The guitar seems to have a tonal centre around G major meaning the further you go to the dominant and sub-dominant sides from there, the tougher it becomes to play. (I’m talking acoustic fingerstyle guitar as distinct from, say Jazz, particularly played on electric.) There is a jump in difficulty when you reach B major and B flat, respectively, which leaves a lot of major and minor keys out of bounds, so to speak. I feel cheated.

It all comes down to being brought up in the “folk tradition” and becoming restricted to chords that rely on open strings for sonority.
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Now this is a term that crops up quite often on internet forums and even printed publications. I’ve even seen tables constructed in Microsoft Excel correlating chords to modes. Modes are cool and their use as a basis for melodies will provide exciting possibilities particularly if the desire is to evoke a “folky” or archaic flavour.

But modal chords? Bah! Gimme a break. I’d like to know what difference there is between chords which are diatonic to the scale of the Dorian mode on D with those diatonic to the C Major scale. Etcetera. Many of my songs are modal in character – but in each case that’s because the scale upon which the melody is based has a root and intervals which coincide with a particular mode. It has nothing to do with the harmony or chords used apart from their being diatonic to the scale.
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I’ve just been told by a friend at Soundclick about a new widget I can use all over the place. It looks cool, seems to work, and I might just port it over to my main site, my MySpace page and a anywhere else I can plonk it without anybody noticing! I think the streamed sound is better than anything else I’ve heard so far.

Click on a song - go on - you know you want to. But only a fool would click on “buy this track now for $0.75″ (even though that’s 13 cents cheaper than the other one I posted recently).

Good innit?

        

I have thought about this quite a lot. In the UK last year (or the year before) there was a theatre play in that was closed due to a particular group of people being offended by the content and demonstrating outside the theatre where it was being staged in order to get the play closed down. They succeeded. There was strong protest that this closure was evidence of pressures exerted by one group curtailing artistic freedom of expression of another.

The reason for my pondering this is that I have recently written a song which again reflects my strong atheistic views. This is just a song like any other and has no propogandist agenda attached. Nevertheless, the song can / will / does offend a few people.

Taking into account that there is a difference between expressing something that is intended to offend and expressing something that offends as an incidental by-product of that expression (but without the purpose of doing so), I have concluded that the feeling of being offended, in the latter case, is the problem of the person offended. I have further decided that I have no duty to consider this (potential offence caused) when I write, record, publish, or perform.

So I sing my song with gusto.