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Lesson 2

Musical

Example

Lesson 2

Secret

Score

Lesson 2

Score/

Music

Creating a Melodic Echo

Can you hear the big difference between our new, revised version and our original? They both are played at the same tempo, yet the newer composition has more energy than the original.

How did we accomplish that transformation? By replacing the original 8th notes at the beginning of each bar with 16th notes.

And by adding more notes to the left hand bass line. These additions added much more life to the composition. Let's see if we can add even more. You can see that bars 5 and 6 are exactly the same as bars 1 and 2:

Maybe we can do something extra to those repeated bars. A very common way of presenting a theme is to state it once and then slightly vary it the next time you hear it. What if we added an echo effect at the end of bars 5 and 6? We've already stated the melody once in bars 1 and 2, so this would be an effective variation. Let's listen to what that would sound like:

That worked nicely. Let's see what we did. We'll compare bar 1 to bar 5:

We simply took beats 2-and-a-half and 3, and repeated them one octave higher, like an echo. We followed the same procedure in the next bar as well. It made the music less repetitive, even though we were basically repeating the first two bars.