody so far

Let’s recap how the Pyramids melody has developed so far. (Use the Lesson links to refresh your memory and come back up to speed if you haven’t done any work on Pyramids for a while.)

In the Lesson One ‘Chord sequence in the BMP’ version, the right hand played only the chord tones – the right hand BMP notes – using fingers 1, 3 and 5:

Pyramids_L5_M2

Note: The MIDI file plays all four music examples one after the other.

In Lesson Three we added a melody note and changed the fingering of the chord tones (BMP notes) to 1, 2 and 4, to leave finger 5 for the melody note in the following bar:

Pyramids_L5_M3

In this lesson we are going to add in the note that’s under the right hand third finger (RH3, arrowed), in every other bar. (Note that for this to work, you have to have moved over to the 1-2-4 fingering for the BMP chords.)

Pyramids_L5_M4

However, it’s difficult to play four equal quavers in the space of three, as shown in the music example directly above. So we keep the thumb (RH1) down for longer, and making the other three notes shorter:

Pyramids_L5_M5

The pattern of the developed melody

If you listen to the developed-melody performance, you will hear that the first bar has the extra note (it’s ‘fancy’), the second bar is the same as before (‘plain’), the next bar is ‘fancy’, the one after is ‘plain’ and so on.

This fancy, plain, fancy, plain pattern continues for most of the developed-melody version of Pyramids, as shown in the chord chart above.

Always be on the look-out for patterns like this. It's so much easier to learn just two things - a 'fancy' and a 'plain' - and 'get' the overall pattern, than to read every note as it comes along.

If you understand the fancy/plain explanation, you can play most of the Pyramids developed-melody version using only this chord chart. Make sure you are using RH fingers 1, 2 and 4 for the BMP notes, and squeeze in the note under RH finger 3 in the ‘fancy’ bars.

The developed melody in bars 13 and 14

The only place the ‘squeezing the third finger back in’ technique won’t work is in bars 13 and 14, where the melody falls instead of rising.

Here is the First Performance version of bars 13 through to the end:

Pyramids_L5_M6

(Note: The MIDI file shows the whole process, as before.)

Swap the order of fingers 3 and 5 in bars 13 and 14:

Pyramids_L5_M7

Now squeeze a fourth finger note in (arrowed):

Pyramids_L5_M8

Your developed melody performance

Now you have seen all the developed-melody elements in the chord chart:

Finally, we add a little decoration to the melody right at the beginning:

Pyramids_L5_M9

This little decoration is known as a ‘shake’, which describes well how to play it. You see that it’s just the first melody note and the note below.

You can open and download the music for the developed melody version here, but see if you can play a developed melody version just from the non-music material in this lesson. It doesn’t matter if your version is a little different from the ‘official’ version.

Otherwise, you can challenge yourself with this lead sheet version. (You encountered lead sheets in Lesson Three.) Make the ‘developed melody’ stand out, but fill as much of each bar as you can with the Basic Music-making Position notes indicated by the chord symbols.

Adding the developed melody to the four-chord version

Before you try to play the developed melody over the four-chord base, you must be able to play the ‘Pyramids: Four-chord Version with Melody’ (Lesson Four, Part Two) confidently. If you need to revise it, open Lesson Four in a separate window.

It’s always a good idea to build up to a complicated performance like this.

Play the Pyramids chord sequence in twelve-eight, with four (LH, RH, LH, RH) BMP chords for each chord symbol. Here is the Pyramids chord sequence (four-chord version) again, with the performance files following.

Pyramids_L4_M1

Without stopping (if you can), repeat, playing the simple melody over the four-chord base. You have to use the sustain pedal to hold the roots and the melody notes. Try to ‘bring out the melody’ – including the ‘promoted’ notes.

Pyramids_L4_M6

Then repeat again, squeezing the finger 3’s back into the 1-2-4 BMP chords, and the finger 4’s into the 1-5-3 chords in bars 13 and 14, exactly the same as in the first part of this lesson only higher up. Now you’re playing the developed melody at the top of the four-chord base, as in these performance files:

Pyramids_L5_M10

You can download the music for this performance here, but you will learn more from putting a performance together from the 'non-musical' instructions provided here.

This is the end of Lesson Five of the Pyramids Variations series of free online piano lessons from Musicarta.com. When you’re ready, go on to Lesson Six, where you’ll learn about the 32-bar 'AABA' song form - the heart of American jazz standards - and add a new section (including seventh chords) to your ever-improving Pyramids performance!

In the meantime, take a break and browse the tabs on the Musicarta.com home page for more great ways to make chord melody work second nature to you.

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