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Category: Noodles
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Songwriting – Where Are Your Songs?
Sometimes I’m asked at gigs and it catches me off guard. It’s always a difficult question to answer succinctly to a stranger, and causes me to stutter and stammer incoherently. “I’ve always done it”, is as lame a reason as it is true. Songwriting, that is to say. But to me it’s all rather obvious…
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There are three types of musical memory…
…that I can think of: namely; (1) muscle memory which enables the fluent playing of the guitar, (2) that which enables aural recognition of intervals when hearing them and, (3) that which enables recall of which chords are diatonic to which keys, their voicings, and their placement on the fingerboard. All three need attention on…
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Too Much Introspection?
Lurking around online guitar communities one’s bound to come across a variety of opinions on this, that, and the other to do with the best example of this and the best way to do that. It’s all excellent fodder for contemplation and is occasionally informative. Most of what one reads is, though, borne out of…
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Music-making and chaos
My musings on musical invention earlier have led me on, by way of consideration of the randomness of the creative process, to wondering whether chaos, in it’s scientific sense, might have some part to play. As difficult as it is for me to imagine a cause for the truly random event, I can think of…
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Songwriting and “Inspiration”
What is the nature of the faculty for inventing music? When I think about “inspiration” – that white heat of spontaneous creativity – which may last moments only, I realise that there is no analytic thought involved. It comes as a priori knowledge of what is musically right and fitting as it is being played…
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Noodling with form
One of the effects of my listening to so much classical music (particularly symphonies) is that I appear to have developed an ear for forms such as rondo, sonata, minuets, etc. Out of curiosity, I’ve also read a little about the historical development of these forms. Even more curiously, I’ve been pondering how they might…
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Noodling with words
As I wander from internet forum to bulletin board and back again, I come across certain topics that come up repeatedly like the sunrise. One of these is a question about the relative priority of music or lyrics when it comes to songwriting. If I pipe up and post a reply it is usually a…
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Noodling with scales
How many useful scales are there – or how many would be of interest to me? Modes are one set of scales that seem to get an inordinate amount of attention from fingerstyle guitar players (and others) these days. I guess it’s their folky and archaic sound world. Arabic and other eastern scales have been…
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Noodling with harmony
The guitar seems to have a tonal centre around G major meaning the further you go to the dominant and sub-dominant sides from there, the tougher it becomes to play. (I’m talking acoustic fingerstyle guitar as distinct from, say Jazz, particularly played on electric.) There is a jump in difficulty when you reach B major…
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Diminished 7th Chords
These mongrel chords are the Crewe Junction of the harmonic world. You can come from many places to them and depart from them to many more. But they worry me insofar as I suspect they could be used to cover up a multitude of sins. They strike me as potentially lazy solutions to musical problems.…
