CHORD PROGRESSION

32-bar AABA Form

The 32-bar AABA chord progression lies at the heart of the 'Great American Songbook' of jazz standards.

The Pyramids versions you have been playing up to now are quite short – only 16 bars long. To make the piece any longer without simply repeating the same music, we need a new, different, bit of music.

This new material is called ‘the B section’ – just why is explained further on. It will make up bars 17 to 24 of our extended piece, which we finish off with our regular final eight bars. This gives Pyramids its final 32-bar AABA form.

Chord Progression – 32-bar AABA Form 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 for the Module performance:

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.

The new music

Here is your zigzag line diagram of the same music:

Now add in the left hand chords only:

The right hand has to play chord tones as well as melody notes. If we add those right hand chord tones in, we get this diagram showing all the elements of the new ‘B section’ music. Look at the numbered features:

1. The stems-up notes in the treble clef are the melody notes.

2. The stems-down notes in the treble clef are the right hand chord tones. Most of them are plain Basic Music-making Position (BMP) chords, in spite of the fancy chord names.

The written-out B section music

The three-note chords which are not simple BMP chords are circled in the music above, and you can find these chords in the diagrams which come next. Otherwise, you can see that the pattern is the same as before: one melody note at the start of the bar, and six rising (left hand, right hand) BMP chord tones.

The new B section chords

The F major seventh chord (Fmaj7, bar 17)

(Note: The audio and MIDI files in the table play all four chords in this section one after the other in the order they are presented.)

The added note E, the seventh note above the root F, gives this chord its name.

The E minor seventh chord (Fmaj7, bar 17)

The A minor (inversion) chord (bar 20)

The D sharp diminished seventh chord (D#dim7, bar 22)

Seventh chords make music sound interesting and generate harmonic movement. If you want to learn more about seventh chords, visit Musicarta’s Seventh Chords page.

Using the build-up resources in the lesson so far, play the simple B section music.

Expanding Pyramids to 32-bar AABA form

You already know that the different section of music needed to make the piece longer is called the ‘B section’. Note that the letters ‘A’ and ‘B’ used here have nothing to do with the notes or chords A and B, but are used to stand for eight-bar sections of music that are either the same (like A1 and A1) or nearly the same (A1 and A2), or different, like A and B.

We are going to make Pyramids twice as long by playing four 8-bar sections of the chord sequence in this order: A1, A1, B, A2. This structure is usually just called “AABA form” – you say just the four letters names, without the little numbers.

In the new 32-bar Pyramids ‘AABA’ piece, the second 8-bar section really is the same as the first – otherwise the piece would end, like the 16-bar version you already know. The slightly different eight-bar A2 section is saved for the ending.

Developing the B section melody

• The third finger is squeezed in in bars 18, 20 and 21. going up.

• The fourth finger is squeezed in in bar 22, coming down.

• There is a repeated melody note across the bar line three times (bars 18/19, 20/21 and 21/22). Use different fingers – RH4 and RH5.

• Watch for the thumbs playing the same note E in bar 20, where the right hand plays the second inversion A minor triad.

• Notice when the melody is ‘fancy’ and when it is ‘plain’. The pattern is:

plain □ fancy □ plain □ fancy □ fancy □ fancy □ LH-over pattern

Learning the Pyramids 32-bar version

You can use it in a number of ways:

• Play it all the way through with one note in each hand;

• Try to hear the music playing in your head as you ‘read’ it with your eyes;

• Use it as a reminder for playing the AABA 32-bar Pyramids version without the music.

You can download the music for the Pyramids 32-bar AABA Form performance using this link, but try to play the 32-bar Pyramids version from the non-music build-up in this lesson. It will make you much more creative in the long run.

Here are the audio and MIDI performance files again:

Or take a break and browse the tabs on the Musicarta.com home page for more great ways to make thinking about chord progressions second nature to you.

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