No really, I’ve been meaning to write.. its bad of me not to.. I’ll just post whatever random, who knows what, comes out of me tonight.

Lately I’ve been a little depressed.. I suppose it being mothers day season, this my first since my mom passed, plays a roll in this depression. In any event, I’m not getting much of anything done, or haven’t this week.. my psyche has seen better days…

In a defiance of all this, I cracked open DP a few moments ago.. started loading instruments, playing around… feeling like “I just want to be productive, it doesn’t matter how.” This is a good place to start.. I mean start anywhere, start where you are, just work at it.. It doesn’t matter if what you do is of any value, just get those damn wheels turning.In truth there’s probably grand possibilities all around.. and if I can just get out of this funk, I might just realize a few of them, and there by escape total doom.

In my little music project.. which probably wont reach “bean hill” status.. I fired up Native Instruments piano program.. for the first time.. and fooled around a little bit.. “oh, you can do quarter tone scales in this?”

Quarter tones is like the “Charles Ives” school of microtonalism. This is a slightly out there planet for me to talk about.. but I generally don’t give quarter tone music too much respect in the microtonal department. The reason has to do with justintonation… Basically.. once upon a time a musical system was created, that everyone uses today.. only trouble is that the pitches are all wrong.. Justintonation fixes this problem.. I’m generally not all that geared to justintonation because.. well just because of how my music is structured.. so what I normally do is.. “abstract from the traditional diatonic system.” What I mean by this is.. I start on the planet everyone else is playing on.. and sorta move out from there.. though I clearly don’t play by earthling rules!

Anyway, so quarter tone tuning is something that actually would work with the structure of my music.. but the problem is.. though it can come closer to correct pitch relationships then what everyone else is using.. it doesn’t quite get there..

My thinking is.. well.. 2 fold basically. #1 You can have instruments that are expressive with pitch, and #2 You could have different tunings going on at the same time. Let me explain the implications:

If you where to start with a quarter tone tuning system.. and then you were dealing with instruments that were expressive in terms of pitch.. there pitches would, one way or another, fluctuate around that quarter tone foundation.. inside of those fluctuations.. its at least possible that you could have the proper note relationship thing working.. in the justintonation sense of it.

Having multiple tunings.. means the cross relationships.. between the pitches of different instruments with different tunings.. could create the proper pitch relationships (particularly if we add the pitch expressive layer to the mix.)Working this way would create certain organizational challenges.. but the results could be interesting.. since I would be working in a way where I can’t really predict the results too well… and this often leads to interesting music. 

A few latter:

As I read what I’ve written I notice something. Most of the time, at least since I put together the new studio, I’ve been working hard to reach square one.. to do work that is.. “not sucky.” I mean.. its like you’re “pre good at this.” It’s like you have to work real hard to reach results that are.. not terrible.. but when we look at me working with music.. I throw some stuff out there, without giving it the least bit of thought… and look how sophisticated it is!?  Just seemed like a worth while observation.. anyway, let me post this.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 7:20 am and is filed under Komplete & Kore, Microtonalism, life, musical composition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.