A short while ago I received a phone out of the blue, a call from my musical past.
In 1982 I’d played a gig at the Princeton Art Museum with a fabulous lead guitarist: Les Scharfstein.
After the gig, Les took off for New York and… I always wondered what happened to him.
Anyways, it was Les who — out of the blue and from 37 years ago — left a message for me.
When we did catch up voice-to-voice, one thing we talked about was musical creativity.
In with that topic was the notion that a songwriter might take a chord sequence from another song — could be a known song, but needn’t be — and “force” him/herself to compose with that immutable sequence.
So last night, I collected the chord sequences from five songs. Two of those songs had relatively simple sequences, the other three were more adventuresome.
This afternoon, I picked Chord Sequence #1 and… got to work.
I decided to block in the sequence with piano and drums in Logic Pro X.
First reaction: almost an irritation at being tied to someone else’s sequence.
Sure, I might have come up with a similar sequence on my own, but that would have been after noodling away on the guitar for days, and I’d have a melody. Here, the chords felt stark, naked.
But as I worked with the sequence, I started to get ideas.
This sequence was fairly simple, so I found myself playing with simple melodies early on, then more complicated, more rhythmic melodies later, over the same chords.
I couldn’t resist transposing the verses and chorus up 2 semitones when it came ‘round to repeating them. Weirdly, the transposition is almost seamless. I’ve made a note to myself to find out why, theoretically.
I’m going to let it sit for a bit… then get my guitar out and play along… see where it all goes…
Stay tuned…
Thanks Les!
