creative accountability, pushing notes

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

Most of my time at the keyboard today was spent on piano-playing drills, but I did manage to load up "deep experiment" briefly to rework the chord progression once again. I ended up largely undoing what turned out to be shoddy work at the end of my last session with it. By "shoddy work," I mean that I had erred in identifying the 7th intervals for the chords—so the chords were simply wrong, and after fixing them, the inversions sounded more chaotic and didn't really provide the cohesiveness I thought was there.

I returned the chords to their simple forms and shuffled the progression around to a better-sounding-at-this-time iv - v - III - i (was previously III - iv - v - i). It feels a little like a bridge part, so I feel compelled to revisit it again later—but I'm left again with the feeling that I'm in a very naive place with this effort, and a little doubtful that I can "experiment" my way into something compelling.

I tried to read more about scale degrees and chord functions, but the advice I've found so far seems either too simple (like the introductory guidance about 2-5-1) or too far ahead of where I am now (I found what seemed like undergrad-level academic material describing the different functions of the third scale degree in different keys).