Here is the video that started this blog. It is a stop-motion animation of my song Flying Dream, as it moves in harmonic space. It’s a preview of what the blog is all about. Red = bass, yellow = melody, and orange = the harmonies. Be Love is the second full song video I did….
I often have the pleasure of singing at one of Steve Key’s Songwriters At Play showcases. These are held several times a week in San Luis Obispo area. There’s a lot of talent in the county, and Steve books many good traveling acts. These tend to be excellent shows. Brian Jeffrey is one of those…
I want to show you some lattice movies of how I’ve used blue tritones in my own music. Real Girl has several examples. The clearest is a guitar lick in the chorus: That 7b5 is tasty over the bVI chord. For an instant, it makes a “barbershop seventh,” the 7th harmonic of the root. Here…
My new song video, Real Girl, contains many examples of consonance and dissonance, tension and resolution. In my last post, I extracted a phrase from the song and slowed it way down to illustrate how the bass and melody dance, creating and resolving tension in several different ways. Here is the last half of that…
There is a passage, in my song Real Girl, that clearly showcases both kinds of dissonance — the kind that comes from harmonic distance, and the kind that comes from reverse polarity. This melodic passage occurs many times in the song, and it contains a rather dizzying series of tensions and resolutions. My friend Jody…
Here is my third stop-motion animation of a full song. Real Girl uses a custom nine-note scale. It occupies the Southeast quadrant of the lattice, the zone of the natural minor, with two added notes — the 7, which allows for a major V chord in the progression, and the 7b5, a blue note that…
A few weeks ago, I unexpectedly recorded a charming version of Real Girl. I’d been plugging away at the song all afternoon, taking videos to watch and critique, when my housemate walked in. She and I always make each other laugh, no matter what is going on. I don’t know why, we just look at…
A few days ago I got myself a Zoom Q2HD recorder. It’s a good stereo sound recorder with fixed-focus HD video, great for quick ‘n’ dirty live recording. I cracked it out right away, and recorded a couple of living room videos, one in San Francisco and one in Shell Beach. Here they are. Hope…
I’ve added a new recording to the Audio page. It’s the first time I’ve consciously written a song using the lattice. The chord progression is especially influenced by how it appears visually. I was moving colored bits of glass around throughout the process, aiming for beauty, tension and resolution. The music tells a small story, of…