Sometimes, late at night, I get bored practicing Jazz and really just want to do random music. When I get those urges, I'll turn on the recorder and just let it run, no edits other than to cut down on dead space in the tracks.
It took me a bit to get my guitar situated, so you might have to listen to the repetitive beat for a few minutes to get to something interesting.
I’m working on a funny song about founder status in NYC, and I thought it would be fun to get people to shoot me lyric lines over twitter to include in the final song. The hook in the song is based on Jay-Z “Hustla”, but it’ll be way cheesier since I’m not Jay-Z. Here’s what I got for the chorus/hook so far:
I'm a founda baby! And I want you to know I'm not a nerd Thanks to my VC dough
I intended to move my content onto the Internet Archive to avoid slamming the site with .mp3 downloads. The music I’m putting is all CC licensed non-commercial, so there’s really no point in keeping it on my site if IA will do so many cool things for me.
Well, in two days I transfered about 6G of just these three .mp3 files. That’s pretty cool, and thanks to all the people who listened to it. I’ve got more stuff in the works, like actual songs this time. Watch for something later tonight.
I've lately been playing around with a Indonesian gamelan scale called the pelog scale. It's a strange scale that is almost a blues scale, but with just enough odd tones that it has a strange "evil" or menacing sound. I played with the scale on a piano at first, just checking out what it sounds like with the western version of tuning, and then I worked a few forms of it out on the guitar. What I noticed is there's a few chord progressions you can do with it, but that the best ones are chords that are adjacent (a half-step different). In fact, as long as the high notes of the scale match the high notes of the chord it can sound pretty close to a fit.
The first chords I tried were just [: Amaj Bbmaj :] repeated in
a vamp. This would fit, but it was kind of boring unless I had a ton of
distortion, and I didn't really like the sound. I didn't make any recordings
of this since it didn't fit the direction I wanted to go. It also sounds half
decent with power chords, but again only with some distortion to give it that
evil emo death metal feel.
This is a simple test I did for Giles Bowkett last week. I was
talking about how Pat Martino had a weird
(brilliant?) treatise on using minor arpeggios over every chord you can use
in Jazz. I took a simple [Dmaj7 | B7#5b9 | E-7 | A7#5b9]
progression and I played entirely minor riffs over it.
It is a cool effect, but the primary purpose for me is that it reduces the amount of things I need to keep track of when playing. Truth is I'm way better at bizarre complex harmonies than I am at playing over them. By figuring out how to only play minor and diminished forms over all chords, I can cut down on what I have to deal with.