Traction

With all this thinking about theory and philosophy about music, stuck somewhere between a strong belief in instinctive advancement of harmony (see my previous posts) and my own insecurities about overusing diatonicism, I’ve found it quite difficult to write music over the last month or so. I’ve put a lot of ideas to paper, but whenever it is completely diatonic I feel like I’m not progressing, and if it’s harmonically adventurous, I worry that it is contrived… I’m finding all this thinking and reading is making me over-analyze everything. My brain seems to have a lasso around the ankles of my creativity…

That’s not to say that the reading and theorizing is not useful - I think it just takes time to internalize the ideas into my subconscious where they belong. This is beginning to happen I think.

This track I’ve been writing over the last week is making me feel like I’m getting back on track. It feels like any diversions from diatonicism are natural and instinctive, and it’s got some pop energy but is moving away from the pop shackles of chord progressions… If there are chord progressions they are often kind of smeared - the lines between one chord and the next are kind of fuzzy.

The other thing that is making this really enjoyable to write is that all of the ideas are based on a three note pattern of 1-2-5, and various transpositions and incarnations of that set.

There is a lot more work to do on this yet - the parts need to be refined and the structure is currently not very sophisticated. It’s very section-section-section and needs to flow and develop better I think. But the basic ideas are here.

http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Fchrisperren%2Fonetwofive-demo&secret_url=falseonetwofive demo by Chrisperren