E Dorian

Throughout October, I was toying with a chord sequence which I developed, trying to turn it into a song. I think that the fact that I was toying or dabbling means that I wasn't very happy with it. About a week ago, I sat at the piano and played the sequence once again, trying to find a tune which would work; after knocking around for a bit, I discovered that I was playing a song written by someone else (I don't recall now which song, not that it matters) and that the rhythm had changed from 4/4 to 6/8. I started to sequence this variation, but didn't get very far.

After a few days cogitation, I decided to start afresh, keeping only an instrumental portion from the song. I decided arbitrarily that the song would use the E Dorian scale (E F# G A B C# D), and unusually for me, all the chords used (at least, in the verse) are based on this scale: Em F#m G A Bm and D. I quickly developed a 15 bar sequence for the verse and even built a complete arrangement. 

As someone noted on the Music Practice and Theory stack exchange site, this scale doesn't really have the concept of perfect cadences (e.g. B -> Em); the normal cadence for the Dorian mode is D -> Em. Thinking about this, I decided to reverse the chords in the last three bars of the verse, from Em D A to A D Em, as this would have a better 'cadential' feel. This meant that I had to change several bars in the arrangement. Sitting down once more at the piano in order to develop a tune, I realised that I needed a 16th bar to the verse; back to the sequencer in order to add this bar to every verse, and then restructure the drum loops. The tune may be a bit too high for me to sing comfortably: it ranges from D above middle C to C# an octave higher. Lowering the key by two or three semitones would bring it into my comfort zone, although I have reached that high C# without help in the past.

That's all behind me now. The song - or rather, the arrangement - is now complete, at least until I have some more ideas. All that's left to do is write the words. I haven't given this much thought as I was waiting for the melody to settle down. The current idea is to call the song 'Wide awake', where the lyrics are something like 'Wide awake at five past one, the daily grind has just begun; wide awake at ten past two, ......'. I don't know whether those words even fit the new rhythm and I'm unsure as to whether this is a topic which will maintain an entire song.