Photo courtesy of Josh Tidsbury
Creating performance backing tracks can be quite the creative task.
- You want enough similarity between various tracks so your audience feels it's listening to a coherent "band," and not the radio.
- But you don't want your performance backing tracks to be so similar the audience gets bored by the sameness of it all.
One day, while researching the Lydian mode, I chanced upon Rick Beato's Film Scoring 101 — The Lydian Mode and a whole new avenue of arranging performance backing tracks opened up for me.
At 16:24 Rick Beato begins a discussion of spread (or open) triads. I was dumbfounded. So simple. So effective.
(In it's simplest form, take a major triad like C major (C - E- G) and move the middle note (the E) up (or down) an octave.)
Immediately, I made a copy of one of my performance background tracks, then changed the basic keyboard chords to spread (or open) triads.
Rick Beato is so right, it "opens up" the sound.
I kept the new arrangement! And I made the same change to other performance backing tracks I thought would benefit from the sound.
Rick Beato's "Everything Music" series includes a Music Theory Lesson — Spread Triads that explains more and offers many more examples.
Google "spread open triads" and... a wealth of theory and application is at your fingertips.
New (big) learning for me: Even if you don't compose film scores, YouTube has many excellent film-scoring lessons a singer-songwriter (creating performance backing tracks) can learn from.
Warmest aloha,
Cat
