hi there....just a quicky.
say you want to play a song beautifully. you have an idea of how it goes, but you want to get past just playing chords. after all, you're a keyboardist, not a guitarist. you want tot use them 88 badboys to your advantage. here's a few steps...
1)
Identify the chords of your song. you can play these with both hands or just your left hand, since you right hand will be busy later with melody, harmonizing the melody, etc, later on. In fact, if you just play the root, or the root and the fifth (the "shell voicing") in your left, that will do, too. (**You can do these steps in FL piano roll, as well)
2)
Learn to play the melody of the song in your right hand. For reasons that will be more clear later, for now, play the melody with the pinky of your right hand. This will free up your other 4 fingers to do harmony later.
3)
Learn to play the left chords, (or just roots or shell voicing) and the right hand melody with pinky at the same time.
4)
Okay, here is where it becomes flavorful. Now you want to harmonize that right hand pinky melody. That melody is like a soprano, and you want to play two other voices with the other fingers of your right hand (RH): the alto and the tenor (your left is your "bass"). But what notes do you play with your other fingers?
Now you must think in triads with your right hand. Let's say your songs starts with a C chord, and the first three notes of the melody are D, C, E. Lets look at it this way:
Soprano: D C E (played with pinky)
Bass: C -------->
G -------->You want to fill in more voices with your right hand to harmonize that D, C, E. ***The basic rule is you want to use chords that are diatonic to the scale you're working in (in this case chords formed from C,D,E,F,G,A,B) and then invert them so that the pinky plays the leading voice (the soprano)****
That means we want to work with these chords for harmonizing your melody:
C-E-G
D-F-A
E-G-B
F-A-C
G-B-D
A-C-E
B-D-Gand their inversions.
So lets add some harmony to the above melody:
Soprano: D C E (played with pinky)
Alto: B G C (played with RH middle finger)
Tenor: G E G (played with RH thumb)
Bass: C -------->
G -------->
okay, in the orange, we've harmonized the melody. Let's look at what we did: The first note, the "D", we harmonized with B and G, which means we have formed a G chord in the right hand (while playing a C in the LH, which gives us the slash chord G/C or, if you want to get technical, a Cmaj9). Then we harmonized the C with a G and a C, and the E with a C and a G. Both of these "new chords" are C.
There's a lot to be say about this. My basic guideline is I want to form as many slah chords as i can that will sound "right", because I'm usually after a warm and gospely feel. Furthermore, there's nothing to limit you from using only chords in your RH from the diatonic notes. You can "borrow" chords from other scales; in fact, one's style is very much distinguished by what other scales one chooses to borrow chords from. but I digress.
5)
Create interesting "transitional chords" in your left hand between those boring block chords you have set up. Some genres depend more on this than others (the african american genres rely on this heavily), but this is something you want to learn to do. I could right a chapter on this, and in fact I have been studying this for about the past nine months. For in depth info on this, see my prev post on transitional chords here :
http://www.flipside.singingcrane.com/FL/index.php?topic=2013.0The basic rule of thumb, for me a least, is you want to introduce some chromatism into your chords progression during transtions. For example, if you are going from C major (C-E-G) to D minor (D-F-A), why not introduce a Db diminished (Db-E-G) in between. Its only one note away from the C major.
We could talk about optional steps, like figuring out riffs to accompany in between lines of the melody, and decorating left hand transitional chords with right hand ornamentation, but I think this is a good start
