Week 1, 2018: Your Musical Steem and SBD Report
Your Musical Steem and SBD Report
This music composition as made based on the movement of the Japanese candlesticks for Steem and SBD this week. Steem is electronic synth as SBD is piano. The form of the chords change based the movement of the coins. The notes represent actual time. Each quarter note is a 2 hour section and each 1/8th note is a 1 hour section of time in the last week.
This post took a lot of work to put together. I wanted to share it with you guys as I've been holding this idea in my head for some time but hadn't acted on it until now. One week after the beginning of the year, what a great time to start this up!
Compositional Process
This compositional process was interesting. I may use it for the next one, may not. I started with form. How many measures would it be, and what meter we would be going with?
I added up that there are 84 sets of 2 hrs in a 7 day week. 84 can be divided by 4 and 3. If I were to use the 2 hour mark for quarter notes, and the 1 hour mark for eighth notes, I would be heading on my way.
When dividing 84 by 4 we get 21 measures of 4/4 timing. When we divide 84 by 3 we get 28 measures. But I wasn't sure if I wanted this piece to be waltzy.
I thought, okay, If I did this, I could have 7 sets of 3 measures. Each 3 would be a new chord, and the last note would resolve.
What I found is that, the tediousness of the movement of notes, and having them both play (double the work) ended up taking several more hours than expected. I wanted to do it right to feel like I accomplished this idea. Once I got this to work, let's talk about implementation.
The chords I chose were: /D/G/F#/bm/A7(b9)/D/Asus-A/ I chose these for a very specific reason. I wanted it to start bright, as it's rising, as it begins to turn I have a chord that functions as a turning point push to a minor chord and a broken V chord when it's falling. It resolves back to normal as the D chord recovers it and it sort of balances back into place near the end of the week.
Some of my initial ideas with the chords I abandoned after just trying to follow the course of the music line. Steemit went crazy this week, and I had to try and reflect it. I used the key of D because I saw Steem had a good week, and D is a bright key. So why not play off of that a little.
I want to mention that the compositional process involves a lot of music theory knowledge to know what notes not to play over what chords, and what chords function in the key. Here's a short analysis of the chords. This a simple progression but I took infinite liberties as to what tensions and resolutions were allowed due to the nature of how the chart goes.
/ I / IV / V/vi / vi / V7(b9) / I / Vsus4-V /
Now that I've talked a tad about the compositional process, let's go into the production.
Production
The production on this track is pretty simple.
I used an electric piano and a looping rhythmic pattern for the background.
SBD is played by Piano, and Steem is played by an Expressivee Synth and Touché Paddle. To see more of the touche check their video out here:
It took me a while to wrap my brain over all of the movement on top of within the chord structure, on top of with each-other, on top of it just working in some relatable musical sense.
Future Thoughts
I would like to be able to do monthly summaries involving Steemit users. So don't be shy and reach out! It would be amazing to involve some of the tremendous talent found on here.
Depending on how complicated I allow them to get, I will be posting either once per week, or once per month with a musical update!
Steemians, thanks for taking a look at this report and stay tuned for future ones! Please comment, upvote, resteem, follow, anything helps and I want to meet all of you interested in making Steemit as passionate and collaborative as it can be!
