HS Tech gave me the idea. He wrote about keys and the colors they represent to him. I find it very personal because I would assign different colors to the keys. But there could be a common factor when it comes to the preference for certain keys. For example, I'm not particularly fond of flat keys. I have used them, especially in educational works, but I prefer sharp keys. I find flat keys too soft and boring. Strangely enough, as a teenager, I preferred A-flat major. I think I've become 'harder' over the years. And when I have to choose a key, I prefer E minor, even though I modulate freely.Certainly, the instrument you play influences your choice. Guitarists are more likely to opt for E major over B-flat major, even though you can easily retune a guitar.Furthermore, I have an aversion to keys with many accidentals. Then I have to think too much. Composing should be relaxing. If the music doesn't flow spontaneously, allowing my thoughts to wander while composing, I'd rather go cycling.
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I'm a guitarist myself and prefer to play in keys that offer the best compromise between range and facility. F is a bastard. G-E are good. I tend to hover between A and C, but you can't go wrong with E for the low string. You can easily retune a guitar, but I prefer to leave it.
This is all based around blues and rock-based improvising, though, with bends and vibrato central to the style. Trying to bend a tone or more up on the very low frets isn't fun.
F is not bad, try accompanying a piano playing E flat without a capo... pure nightmare.
When I was younger, I once had to play something in D. I purposely tuned the lowest string down to D instead in order to get a more sonorous tonic chord. :-D Makes the fingering easier, you don't have to finger the low G in a G major chord. But it's very dependent on what chords are in the song though. If you need something that requires fingering the bottom string that could easily break down.
Ah, drop D. I think this entire soundtrack I did is in open D - or rather open C (CGCGCC iirc) to avoid tuning the strings up too much, then capoing the 2nd fret. Lends itself well to flamboyant frontier folk diddlings. https://youtu.be/V9pujNvRPCw?si=FiSn04UEP7vZXD7k
Eb accompaniment is where I would give in and simply tune down. A staple of many rock and blues greats.
I would just make sure I bring a capo with me 😅
At the moment I'm watching the tv series 'Deadwood'. This would be perfect as a opening theme and supporting music. It has an excellent atmosphere. Professional production too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H1BjPmEBm0
Thanks a lot, Rowy. Deadwood has a much more upbeat theme than I assumed it would! I love playing and writing in that style.
Fantastic stuff Dave. Loved the playing, the different feels and the production, top notch. Can you go into further detail as to what this was for?
Oh, you! *flutters fan* It was for a game called TerraTech, a kind of exploratory adventure-action thing. I got in touch on a whim and apparently beat out some biggish names because I was the only one not offering synths. They liked the adventurous, frontier feel it gave to the “you’ve crashed on an unknown world, now go and harvest stuff” narrative. Got an amazing fan reaction too.
Many of the pieces have an exploration and action variant, which follow the same music and rhythm but are very different in execution. Both these tracks would play concurrently in the engine, and then events would trigger on or the other to fade in or out. So when encountering some big killer robot, the music would fade from pleasant slide guitar atmosphere to full-on gunslinging without any jarring.
If you listen to 38:11 you can hear the down-and-nasty iPhone voice memo of me improvising on acoustic that got me the gig and shaped pretty much the entire score landscape of the game - even after I got stealth-replaced and then replaced for real, the new music pretty much followed this style. Overall a pretty negative experience, and I accepted absurdly low rates because I was new, but I got to make some cool music.
I’m glad you like the production - one of the reasons for negativity was that the studio wanted to make their own mix of the music, obliging me to spend a lot of time sending the raw files whilst feeling my skills were being questioned without anyone coming out and saying it. And I’d say their own mix was awful, super compressed and rock-slanted over the intimate folky mix and master I worked on. And that was the version you hear in game. Well, I’m sure you have worse industry tales to tell then me.
38'11" - very cool riffs. I started tapping immediately.
The duplicitous and unethical nature of producers always hacked me off. They play composers off one against the other, egging them on for no extra monetry reward by hinting that one of them is close to getting the contract - just another revision should seal it. Before they know it, someone else has been awarded the contract and worse still, the winner may be having to contend with some of the music the losing composer had written being used as temp tracks. It was one of several reasons I decided to get out.
I do remember one experience about music I worked on being replaced in similar fashion to yours. It was a track I did for a Ford commercial. I was commissioned to do an arrangement of the famous 'Flower Duet' from Delibes 'Lakme'. Initially I sent in a samples demo which was subsequently approved. We then went to Angel Studios in London with a string section, a pianist and me conducting to record the track for real. It sounded very nice and the musos loved it too. I got my cheque and forgot all about it. A few weeks later I caught it on TV and thought the mix sounded a little off and soon after that, Levine, who was on the session, called and asked what had happened. I subsequently found out that they'd gotten so used to the demo that when they heard the real thing they didn't like it. I was mildly incredulous they would choose dull samples over rich live playing, but wasn't surprised and soon got over it because by then I knew the score with agencies and how they operated at times.
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