Counterpoint
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Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
Here’s a short arrangement of Blue Bossa . I wasn’t trying to work on one particular concept, just "following my muse" as the say. Still, I was going for a contrapuntal texture. It’s 3 voices, the second voice doubling the first one in thirds, for the most part. Although I tried to give it some [...]
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
I was messing around with Bach’s Invention in D minor today, and came up with a cool way to play it on the guitar. By simply transposing the bottom voice up an octave it becomes very playable and sounds quite nice.
The only catch is that the two voices cross each other at times. Here’s the [...]
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Here’s the full 2-part etude based on All The Things You Are. First, the basic outline using different polyphonic patterns:
allthethings.pdf
And now with some melodic activity added:
allthethings2.pdf
And here’s a rather clumsy rendition of it:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Of course, the idea is to use that as a foundation and to play around with [...]
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
I started messing around with applying patterns to some standards. Here is one I came up with for All The Things You Are:
Because of the constant movement in fourths, it pretty easy to apply a repetitive pattern like this. Other progressions require a little more creativity.
Here’s the same pattern with some added melodic movement:
[...]
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Continuing some ideas from my last post, here are some examples of combining intervals. Instead of parallel thirds, I’m alternating between thirds and sixths:
And here’s a pattern derived from that:
Now, maybe if we were looking for something a bit more modern, we could try other intervals. How about seconds and fourths?
And the [...]
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
I’ve been leafing though a book called "Gehörbildung" by Ulrich Kaise. It’s a pretty interesting take on ear-training, though a little hard to read for me since it’s in German.
The second half of the book deals with 2 simultaneous voices, and he mentions some figures from "Dritten Theil des sich selbst informierenden Clavier-Spieler" by Michael [...]
Monday, February 18th, 2008
As promised, here is a recording of the etude I posted not too long ago. I learned it as is, and then slowly started to improvise with it…mostly just playing with rhythmic anticipations and adding a little motion to the bass line. I still need to work on it a bit, but I [...]
Monday, February 11th, 2008
In a few previous posts I’ve mentioned books I’ve downloaded from archive.org. This has proven to be quite a valuable resource. I’ve found many interesting books in never-ending quest for musical quasi-knowledge. Here are some highlights:
Canonical Studies: The title says it all. I read somewhere that Bartok was rather fond of this book. It does [...]
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008
With all my fascination for counterpoint on the guitar, I feel bad for not having mentioned Jimmy Wyble yet. The truth is I’ve yet to check out his book The Art of Two-Line Improvisation, which doesn’t seem to be available in Amazon or Sheetmusicplus at the moment. Mel Bay doesn’t say it’s out of print, [...]
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
I’ve been checking out a book called Method for Renaissance Lute by Andrea Damiani. In it, he makes a lot of interesting comments about playing counterpoint on the lute…a lot of which can be applied to guitar.
Method for Renaissance Lute (english version) By Andrea Damiani. Published by Ut Orpheus. (DM 27) [...]
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