Hi David,

I wish Paul would come over and stay a few days at my house. I am sure he would like my wife's cooking and we could go ride around in the boat. I would go to great lengths to protect his privacy.

I have a habit of talking to myself actually. It may seem strange but everyone knows I have PTSD so I can get away with it...lol

In a quest to find better melodies I started to wonder if they had elements in common. They are often short phrases that have to start and stop somewhere. They generally need to resolve to something or have some feeling of connection to the next phrase or two but they need to resolve or we are left hanging or worse.

I started sustaining a C chord in my left hand to construct melodies. I found that if I started on the fifth, songs I know just started to appear. So I went looking for songs that started on the fifth.

If you sustain a chord and start an octave up, that note will obviously sound good. It is perhaps the most common place to start a melody. Leaving passing tones out of the discussion for the moment and assuming one is not looking for discordance purposely only certain notes are available. Obviously, the minor second sounds discordant as hell. The D note is the 9th which can be both a melody note and change the C major chord to C add 9. The minor third...well you get the point. So what this teaches me is not so much which note to start on but which not to start on or use.

There are other ways to look at these issues from a mathematical perspective of the physics of sound but that is a pretty arcane subject for most musicians.

I need to buy some well-written sheet music to analyze some of the classic music. None of us learn music in a vacuum so there is nothing strange in picking good ideas from the music you like.

We have a tradition in the blues world that if I play the song more than twice I wrote it...lol

There is a lot to learn.

Billy

Last edited by Planobilly; 08/26/21 02:41 PM.
“Amazing! I’ll be working with Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Buddy Rich, and you’re telling me it’s not that great of a gig?
“Well…” Saint Peter, hesitated, “God’s got this girlfriend who thinks she can sing…”