It may be a bright, you know, quick and dancing kind of piece or it may be a very
peaceful, beautiful piece, or it may be a dark, sad, minor piece.
every song you play will have a character, and you'll want to know
consciously, what it is, and say, okay, my, my job is to show this song to the
listener. I'm going to show the listener the
compositional elements that are in it and, I also need to show them the mood
that the piece has. And what it's, what it's feeling is like.
And, that's something that, you know, I think about trying to stay in character,
just the way an actor tries to stay in character when they're acting a part.
I try to stay in character with that song not only when I play the melody, chorus,
but also when I improvise on it as well. So let's take a look at a song, this is
written by a friend of mine, composer Carla [INAUDIBLE] It's called Ojos de
Gato. It means eyes of the cat.
And we're going to walk through this song.
I'm going to play it on the piano and talk about the different elements of the
song. So that by the time we're finished with
it we'll have a lot of things at our disposal, things that we can feature.
When we play this song to help sell it to the listener, who listens to us play.
[BLANK_AUDIO] I'm going to play Carla's song, Ojos de Gato, and the first time
I'll just play it all the way through. And we're going to, then, get a sense for
what kind of song it is, what mood it has, and so on.
So, here goes.
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC]
. Okay, so we can draw some conclusions.
it's a short piece, and it's got a very simple melodic theme, [MUSIC] that keeps
repeating throughout the song. it's a slow, straight eight, kind of
bossa nova time feel. And in terms of mood it's kind of
melancholy and sad. It's in minor for the first half of the
song, so I think that kind of is a useful description of the song, so as we get
ready to play more on it. So, the next thing we want to do is take
a look at the chord scales, make sure we, we know which scales we're supposed to be
using on these chords. And in fact, we have a bit of a question
right here on the first chord. [MUSIC] because normally on an A minor
chord symbol, we would be, want to see what is happening with the sixth.
Is it the natural sixth? [MUSIC] Or is it a lowered sixth?
[MUSIC] And it turns out that both of them are there in the music.
So we have to decide which one is more important.