No, it's not a remake of "When Harry met Sally", but rather a new track in the Folktronix vein. This one combines two tunes with a fairly similar harmonic structure: an Israeli folktune about King David, roughly translated as "David with the beautiful eyes" and an English tune "Sally free and easy".
The Israeli tune is in a marvelous scale which goes A, Bb, C#, D, E, F, G. The chords normally used in this scale are A, Gm and possibly Dm. One could say that it's actually the key of D minor (convert the A# to Bb and it is the D harmonic minor scale) but the centre here is definitely A. I was playing around with this tune a few weeks ago, thinking that I ought to introduce a little oriental music to the the British material, so this snippet (only eight bars) was floating around my head.
I have been considering "Sally" for some days; the chords of the first part are A and GMaj7 alternating. I used a very similar chord structure for a song several years ago, although that was set to a 12/8 time signature, and the thought had crossed my mind to use the same backing track. When I did try this quickly, the tune didn't flow well, so this idea was dropped.
Then a delicious thought waltzed in: why not play "Sally" in a sort of minor key, using the chords A and Gm - and then of course I realised that I could combine it with the David tune.
So, first we have two verses of the 'David' tune, a little break, the minor 'Sally' tune, another break and then the major 'Sally' tune. There aren't many repeats because the tune is set to a fairly slow pace (80 bpm), and all of the above lasts about four and a quarter minutes, which is definitely long enough.
The sequencing went extremely fast, as I near enough knew exactly what I wanted. Friday afternoon/night is a good time for this, as there is quiet all around, and I'm relaxed, not being bothered by anything else. One nice piece of serendipity was a little riff/arpeggio which I constructed. This is the sort of thing which whirls around the stereo spectrum and tries to add spice whilst being unobstrusive. An interesting thing which I have noted is that when using a digital delay of a few beats, the resulting arpeggio when heard from afar seems to have a different structure from what it really does. As a result of this, I am writing more interesting patterns which correspond to what I hear in the background.
After completing the MIDI file (and having dinner in-between), it was time to transfer to Reason. This can often be a drawn out task, as the sounds available are so much richer than those in the MIDI sequencer and often influence the original notes. This time, however, I was able to find a happy mixture fairly quickly, although the balance took some time to get right. As a garnish, I added a few drum loops, and now the whole thing comes over very bright.
It's interesting to note that I started the Folktronix project with slow, dreamy tunes mainly in triple time, and ended it with upbeat tracks in four with drum loops. "My Lagan Love" is still wandering around my head, searching for a good approach, and this is definitely a slow, dreamy one. According to the file which I downloaded, it moves between 3 and 5, although the test version which I sequenced according to how I hear the song was completely in 3. I haven't decided to use the melody which I hear or the "official" version.
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