Hi everyone, in this post I want to introduce you to my work: An arrangement, more specifically, an arrangement based on time signatures changes.
But what is that? (As in my country says: “How do you eat that?”).
- An arrangement (In music) is just changing, adding or removing elements from the original music to create something a little bit different. For example: “Knocking on Haven’s Door” by Gun’s & Roses is an arrangement from Bob Dylan’s song, it has the same melody, chords and lyrics, but the styles are different.
- A time signature it’s just how many pulses we feel in every measure of the music, in a simpler way, determines how we are going to move our head at the rhythm of the music.
Now, as you probably know, we are talking about “Tubular Bells”, if you don’t know, this is the main theme from “The Exorcist” movie (1973), composed by Mike Oldfield in the same year. So let’s talk about this piece and his iconic part: the first 4 minutes.
This piece has an Ostinato on the piano, this ostinato can be written in multiples ways:
(This are just a few possibilitys) This ways depend on many factors like the accent of the melody, chord changes, the other instruments and most importantly: the perception of the listener. But I’m not getting too much into it, I just want you to concentrate in a single number: 15.
So the entire theme is based on this 15 pattern (it changes in one part but that’s all, it come back to the normal stuff)
To understand my arrangement we need to go deeper, to the micro. As you can see in the image we are counting every 2 notes, the next step would be counting every note, so the cicle isn’t on 15 pulses anymore, it’s in 30 instead.
Why we need to do dat?
Well I figured out that the final result has a total of 33 of this little pulses. Maybe you’re wondering how that sounds? Well I strongly recommend you to listen.
This is the final resultLink to DSound
Link to SoundCloud
How I ended up writing this?
My computer have Windows 10 and it have this player named Groove Music I think, so this media player it’s not very good, sometimes when I press the play button it has a little delay, then the music start playin and then it accelerate to compesate that lost time. When that pice was playing, for some reason, I had to press the pause button, when I came back and play it it sounds really weird, that half-second moment of the song sounding weird give an idea, so I open my music editor and start to write, the rest, as it's said, is history.
This kind of work is something that might see a bit strange but I really love to do and listen too because it opens the specter of what we can do with music and forces me to enjoying this kind of stuff and I hope that, like me, others can enjoy this kind of stuff just like I do.
I hope form my heart that you enjoyed, thanks for reading, hearing or both.
See you soon!
-danig