I've been working on a new song for the past ten days. Although the tune and chords have been settled, the arrangement is about 70% finished at the moment. Each verse lasts 24 bars that can be subdivided into two loops of eight bars followed by two loops of four bars. The first five bars of the eight bar loop are in D myxolidian (D C Bm Am G) but then the tonality changes, possibly to D minor (F E A). I suspect that the four bar loop can be seen as in D minor, although this tonic chord does not appear in the sequence (Bb F Gm A).
The bridge is definitely in D minor and is influenced by a recent video by David Bennett Piano, where he discusses songs containing three bar loops. I spent some time playing various such sequences on the guitar (the verse sequence was composed 'in my head') until I decided on Dm7, CMaj7 and Gm add 9. Sometimes this last chord is replaced by BbMaj7 - they only differ by one note, G being replaced by F. This sequence is repeated seven times at the moment.
I imported the MIDI sequence into Reason yesterday where a huge surprise awaited me. When I played the sequence with a rough mix, every note was sustaining almost infinitely; this has never happened before. Changing the instruments around and reimporting didn't make any difference. Eventually I realised what had been causing this sustain: a MIDI controller message. As it happens, I had wanted to improve the sustain in the sound created by the MIDI sequencer (expecting that this would have no effect in Reason as R generally ignores MIDI messages) so I had added a controller #64 message (sustain pedal) at the beginning of every track. Once I removed these messages, I began to obtain the sound that I was expecting.
Normally I deal with sustain in Reason, but it's good to know that I can achieve this by adding a controller #64 message with a moderate value such as 10.
The song itself is fairly normal and restrained: a decent beginning for any
new album that might appear in the future.
Title | Tags | ||
---|---|---|---|
434 | 50 words for snow - Kate Bush | Kate Bush | |
991 | Repairing the Kindle | Kindle | |
1098 | More on Delphi 7/Hebrew/Win 10 | Programming, Delphi, Unicode | |
1446 | Mike Nesmith, RIP | Obituary | |
1563 | Could it be that it's over? A rant about current Israeli politics. | Israel, 1984, Yehonatan Geffen |
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