Extending An Idea

One thing I used to struggle with (a lot) was extending an idea, or to put it another way, getting more mileage out of the little creative breakthroughs. These past few days I’ve been playing with a simple little chord progression with a nice diminished passing chord. Here it is playing simply with piano and then a basic string patch.

[audio:https://fernandogros.com/music/dimideacue2.mp3|titles=DimIdeaCue1|artists=Fernando Gros]

Of course, you could just loop that. But, it would get dull and generic after a while. Moreover, too much static chord movement like that can become very dull in an orchestral setting. Today I had a couple of hours to spare, so I set about laying out that chord progression in a few different ways in Sibelius, then importing the results into Logic, where I set up some orchestral patches using Kontakt. There’s a lot more that could be done in terms of writing, mixing and the rest, but this shows one way you could expand a simple three chord idea into two minutes of music.

[audio:https://fernandogros.com/music/dimcueidea4.mp3|titles=DimIdeaCue2|artists=Fernando Gros]