WEEK NO. 3

This week was a LONG one.

Since we ended the refrain in F Major I thought it would be clever to cadence to C Major using what I call the “Cage the Elephant” cadence.

It’s simply a minor 4 to a 1, so a plagal cadence but sadder… darker? I don’t know but I like how the 3rd of the 4 chord just descends chromatically until reaching the 5 of the Tonic its cadencing to. On guitar it works very well going F-Fm-C.

                  I call it the “Cage the Elephant” cadence because there is a band called Cage the Elephant and they end one of there songs, mind you it’s my favorite song by them, “Trouble” with this type of minor 4 cadence. Beautiful song, highly recommend it.

                  The idea for this episode was an Alberti Bass accompanying a playful melody, the result was:

It took me an ETERNITY to come up with the melody. I wanted to keep guitaristic and try to make a good melody simply by utilizing the notes which were near by the chord that was being “Alberti’d”, if one can use such term. The progression lead me to Am7 by the end of it and it seemed to naturally go there but I naturally could not get out of it. The final measure you see was just a place holder. I was stuck and just pondered on it for a bit.

And pondered… and pondered…

Then I decided to write something new in a more guitaristic key, E Major. What I came up with was:

                  I went straight from F Major to a B7 to cadence to E Major, I will try to find a smoother transition—maybe, with the right use of rubato I think this cadence can be quite pleasant to the ear. There isn’t much of a melody so I treated it more as an introduction to the 1st episode.

 
The melody comes in at measure 29:

                  I was inspired by my daughter, and tried to capture the innocence of childhood—watching her play with her toys on a Sunday morning really spoke to me. The melody repeats but has small differences in each repetition giving it just more movement in the second repetition. I could not think of how to end it, maybe once I start thinking of the 2nd episode I will have an idea of the sections ending.

                  We are on track, its week three and we are doing well. I am thinking one more episode and then a coda and we will be done and we’ll just have to record it and perhaps just make some cover art for an audio recording to put on YouTube. MAYBE. But recording it for sure.

                  NEXT WEEK WE WILL WRITE THE 2ND EPISODE. SEE YA THEN!