Music Lab

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday July 10, 2010 – Music Lab

The regular Music Lab crew has elected to continue meeting, at least from time to time, through the Tuning the Air summer break. We had five on board this morning, including one new arrival to Seattle.

The last time we met, I had introduced a simple exercise in voice leading; choosing notes from a given chord and playing them together, and then moving to the next chord with as little movement as possible, staying put on common notes, moving by whole or half-step when a change is necessary, and possibly by a third when absolutely necessary, but never more. This is a horn player’s bread and butter skill, but for guitarists it tends to be unknown or a mystery. For that Lab I had taken a few bars of Big Rock Candy Mountain as material to work with, since Sgt Bones was working on it for their monthly podcast; seemed relevant. Earlier in the week there had been a casual discussion about the virtues of Willie Nelson’s Crazy, and so for today I had the idea to use as much of that as possible. It contains an interesting assortment of harmonic movements, most very typical of a certain genre of music and something players are likely to encounter often. In particular, in the first 8 bars there are two variations on the sequence: V/II-II-V-I. The bridge and the out-chorus both involve other iconic chord sequences, which I imagine we will take a look at in the future, if this continues to be a useful endeavor.

We began by simply pulsing the chord changes, discovering the relationships. Once the sequence was established, and the players had identified some paths through it, we moved on to playing it in time, in 12/8 bars. I gave IgorK the role of bass player, sounding roots on 1 and 3. I had the remaining 4 players move to circulating their notes, from Ian to Christina to Greg to Carl, with return. Once this pattern settled in it formed a good, though far from easy, 1-2-3 4-5-6 feel; twice through the circulation per bar. Igor moved to roots and fifths. At this point the time ran out. I took a few minutes with Igor to look at where we would move next in developing a strong bass line. More on this in the future, I’ll wager.