Crowd Sourced Blues Generation.

"I woke up this morning.. my blues were all red, 
 Been thinking about, generation instead..
 Chatting with Gandalf, putting thoughts in my head,
 That blues is a sequence, of riffs in a thread.
 Woaah-oh.. maybe you could get some, of my gener-ated-blues.. "

Ok, so, when noodling blues, I have a whole bunch of little tiny riffs, that I glue together based on where I think the music should go next, and when you stop to think about it a bit, the sequencing isn't entirely random.

Perhaps there's enough structure present within the music to allow construction of a system where anyone can contribute to the music, while the system acts as composer & arranger..

Spotify Buffet Picks of the Day.

I was thinking of a Smashie & Nicey themed post given the title.. but I was convinced by Jim the Jedi to avoid that for the sake of the sanity of the blog readers.

I've been listening to Spotify a bit recently, although some of the discussion over their recent (free) usage limit changes is a little offputting, that doesnt change that it does have a huge pile of  music on there. Every now & then, you come across one or two that make you smile...

Real or Fake ?

Thought it'd be worth sharing my thoughts on this one.. I'm sure many people out there prefer the touch & feel of 'real' but others amongst us prefer the greater opportunities provided by 'fake'.

I'm talking Pianos here, or rather Analog vs Digital, or Thing-with-lots-of-strings-and-tiny-hammers vs Thing-with-an-electrical-plug. However you want to describe them, I've played both, used both, abused both, and learnt a few things I tend to love / hate about them. I thought I might share my thoughts on both here...

Old School Piano Demo

So I've been messing with Blues in different keys than Cm...

I mean I can play Cm blues with my eyes shut (this may not be a good thing), but its like 90% muscle memory, and 10% creative input from me. On the advice of my piano tutor, I've been experimenting playing them on other keys, Am, Fm, etc. Normally I'd just hit transpose and be done with it, so I'm happy to discover there is a benefit to attempting this, beyond having a few other targets to transpose to.

While noodling around in Fm blues, a phrase came out that sparked off a little nostalgia, it's all caused by the white/black arrangements and how I like to slide off the blacks to get that nice sorta jazz/blues/waterflowing type effect.. of course Fm blues has different alignments for those notes, which then lends itself to the creation of different little patterns to use rather than the Cm familiar ones.

While experimenting with variants of phrasings over the new alignments, I'd started getting the odd flashback to a demo on the Amiga, with lots of spheres rotating on the screen in a vaguely 3d way, where you could alter the parameters used to generate the animation. All the while in the background of this was a piano tune looping round & round drilling down into your subconcious.

Now, I could go power up my Amiga, root through a tonne of Floppy Disks, and hope to discover the one with the demo, or, I wait a few days, and the name 'Piano Plinker' comes to mind, hit youtube, and bam.. here it is. Enjoy... (It's not the original, but the tune's still there.. just as addictive as ever.)