How to Create Flourishes with Keyboards

Video Transcript

"BEN ANDERSON: Hi. I'm Ben Anderson with Expert Village, and I'm here today to talk to you about flourishes, playing flourishes on a keyboard. What a flourish is, it's generally--for example, if you're playing a quiet melodic song and you're just playing a couple of chords, a flourish might be adding something that sticks out to the ear and really just kinda helps fill out the sound a little bit. So say I'm playing something really quietly, the little bit that I did at the end there would be called a flourish; it's just an arpeggiated chord that's being played over the top of the chord that's already being played. A flourish can be--it doesn't even have to be an arpeggiation. What a flourish does is to help stick out. It sticks out to the listener's ear as something that's being done differently that normally wasn't there. These are often--you commonly use in jazz music, where jazz musicians will add flourishes upon different chord progressions that are already there. There are many other different ways that you can do this. In David Bowie's "Life on Mars," there's a point in the song where it comes to a powerful chord and there's a little flourish that's on top there that just adds a little more to that sound and it sticks out to the listeners like, "Okay, I hear something that's different and it really caught my attention." That's really the whole point of flourishes. It's to catch the listener's attention. And more commonly than not, they're just there for a few quick seconds if that even. They're just there to stand out for a moment just to take the listener's ear away from something else. And they're mostly for, again, support. So, adding different flourishes will help support a song and will give the listeners something new and something interesting to listen to. And also with the keyboard, it's nice because you have a lot of different sounds to choose from and lot of different instruments that you can try to replicate, so a flourish doesn't have to be anything necessarily like I played before. It doesn't have to be on a piano. It could be something else. It doesn't even have to be something quick moving. It could be something a lot more melodic. It could just be a couple of notes but it's enough to stand out and stand apart from everything else that's already being played, so therefore it gives the listeners something to grab from their attention."