LeadsheetsCharts for exploration.
Backing tracks with charts at Bandcamp
Actually, Actually (from Music for Chasing Squirrels)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
I am trying to break my habit of prefacing every differing opinion with “actually”. Actually, actually as a filler word is rather obnoxious. The former manager of Fort Collins Coffeehouse, Hayley, called me out on this bad habit one day after I informed her that “actually, my Irish cream latte is quite delicious”. I was writing the chords to the B section of this tune at the time so this seemed an appropriate title.
Blues for Phrygia (from Music for Chasing Squirrels)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
I was in a Phrygian kind of mood, so here’s a 16 bar blues in Phrygian. Sort of. It’s in 4/4 but there’s a sort of prelude section in 6/8, because if you’re going to write a blues it might as well also be a jazz waltz.
Cibeles (from Music for Chasing Squirrels)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
A quick one in Phrygian/Phrygian Dominant. Named for the Plaza de Cibeles in Madrid, since Phrygia’s goddess is Cybele.
Dearest (from Music for Chasing Squirrels)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
I found this melody sketched on a Colorado Music Instruction Center payment reminder card from the early 2000s with the word “Dearest” written in script beside it. Given that context, I don’t know if I intended it as a declaration of love or as a reminder to settle a delinquent account. I like to think the finished tune works in either case.
Frickle Frackle (from Music to Squeak By)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
Because I really wanted a minor Blues.
For C. and D. (from Music for Chasing Squirrels)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
Definitely one for us jazz nerds. I was trying to make triad pairs sound natural, so this entire melody is alternating C major and D minor triads doing their best impression of the Great American Songbook.
Fossil Creek Tunnel (from Music for Chasing Squirrels)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | -F
Fort Collins has an excellent system of bike paths. When I moved to the south side of town in 2012, I was thrilled to learn that the Fossil Creek Path would soon be finished allowing me to ride a loop around town. All that remained was a single, soon to be completed tunnel under a railroad track. It was finally finished a few weeks before I moved away in 2019. I got to use it once and wrote this to commemorate the occasion.
Grin (from Music to Squeak By)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
A triadic melody with unexpected resolutions, too many solo sections, and my favorite drum groove in the outro. This one always makes me smile..
Half the Times I’ve Failed (from Music to Squeak By)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
Written in a lesson to demonstrate writing to a prompt. Played on my early-2000s “Electric Memory” rig.
Kiddo (from Music to Squeak By)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
A dedication to my Grandpa John. The melody is a tone row but it’s harmonized as a jazz ballad in E-flat. Grandpa would have loved this as he was both a lover of irony and completely tone deaf.
Laetitia’s Lost Chords (from Music to Squeak By)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
As a teen in the 90s, I learned a Maj7 barre chord and promptly wrote “Song for Laetitia”. My dad always poked fun at its naive harmony so I reworked it with hipper chords. Years later I missed the original’s simplicity and inadvertent mixed-meter so I wrote them into this cut.
Mrs. Harvey’s (from Music for Chasing Squirrels)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
Mrs. Harvey’s Bakery is an historic building on 11th Avenue in Longmont. I wrote this back in 2010 after driving by it a dozen or more times while moving my recording gear from CMIC to my new place off Pratt Street.
Near Majority (from Music for Chasing Squirrels)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F | Grand Staff
8 bars of this melody are from way back in 1999. I wrote it for an assignment at CU Denver and intentionally tried to make it as difficult to sightread as possible to trip up my professor as he played it in front of the class. It was a jerk move, so as a bit of penance 21 years later I finished and recorded it here. I hope it’s the ugliest thing I ever release.
Nines (from Music for Chasing Squirrels)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
Graphite Addiction recorded an alternate swinging version of this aa “Mental Morphology”. This is my take on the funkier original, trying (and failing) to play bass like Tim Carmichael and drums like Pete Ehrmann.
Penguin Eddie (from Music to Squeak By)
C with Bass | Concert | Bass | Bb | Eb | F
Eddie was a local bar-fly I met after a gig. He told me a tipsy tale of his exploits catching a penguin (“It was an emperor penguin!”) out of a zoo’s exhibit. I wrote this as a tribute to his brilliant comedic timing and syncopated phrasing.
Ricky Loves Lulu (from Music to Squeak By)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
There used to be a bridge by Erie, Colorado with this graffiti on it. When the railroad removed it someone painted “Ricky Still Loves LuLu”. That deserves a song.
Serva Jugum (from Music to Squeak By)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
Clan Hay’s motto, “Keep the Yoke” provides the title for this one. It’s a standard gopuccha yati cycle for the head and a funk waltz in the solo.
Smolkin’s Boogie (from Music to Squeak By)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
Every instrumental guitar album needs a boogie. This one is just a bit confused about where it’s going.
Somewhere East of Omaha (from Music to Squeak By)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
As my late friend Ward Harston put it: “That’s not really a rhythm.”
Somewhere West of Wichita (from Music for Chasing Squirrels)
Concert | Bass | B-Flat | E-Flat | F
This companion piece to “Somewhere East of Omaha” from “Music to Squeak By” shares its odd little 5 note rhythmic quirk. Mainly it’s a feature for my lovely Collings baritone.
Reference Books
Thesaurus of Diatonic Sets (Curious Automata, 2013)
Paperback or Kindle | Free PDF
The Thesaurus of Diatonic Sets is a guide to all of the sets formed by the diatonic or any other seven note scale. Every possible set is listed along with their descriptions, diatonic interval vectors, subsets, supersets, and sets which contain no common tones.
This book is ordered logically, starting by number of notes. Sets of the same number of notes are then grouped by intervallic content and each group is named for a common chord formed by it. These chords are then placed in order from those with the most evenly distributed intervals to those with the least. Finally, the sets in each group are listed by the root of their chord in order of scale degree, from I through VII.
Index of Movement in Diatonic Sets (Curious Automata, 2014)
My previous book, the Thesaurus of Diatonic Sets, describes the relationships between the content of the subsets of the diatonic or other seven-note scales. It served that purpose well, but I soon found a basic flaw in its approach to pandiatonisim. It is careful about the set content but woefully lacking in concern about how sets move, treating all sets with similar content relationships the same. Resolving to the tonic triad from V {2, 5, 7} and IV {R, 4, 6} are the same in terms of set content, as both of these cadential pairs share one common tone while two differ. They are quite different in sound and practice, however, and it is an odd system that cannot distinguish between authentic and plagal cadences. The sets’ content does not tell the whole story, since the paths between sets are a large part of what define their relationships.
I had created a map with every possible destination but no roads. This book adds the roads. It lists the possible movements between any two subsets of a heptatonic scale in a simple to read diatonic movement vector.