How To Sing & Play Piano With Only Two Notes!

Let’s play the left hand root and in the right hand on the piano. Just play one single note. Play the third of the chord. The chord is either major or minor; those are your only two alternatives for thirds. This means that you don’t really have to know a lot beyond just the basic major and minor chords.

Today I’ve chosen an old jazz standard called ‘Poor Butterfly’ because it’s got a nice chord progression. Let’s tackle the first few bars:

• The first chord is an Fm7 so my left hand is going to play an F
• My right hand is going to play the third of the chord – I’m spacing the hands out so I’m actually playing a 10th – I’m not playing the 3rd directly above it, I’m playing the 3rd and octave above it which will give a little bit more fullness to the chord.
• Play the 3rd of the chord an octave higher than where the root is; so there’s the F minor 7 then the next chord is a Bb7 chord and it’s a major chord because it has a major 3rd
• Then, go to EbM7 for 2 bars
• Next, I’m going to play the G7 at the beginning of every bar and then I go to C7

I’m going to play it to beat one of every single bar and if the chord repeats for a bar like it does in bar three and four, it’s an E flat major seven chord, you’re still going to articulate it at the first beat of every bar. We’re going to take that same phrase and count four beats for each chord.

Now we go to the C7.

Now we just have to add the melody on top. It helps to \ choose a song that you know very well to get started. You have to give yourself your first note; in this case, B-flat. You’ll notice for this song, there’s a little pickup before the piano part comes in before the chords start. To get this to line up properly, you can either count the way that we’ve been counting or you can just try to make sure that when you play the root and the third it lines up with whatever the lyric is in that first part of the bar.

In this case I’m going to play the chord while I sing “fly.”

When doing this, not only will you really get a sense of how the harmony works, you start to get a sense of what the architecture is of the harmony. You’re also going to get a feel for how the harmony and the melody work together. In a piece like this, it is really interesting because sometimes the melody really sounds like it’s inside the harmony. The first bar when you sing Butterfly and you’re singing the Ab, well, you’re also playing the Ab

But then when you get to the EbM7 chord, you’re actually playing a tension note. This is a useful tool to get you to start to hear the harmony but also this is a very beautiful way if you were to sing and accompany yourself it’s actually a pretty full way to do it.