Octave Displacement - Pt. 1

Subtle (and not so subtle) shifts to take your melodies to new places.

In this lesson, I’ll be talking about the technique of octave displacement. This involves taking a note from a melody, chord or improvisation and moving either one note, or a group of notes to a different octave. In a previous lesson, I spoke about chord inversions, moving a group of notes in a chord to a different range, and this is a related aspect of that idea.

Occasionally, octave displacement is used to keep a melodic line within the range of an instrument. Sometimes it’s done to add leaps or movement which can expand on an idea and add something interesting and unexpected.

I’ll demonstrate moving notes into different ranges by starting with this simple part, something relatively straight forward: