It's all in the voicing

About a month and a half ago, I blogged about a simple song that I had written, "There she goes". Recently, I've had the song playing in my head, but as opposed to the simple 4/4 rhythm of the original, I've been hearing it with a 6/8 rhythm. On Saturday I got the chance to sit down and create a new version of this song with the ternary rhythm. I haven't been too successful in sequencing songs with this rhythm from scratch, but this time it worked. After completing the sequencing (and discovering that two bars in the original are equivalent to four bars in the new version), I sang the song and mixed it. 

The morning after, I listened to the song once and found it terrible (too slow), although I should listen to it again. There was, however, one thing that could be saved from this version: at one stage in the song there's a Bb chord, but somehow this got sequenced as the triad C-G-D (over Bb in the bass) - an interesting sound. I took this chord and put it back into the original version, improving it somewhat.

Today I was thinking about this chord: it's a quartal chord, with intervals of fourths (D-G, G-C) as opposed to thirds as used in most chords. Whenever I see a quartal chord, I see it as a some form of a suspended chord, in this case probably Gsus4. But what happens when one adds the Bb in the bass? My next thought was that this was a Gm(add 11) chord, a strange construction. But then I thought that it could also be viewed as a Bb6/9 (no 5) chord, not that I've ever considered such a sequence: Bb D G C. I played this on the piano and it has a really nice and spaced out quality - that's because of the fourths D-G-C. When I played the tune of 'There she goes' along with this chord, the tune adds an F at the top, yet another fourth - Bb D G C F. But this can also be seen as a 'complete' Bb6/9 chord and is even more 'spaced out' or 'airy': it's a chord that allows its notes to breathe.

I've read about 6/9 chords but never appreciated them, mainly because I was playing them in closed voicing, i.e. Bb D F G C. This sounds cluttered and not very useful. But the moment that I move the F up an octave, I get the open voicing that I accidentally obtained in 'There she goes'. The sixth and ninth are decorative notes and don't really affect the quality of this chord chord that most naturally resolves to an F chord: the Bb resolves down to A, the D resolves to C, the G resolves to F and the C and F stay as they are. We now have a F major first inversion.

I'm going to play more with this open voicing and see where it leads; as opposed to the sort of harmony that I usually employ, where the chords make the running and the melody is something placed on top, it sounds like this chord can support an extended melody without having to change or resolve to another chord.