[PD] pd-based procedural chord progression database..

[Chuckk Hubbard]

On 8/12/06, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Aug 2006, Chuckk Hubbard wrote:
>
> > It's easy to work a Bb into a theme in C without giving too much away.
>
> Indeed, often the VII is not played much, and until it is played at all,
> you can't distinguish between a ionian and a mixolydian. If a melody is
> supposedly in C ionian but doesn't contain a VII then you consider it as
> being C mixolydian and it wouldn't make much of a difference.
>
> That said, I'd like to say that mixolydian modes are extremely common, and
> arguably more common than ionian ones nowadays! as a proof, think that a
> 7th chord defaults to mixolydian, and you have to call it "major 7th" for
> it to mean ionian.

There's a girl studying composition here who writes kind of new-agey
piano-voice stuff, maybe a la Tori Amos, definitely a la some anime
themes, and we were chatting once (my motivation was not strictly
musical) when she said, "I really like to write mixolydian, I just
feel like that's my mode."  What do you say to that?  "My apartment
seems very mixolydian"?

Since folks are brainstorming on musical structures, I recall reading
something in a book about Bartok, about an idea he tried to use.
Expanding on the idea of a tritone substitution, he built a "key" made
from the circle of 5ths, where you would use 4 keys, minor thirds
apart, and then every root of a chord would be either tonic, dominant,
or subdominant of one of those 4.  For some reason he had two major
keys a tritone apart, and then at the minor thirds between them, minor
keys.  I think his idea was to arbitrarily substitute tonic for tonic,
dominant for dominant, subdominant for subdominant.  E.g.:

F          C          G          C could become
F          F#        G          C, or
Abm     F#       Em(or E7)   C
and so on.  I think a jazz theory teacher somewhere used to mention
third substitution too.  That would be a simple way to take things
outside the usual electronica.  I don't know if it would always sound
good, but hey, Jimi Hendrix didn't always sound good.

-Chuckk

"A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting
air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians."
-Frank Zappa