Intros and outros
In this article called intros and outros I am focusing on a subject that is often overlooked when playing a tune: how to start and end a tune.
Intros and outros: intros
Let’s imagine that you are accompanying a singer or instrumentalist about to sing or play the melody. The most obvious way for the pianist to inform the the singer etc is to provide what is known as a bell note. Here are the first four bars of the song ‘I can’t give you anything but love‘.
![Intros and outros. Bell note.](https://www.learnjazzpianoonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/I-cant-give-4-bars-with-bell-note_0001-600x103.png)
The bell note is simply the first note of the melody.
The pianist strikes this bell note to give the singer their starting note, in this case, G.
A second approach is to supply the singer with a broken chord, usually the dominant. So in the above example, because the key is G major the broken chord will be D. However, my preference is to turn this broken dominant chord into D+, in other words D augmented: D+F#+A.
![Intros and outros. D augmented broken chord.](https://www.learnjazzpianoonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/D-arp-intro-600x158.png)
A third approach is to play either the last 8 bars or the last 4 bars as an intro.
Here are the last 8 bars of ‘I can’t give you anything but love’.
![Last 8 bars of I can't give you anything but love. Intros and outros.](https://www.learnjazzpianoonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/last-8-love_0001-600x149.png)
Notice that although the penultimate bar of my lead sheet only contains the chord G,
I have added E7 at beat 3 to create a 1625 for the last 2 bars.
Outros
I’m just going to give you just one suggestion here for an outro. This is a tried and trusted lick that works for the final two bars.
![Outro](https://www.learnjazzpianoonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/love-end-lick-600x230.png)
And here’s my YouTube video about intros and outros.
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