After spending about a month or six weeks doing nothing but mixing, I started on a new track a few weeks ago. It started out all innocent, a funky piano tune with bass and drums accompaniment. I played the original tune live and edited the hell out of it. But what to do with it? Where to go? I had endless options and headed down at least 20 dead-end paths. Finally I settled on the simplest possible structure: vary the key, but keep the tune essentially the same throughout. Wash, rinse and repeat. It’s not unlike that sixties pop tune, Sunshine, Lollipops, but pure jazz trio, all the way. But how to modulate it?

Do I keep the key the same and alter the starting note? Well, that sure killed the melody in a hurry. I was trying to get into a groove here, not write the next Beach Boys ditty. I tried just altering the key, going up a third or down a third, or going from major to relative minor, but it all just sounded ridiculous.

For like, six days, I went off on a tangent and started adding instruments and effects. All trash. Then tried other variations of the three-part tune. All terrible.

So the other day, I said screw this. I’m going back to my elementary harmony and fart around with some basic modulations. (Incidentally, I was quite concerned about the original key of the piece at the outset. I kind of got stuck in am F/Eb/Ab rut for more than a couple of pieces already and I wanted to do something completely different. So this one was going to be in C#.)

La-la-la, I popped the piece up a fifth for the first variation, and it sounded pretty good. So I continued, editing the midi for about four variations, messing with the rhythm here and there as I went along. Well, donut that I am, it took a whole friggin twenty minutes of hard-core editing to realize I was going to have to go all the way around the circle of fifths if I wanted to get back the beginning. Fuck that! But what else could I do?

So I sat down with an Excel spreadsheet and mapped out the modulations. Hey, I could alternate between 4ths and 5ths! No, that was stupid: in two jumps I’d be back at C#. Duh… How about a pattern of 4/4/5, 4/4/5?

That was almost as daft as pure 5ths or 4th/5ths. Luckily I made a few miscalculations and ended up with a mess that actually worked extremely well, revving the piece with 5ths toward the end.

Then I had to make my bass track match this. I didn’t want it to follow the piano exactly. So I got the bass to change only in the first two of the three parts of the tune, (staying the same in the last two) and the piano would seem to come to meet the bass in the last third. Fucking hell, did that ever work.

So now I feel like big fancy-pants composer guy. The piece already has a friggin magic rhythmic base to it. And now I’m completely gaga over it.

Here’s a little (unmixed) sample from the intro. It starts off with part three of the melody, jumps to part two, then part three plays again. (Part one isn’t heard and starts later.)