Genesis of a new song

Last Saturday (3 Aug), I thought that I would try out the guitar interface that I recently bought. I connected the guitar to the interface and the interface to my mobile computer, then started playing around. I hit on a slightly unusual chord sequence that features the Bb6/9 chord (shown below); if I remember correctly, this chord is used in 'Blue river'.

After recording sixteen bars of chords, I tried recording a tune over what I was playing. Here I discovered that either the interface or the computer has long latency (i.e. the amount of time between playing a note and hearing it played back). This made recording over a previously recorded track impossible. 

The chord sequence itself was interesting, so I started transcribing it into the MIDI sequencer. Transcribing the chords was not a problem, but when I started transcribing what I thought the melody was, it seemed not to fit a 4/4 bar. This might well be due to the fact that I'm not very skilled at transcribing note durations - I'll enter a phrase into the sequencer, play it back then fiddle with it until it sounds like what I imagined in my head. OK, I said to myself, maybe the time signature should be 5/4; why not - this will make it even more interesting.

At first I sequenced the notes of the tune using what I could call the 'Mission Impossible' (MI) rhythm: two dotted crotchets followed by two single crotchets. This is useful if I am turning a song that was previously in 4/4 into 5/4, but now seems a little hackneyed to my ears.

I left the song for a week as I had other things to do. I resumed work on Friday (9 Aug) when I starting improving the quality of the melody by discarding the MI rhythm. I managed to get a certain amount done, but this was proving to be hard, so I started working on an instrumental introduction that also was not based on the MI rhythm.

On Saturday afternoon, I continued work and completed the melody for the verse. I then started building the complete structure of the song: introduction, verse, link, verse, bridge, instrumental, verse, coda. I tried out various combinations of instruments playing different types of accompaniment, but I knew that this would be temporary as everything would change once I imported the MIDI file into Reason.

A few hours later, I had an idea: there was an arpeggio that was 'originally' played on the vibraphone, but this didn't sound too good so I moved it to a Rhodes electric piano. My idea was to take this arpeggio and distribute it between three single voice synths, where one is panned centre, one panned hard left and one panned hard right. The effect was so good in Reason that I used the arpeggios more frequently in the arrangement and reduced the amount of background pad.

And this is currently where the song stands. I'll listen to it over the next week or so, both in order to imagine improvements in the arrangement, and also to start writing words.

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