As regular visitors to this site
know, I like to play around with "chord on chord" stuff.
Sometimes my experiments get out
of hand.
Today's featured ditty, "Six Bars
on Wagoner", would be an example.
I believe I may have accidentally
created the world's first six-bar pantonal blues! (Oops...)
In the notation below, I'll try and
give you an idea of what was going through my mind
when I came up with this; it started
out as an improvisation, then got tweaked a little.
The large chord symbols and scale
names above the music represent (more or less)
what was going through my mind at
the time.
The small chord symbols below the
music are stock Bb blues changes.
There's a soundfile, too.
(WARNING: "warm archtop sound" devotees
will be offended.)
To download and view notation/tab, click here
(requires Adobe Acrobat Reader)
Click here to hear "Six Bars on Wagoner":
Part of the
overall weirdness is due to the bass line;
I generally
avoided playing the root notes of the "stock changes" whenever possible,
drawing instead
from alterations and extensions of the chords.
Basically,
the melodic scheme came from thinking of every chord in a Bb blues as being
altered,
then playing
on chordal structures and scales found within the alterations.
That's where
ideas like the F# and C#m triads over a C7 (bar 5) came from.
The little
"blues cell" (1st beat of every even numbered bar)
gives us just
a little familiar sonic information,
but it always
winds up going somewhere queasy!
That's it for
now!
I hope you'll
enjoy this little bit o' madness...