Crystal Blues

Hi Matt,

Congrats on finishing your first composition made using Composer!

Given that you did not have your MIDI keyboard hooked up to the computer, do I understand correctly that you entered these notes by hand? Had you already composed the song, written down on paper, and copied it into Composer? Or, had you worked out the song on your keyboard, and then manually entered the notes in Composer as you worked out the notes again on your keyboard? Or, did you compose this piece "in your head" (or with your mouse) and then manually entered the notes "from you head" into Composer? I'm curious how you compose, as many folks have different ways of doing this.

Do tell us about how you encoded your name into the notes of the song. This should be interesting.

This song demonstrates a consistent style in chord progressions, rhythms, and melody patterns. I suspect that you comfortable improvising in this style. Good improvisation skills come in handy in composing, even when you cannot take advantage of recording your improvisations. I do recommend, however, that you hook up your MIDI keyboard as soon as possible!

Thanks for showing us your work here. I look forward to hearing and seeing more!

Cheers
-- Mark

Hi people!

First of all I wanted to totally agree with Sherry that jazz and blues are very much alike. I mean, they both employ dominant 7th and major 7th chords, and have accidentals flying everywhere. I wonder why they call accidentals "accidentals" if they're such an important part of music.

About how I composed this song: When I improvise, and I particularly like something that I play, I play it over and over again until it's molded into something that is musically solid. Unfortunately, for me writing down two-handed music on paper with a pencil is not something I'm that good at or enjoy. So to compose Crystal Blues, I composed the main theme on my keyboard (measures 7-14), and wrote that down with Composer (which was very easy.) I used the mouse. The rest of it I composed mostly out of my head with a general idea of what I wanted.

I spent most of my time composing and stopping to listen to what I made -- something I could have never done with pencil and paper. And that's how most of my song fell into place.

Measures 51-70 were a different story, though. I composed that a little less than a year ago with a strong influence from the blues scale. In G minor the blues scale would look like G-Bb-B-C-D-F-G. If you already know this, well...just a reminder! But the 51-70 section seemed to sort of fit with the theme of the song, so I put it in.

And finally, about encoding my name into the piece -- this is what I did. I created a code system that was rooted in the Bb major scale and looked like this:
<font face="Courier">
Bb|A|H|O|V
C |B|I|P|W
D |C|J|Q|X
Eb|D|K|R|Y
F |E|L|S|Z
G |F|M|T|
A |G|N|U|

And my name is Matthew Gruen. So, if I didn't make any mistakes, that turns into

G Bb G G Bb F C / A Eb A F A

</font>
And that's the sequence between measure 71 and measure 74, beat 2.

Sorry if I've gone on for too long, but I guess I had a lot to say!

Thanks for reading
Matt

Hello Matt,

Thanks for describing how you compose. It sounds like you have a good musical memory, which comes in very handy for a composer/

You blues scale encoding of your name into the melody is a fun idea. Where did you pick up this idea? With a blues scale, you can't go wrong-- just about any short sequence of notes in the scale makes sense.

Cheers
-- Mark