The Inappropriate Sounds Thread, Le's create disturbing solos! Options

[Ben Higgins]

Have you ever wondered how we musically put our stamp on something? It's got to be more than just what licks we use or our tones. It's also what moods we conjure up when we play.

For a long time I've been fascinated with the idea of a player being able to come along and completely enforce a different mood over a chord progression.For example, if you take a light hearted, happy sounding chord progression, is it possible for a player to make it sound dark and foreboding by what they play over it?

It would be like coming along to everyone's happy picnic and bringing bad weather and turning the conversation towards death for just a moment before everything resolves again. I'm really into the idea of stamping your personality over something. Injecting a few naughty words into an otherwise clean conversation.

Or what about the opposite? Say you've got some horribly extreme backing going on. How about adding some light to it? Can it be done without sounding obviously ridiculous?

Anyone could just play any old nonsense which would contrast harshly with the music but can it be done whilst still retaining some harmonic link to the backing? We wouldn't be changing the original chord progression either. That's what makes it so challenging and I'm unsure of whether it can be done. So this genuinely is a public experiment.

I think we should try it out. Not only that, but suggest other possible mood scenarios that could be juxtaposed with one another.

I'll make a start. Here's a positive sounding chord progression, ripe for major modes and good vibes. Can I add a sense of uncertainty and maybe anxiety into the mix?

 Inappropriate_Sounds_Thread_1.mp3 ( 1.05MB ) Number of downloads: 98


I start off by playing something that sounds appropriate over the backing. All nice and major sounding. Halfway through I try to add some mustard to the cake. Not sure if I got the level of disturbance I wanted at the tea party yet but it's a start. Some of the guests may start feeling uneasy at this point but I don't think our work is done until a few of them have gone home crying.

How much further can we disturb things?

The chord progression is D / A / C / G and here is the backing track for you to have a go:

 Inappropriate_Sounds_Thread_backing.mp3 ( 1.61MB ) Number of downloads: 76


Normally you'd be looking at the D Major scale or D Major pentatonic. I added some notes from D Harmonic Minor, possibly some from C Harmonic Minor and then G Harmonic Minor at the end. Or something like that, I'm not really sure. Try to think about the audio effect rather than worrying about theory at this stage. Try something, see if it works and then we can decipher it afterwards.

Go, create some inappropriate sounds! We can create more backing tracks as we go on with different moods etc

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