unexpected nanosprint fun

[solarbird]

I jumped into the nanosprint group chat tonight to see what would happen.

nanosprint 1: two melody riffs, one about 16 bars, one shorter; a bit of connecting music, only about 4 bars, but it's repeated (intentionally) so that makes it eight. Cut time.

nanosprint 2: 16-bar chorus, 4-bar intro(?) from the verse into said chorus. Cut time.

nanosprint 3: not much that time, an 8-bar riff in 4/4.

I don't know whether I'll use any of these for anything, but I was surprised that on a day I wasn't feeling up to doing much, I was able to get myself to actually make some music that's not the same as most of my other music by throwing myself into the weird, artificial situation of nanosprints.

Also, today, I got to chapter two of this new music theory book I bought and looked at little table, and went oh! because I suddenly understood a lot more about chords. They weren't actually teaching what I figured out specifically - I think they may assumed you already knew this. But...

Okay, so, I've only played either single-note (flute) or arbitrary-combination (keyboarded) instruments, and mostly - overwhelming, really - the former. I've never played anything chord-based. So key has mostly been a question of things like, oh, simplifying notation, or what range is handled on an individual instrument, the specific harmonics given even-tempering, and all that. It never occured to me that the base-note of each note in the scale of a particular key forms the basis of a specific chord founded on that note, rather than any chord that could start on that note, and that all the members of that chord in that key are going to be out of that specific scale, thus using its specific harmonics, which makes the progression of scales based on a particular key's scale be major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished, major.

Anyway, they weren't actually teaching the harmonics part, they were just listing the chords you get in this one particular key, but I looked at the list and thought wait... and played with chords in my head for a minute, and then with a keyboard for a couple of minutes... and now chords and keys finally really make sense.

Comments

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Well, cool, glad you figured that out. Theory's pretty dry at times, until it clicks.

[sutures1.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, yes! That's a really cool thing to discover. I remember when I discovered it too. Then you get into inversions, and how *relative* minors really are "relative" to the initial key that they're in, e.g. in a C Major key with a chord of C-E-G, the relative minor is Am (move a third down from that and take away the top note for A-C-E); and you can mess around with blues progressions, and on and on. Isn't it fun?

Ellen

[solarbird]

Yeah, it's kinda like, "Oh look - tools!" I mean, I can whip out melodies and counterpoints and stuff pretty well (or so I am told, writing that claim terrifies me for some reason) but chords have been a total mystery. Now I have the theory. Yay!