yeah, I know that's a long title...
Last night at practice (the as-yet-unnamed soukous group) we worked on two 'reggae' numbers, a new one, and one from a few weeks back. Both these tunes are VERY similar, in that they revolve around just two chords, and the melodies are lifted from traditional African songs.
One of the things about this band is-our singer doesn't play any harmonic instruments (he plays hand drums, but not in this group....by trade, he is a professional dance instructor-again, traditional African stuff)so how we work is-he sings the parts to us!
VERY old-school! (reminds me of the old punk rock days..."NO! it goes do-do-do-do duh-do-do!...got that?")
So, it's a long process to develop new material: he sings parts to us, we sort them out, and then the key usually changes several times before an arrangement starts to appear.
So, these reggae-rhythm tunes we're working on, one of them has changed keys a few times, while the other has stayed in B minor.
So I spent a long time last night just playing two chords over and over....not quite as boring as it sounds, actually...
Gary (keys) at one point suggested substituting an F3minor in place of the A maj I'd been playing (in the Bminor tune, it was Bm, A maj) so...I tried THAT, and loved it! THEN, I started messing around with inversions of these two chords, working my way up the neck as the song progressed...interesting...I also came up with melodic lines derived rom the vocal melody to spice things up...but ultimately...it was just two chords all along.
We've been doing this band for a while, and it's been incubating longer than anything I've done in years, we've seriously been plugging away for well over a year now...it's slow going, but it's actually starting to sound good.
