ohio rehearsal in dayton

Post 31 of 90.

Don and I met with Don's son Matt in Dayton to rehearse and prepare for our upcoming performance at Un Mundo Cafe in Springfield, OH.

We went over a preliminary list of songs that allow us to incorporate Matt, either by original design or by alteration:
--Asturias
--Growing Circle
--Hope
--Ananda (Steve Jolemore's piece, not the CGT piece by the same name)
--Punta Patri (our own mutated arrangement)

Matt and I will perform a two-person circulation on Hope, and we seemed to have a good handle on that right off the bat. The double-time circulation is still too ambitious, but who knows?

We also worked on a C major circulation as a lead-in to Ananda. We discussed how by changing a single note in C major (F into F#) you get key of G, and all other notes remain the same. Changing key is a piece of cake if you have the layout of C major on the fingerboard down cold.

That doesn't necessarily describe your humble blogger, by the way. And there's more to making a collection of notes sound like a key than is immediately apparent. I hit a big fat F# in the middle of one run-through of the C major circulation, and it didn't sound like a modulation from C into G. It just sounded like a big fat, out-of-context #4/b5 scale degree (also known as a "wrong note"--I'm just being specific about the exact sound and nature of this wrong note).

For the final three chords, I found myself laying down a ii->V->I cadence in the bass, which sounded really good and gave a nice satisfying feeling of harmonic resolution, even if the other players' notes in the upper voices weren't quite resolving melodically. It might be interesting at the next rehearsal to try for a more Dorian sort of harmonic envelope. Maybe I should play something like A->C->D (vi->I->ii in C or v->bVII->i in D Dorian, depending on how you look at it) in order to imply that tonality?

Matt also got a good start on Where It Goes, always a very fun piece of music. With three guitars, this piece could really start to go somewhere...

On the drive home, I noticed my car has a quirk--the heater phases in and out. One minute I'm getting some heat, the next minute the air gets cold, even though the engine has thoroughly heated up into the proper range. It's like the connection between the engine and the heater is inefficient and I temporarily use up the heat energy when I run the heater full blast. I've noticed before that when I come to a stoplight, the air will go cold, and then when I'm back up to speed the heat returns. Weird. I bought the car in the summer, so I've only noticed this now that cold air has arrived.