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SongTrellis |
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A new toy for you I have a new toy for you to play with. It's made of software because software is what I build. It's a musical toy, because the SongTrellis website is all about music. I'm proud to call it a toy because it's operation is simple, it's fun to use if you like music, it's easy to explain how to use it, and you can do a seeming infinity of amusing things with it. Your new toy is called the SongTrellis Tunetext Player. How to use it Here's how to use it. Click on this URL (to construct it, we've added /tunetext to the end of the SongTrellis homepage URL): http://www.songtrellis.com/tunetext A window will launch titled Tunetext Chord Entry that contains a large textarea rectangle where you can type in a list of chord names. Click in the textarea, and type (or paste) the following line of text into it:CMA7,G9sus We're asking the Tunetext Player to play us a CMA7 chord followed by a G9sus chord. Now press the "Submit Chords" button on that page. In a second or two, the chords you typed into the textarea will show up on a music staff in your browser and your browser will play them. A large-ish URL will have been placed in your browser's type-in field which told the browser to play your chords. You can copy this URL from your browser and paste it into an email message, include it in a posting in SongTrellis SongDiscussions or post it as a link in a blogThe jazz pianist Bill Evans created a wonderful improvisation that he called the "Peace Piece", by playing these two chords over and over at a slower tempo, and inventing a new melody above these chords. We can cause the Tunetext player to play us 8 repetitions of the "Peace Piece" chords by typing 8 copies of the CMA7,G9sus between the () pair like this with every chord name separated by a comma: The "&bpm=60" at the end of the URL tells the Tunetext player to play your chords at 60 beats per minute, slower than the 200 beats per minute that it usually chooses. You can type any number of chord names within the "chords:" parentheses, and cause tunetext to play you different harmony. Here are some examples: This plays a very old harmonic pattern, that musicians call the I-IV-V-I in the key of C. http://www.songtrellis.com/tunetext?text=chords:(CMA,FMA,G7,CMA) This is an example of the ii-V-I chord progression in the key of C Major, a building block employed in innumerable jazz tunes and songs for Broadway shows and the movies. http://www.songtrellis.com/tunetext?text=chords:(Dmi7,G7,CMA7) Here's a cycle of 7th chords that follows the cycle of 5ths descending:
Here's a 12 bar Blues progression in C: http://www.songtrellis.com/tunetext?text=chords:(C7,F7,C7,C7,F7,F7,C7,C7,G7,F7,C7,C7) Here's a cycle of mi7 chords that visits all 12 possible roots chromatically (the chord root moves down by a minor 2nd interval with each chord): http://www.songtrellis.com/tunetext?text=chords:(Cmi7,Bmi7,Bbmi7,Ami7,Abmi7,Gmi7,Gbmi7,Fmi7,Emi7,Ebmi7,Dmi7,Dbmi7,Cmi7) OK, these last five examples mostly demonstrate hoary old music theory but are not much fun. Take a look at the Chord Grid on SongTrellis. There are fifty types of chord types listed down the left side of the grid that can be built on twelve possible root notes. In each of those chord types a different stack of anywhere from 3 to 6 different notes are played at the same instant, which produces a certain characteristic kind of sound. You can build any of the chord names that tunetext will respond to by choosing one of the twelve possible root names listed in the grid and following that by any of the 52 chord type names listed. (eg. E7(b9b13), Ab13, Dsus11) Here's a bunch of the chord types played on C roots: and the same set of chord types built on Ab Yesterday, I decided I wanted a progression that alternated the sound of Cmi6 with another type of chord. So for no particular reason except that it was the last chord type listed on the chord grid, I tried to follow Cmi6 with different types of the dim(MA7) chord. In about 30 seconds I found that I really liked the sound of Cmi6 followed by Ebdim(MA7). http://www.songtrellis.com/tunetext?text=chords:(Cmi6,Ebdim(MA7)) These two chord together sound good together and can be repeated any number of times to good effect These chords sound like they leave you in suspense and that your ear would appreciate it if you could visit a third chord to relax the tension. I searched about and used a tiny bit of chord theory that I know and figured out that it was likely that GMA7 would sound good after Ebdim(MA7). If you can find two or three chords that sound good played in a cycle like Bill Evans did for the "Peace Piece" or I did in my experiment tomorrow, you have collected enough harmonic material to write a new piece of music. There are other tools available on the SongTrellis site, which I'll talk about soon, that make it easy to invent a new melody once you have a chord sequence in hand that you like the sound of. New knobs for the toy First, an instrument knob: If you add text like this Inst:44, to the beginning of a chord list in a Tunetext URL you can change the instrument that Tunetext will use when it hums your chord progression for you. There are 127 different instruments built into your web browser. This is called the Standard MIDI instrument set. You can try each of them out by choosing a number from 1 to 127 and typing it after the inst: specification within the "chords:" parentheses in this last URL. Here's a link to the list of the Standard MIDI instruments that those different instrument numbers will invoke for you. When you add text like this &bpm=90 to the end of a tunetext URL, that causes the Tunetext player to perform your chord progression at the tempo you specify measured in beats per minute. The valid bpm settings are a number from 1 to 999. The bpm settings that sound musical are between 50 snd 350. Here's my creation played at 100 bpm and at 250 bpm If you add '&chordcolor=1' to the end of a tunetext URL, that will cause the Tunetext Player to color the notes in a way that lets you easily identify the function of each note in the chords it generates. The notes that are left black are chord roots. Red notes label pitches that are a perfect 5th notes above the chord root. A pitch that forms a major 3rd interval with the root is colored a light blue. A pitch that forms a minor 3rd with the root interval is a dark blue. Minor 7ths are golden colored. Major 7ths are silvery blue. blog comments powered by Disqus
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Last update: Monday, July 19, 2010 at 4:22 PM. |
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