- 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.
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