- Hi, I'm Gareth Green, and in this video we're
going to have a little think about how Alberti Bass
might be useful to you if you're a composer thinking about, well, I've got some chords down, maybe in the accompaniment to
a piece of music I'm writing, but it's just kind of going, chord, chord, chord. What can I do with these chords to make them sound a bit more exciting? Well, Alberti Bass is one of the techniques you might consider. If you are a performer and you're not interested
in composing music at all, it's still worth knowing about because it is a musical device that often gets used, particularly
in the classical period, but it lives on into the romantic period. And there's still plenty of music written in the
20th and 21st centuries that still uses the
Alberti Bass technique. And it's used in other genres, as well. So, you may have come across it, you may not a tonne, doesn't matter. I'm just going to show you
in a very practical way, in this video, how to take a piece of music that's got a
melody in the right hand and it's just got chords in the left hand. The melody could be in the left hand but the chords in the
right hand, doesn't matter. But how to use Alberti Bass to kind of liven things up a bit, create a bit of movement, bring your accompanying chords to life. So, why is this thing called Alberti Bass? That's the first thing we might mop up. Well, it's named after a
composer called Domenico Alberti. And sadly, this is the thing
that he's most famous for, his bass. So, Domenico Alberti,
well, when was he around? Well, we know he was born in 1710, and we know he died somewhere
between 1740 and 1746. We're not entirely sure about
where life ended for him but it gives you a kind of context. He wasn't actually the first person to use this little formula, but he
became associated with it. And so it was named after
him, the Alberti Bass. So, what do we do when
we use an Alberti Bass? Well, we basically do
this, we take a chord. So, here's a chord. It's the first chord that I've got handy in this piece of music
here, D, F-sharp, A. And we basically do this to it. We go bottom, top, middle, top, okay? So it's a little figuration,
you take the chord but instead of just putting it down as what we call a block
chord, you break up the chord. Well, there are lots of ways
you can break up a chord. You could just go up the three notes, go down the three notes,
start in the middle, go up, then down. Start in the middle, go down, then up, I mean, you could do all these things, but in the Alberti Bass formula, you start with a bottom note, you go to the top note, you go to the middle note,
and back to the top note. So it's a sound you've
probably heard a lot. And if you play sonatas by
Mozart and people like that, you'll have played this
stuff over and over again probably without even realising it, maybe. So, it's useful to know
that's what's going on and it helps you when you're playing to see what the actual chord is, because you can put all the notes of the Alberti Bass together and say, oh, it's spelling out this chord. So, useful device for composers,
useful thing to know about. Now, what I've done
here is I've just a kind of written four bars a
little bit in the style of the classical period,
but that doesn't matter. And first of all, I'm just doing the
left-handed accompaniment as block chords. And it sounds like this. Well, hopefully you'll agree with me that that doesn't sound bad. But it doesn't sound particularly
interesting, does it? It's again going chord, chord, chord. Not very exciting, is it? So, if the melody doesn't
want to be too energetic, you know, because we could
liven this up, couldn't we, by getting the melody going. But we might not want that kind of mood. We might not want an over spirited melody. We might quite like this
melody that's kind of a bit more flowing, a bit more relaxed. But maybe it's something we can do in the accompaniment to
kind of make things work a bit better. So, what I'm going to do now, is apply this Alberti Bass
technique to the chords that we've got written. So, all these chords up here. We're going to kind of do a
little bit of Alberti Bass with. Okay, so let's see how we go about it. If we take the first chord,
well, we can do this. We go bottom, top, middle, top, okay? So, I've assigned a quaver, an eighth note to each one of those,
and you see how this, that I've just written here, fills up the two beats of that chord. So, obviously it's got to make
sense rhythmically, hasn't it? But, if you've got two beats and you can go bottom, top, middle, top, then that works very
nicely in this rhythm. And what I'm going to do
now, is to kind of carry on. Well, we now move on to a different chord. So, let's take the bottom note the E, then go to the top note the A, back to the middle, back to the top. And then, we've got the
next bit of Alberti sorted. And then we need a bar line. So you can see I'm just
writing the left hand here. When I come to the next chord, well, it's the same as
the first chord, isn't it? But this time it's taking out four beats. So, how are we going to deal with this? Well, it's fairly straightforward. We do it once and then we do it again. So, that takes care of
that little bit of Alberti. Let's have a new bar line and then onto a new chord. So we're down here on G,
and we're coming up to E, then we're going to the middle note B, then we're coming back to E, again. So that gives us the next
little burst there, doesn't it? And they're onto the next chord. So we've got A, up to the top note G, back to the middle, back to the top. So you can see how the
intervals vary depending on what's in the chord. And then again, in the last
part, the last measure, we've got this chord. Well, we might decide to do
it twice as we did before, or we might think, well if
this is the end of something that we might just stop on
this bottom note to finish, for example. And then, that would give us the end of this little bit of Alberti Bass. So, you can see what I've done, I've taken the left hand chords and I've broken them up. Okay, what's the effect of that? Well, it goes like this. Sorry, I messed up the end there. Let me try the last two bars again. Okay, you see what impact it has? Instead of the left hand just
going clunk, clunk, clunk, on these chords, we've now
got this flowing rhythm in the left hand that
supports the right hand melody but just gives us a bit of movement. And it's so much more
interesting, isn't it? Now you might be wanting to write a piece of music in a classical style. You might be wanting to write a piece of music for a rock
band, it doesn't matter. You can still use this
Alberti Bass technique if it's something that appeals to you. So, there it is, Alberti Bass. Who was Alberti? When did he live? Where does this come from? How does it work? How do you turn basic chords into a little figuration
using the Alberti Bass? So, it's something you
might recognise in music that you're playing and
just be aware of it. And then you can kind of think of the Alberti Bass and think, well, how does that
convert into this chord or this convert into this chord. That helps you to see what the chords are. Or it may be something if you're writing that's going to help you to just embellish your
accompaniment writing. So, I hope that's been a helpful video. If you've enjoyed this video
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