- Six Strings - A Little Off-Kilter v1

 (A Little Off-Kilter - Mirrored Insight)

I am a thief.  I freely admit this.  I steal method and music and technique wherever I can in an attempt to get the notes in my head out through a speaker or a sound hole.  I have, on occasion, even been known to steal from myself.  'A Little Off-Kilter' is the result of a lot of that.

One of the first pieces of music I ever recorded myself playing was a piece that I wrote called 0400.  I love that song for two reasons: One is personal. The other is that this song pretty much came out of my Gretsch in one single piece.  I recorded this in one take and never looked back.

There's a sequence of chords in this song that I stumbled into completely by accident by moving an FMaj7 chord shape around the neck and going, "Ooh, that sounds cool!"  I've always loved it and I was delighted that it came off the way it did. That was all the way back in October of 2019.

Time passed.

January 20th, 2020 saw one of those moments where the music hit me like a thunderbolt.  This was a somewhat unique thunderbolt though as the music that popped into my head contained not only chording but also a main vocal line.  No lyrics, but two outta three ain't bad! This also happened at like...11pm.  For fear that I'd lose it, I hopped out of bed, ran into my office, got my guitar and set my phone up to record.

...Then I remembered that I was basically naked, ran back into my room, put my robe on, and ran back to set my gear up again.

You're welcome.

Anyway, what came out of that brief recording session was notes for a project that I took to calling, 'Sing-Song' because I am the master of catchy song titles.  Like many other musical doodles, it got filed away and sort of...forgotten.

Time passed again.  Somewhere in the middle of 2020, I got the bright idea to revisit 'Sing-Song' and sort of...reintegrate and rework that chord sequence that I'd loved so much from the end of '0400' into something a little heavier.  By the time I'd played the whole thing out, it was almost long enough to actually be considered a song.  Eureka!  Clearly, the only appropriate thing to do at that point was to file it away and sort of...forget about it.

Fast forward to March 2021.  I was up in my office cum music room trying to pick out a sequence of notes that had been buzzing around in my head threatening to turn into actual music for the last week or so.  When I finally got the sequence down -- It's a fingerpicking pattern of E, some D# monstrosity, A, and A Minor -- I stopped and swore loudly.  I had, yet again, basically paraphrased the opening strains from a song that I'd had stuck in my head for months prior.  It wasn't a direct rip-off by any means but the intent and movement of the bass line was pretty damned spot on in my head. Still, it sounded REALLY cool and I wanted to link it into some other music that I'd written.  

Then I remembered that I actually had a perfect solution that I'd been sitting on for over a year.  I got out the knife, carved 'Sing-Song' up -- conveniently, it had been written in the same key as this new noodle I was working on AND the original noodle from 0400 -- and stitched something new together.

That's what you see here.  It's still not done, mind you.  There's a whole intro solo and outro solo segment that I didn't include here because I was in such a hurry to actually record the bloody thing that I sort of didn't take the time to set the necessary equipment up to record the beginning or the end.

This is normally where I'd say something about getting to it tomorrow, except I've sort of accepted the fact that I'm just going to file it away and forget about it.  And why not?

That's sort of worked for me so far.

Chord Notes:

D#susFoo = 0011xx
G6Foo = 00455x
F#11 = 00344x
CMajFoo = 00233x

Em Noodle
G, A, E
G, A, E
G, G, A, A
E, D#susFoo, A, Am
E, D#susFoo, A, Am
E, A, D, A, E
E, D#susFoo, A, Am
E, D#susFoo, A, Am
E, A, D, A, E
E, CMajFoo
G6Foo, F#11, CMajFoo, E
E, F#Foo
G6Foo, F#11, CMajFoo, E
E, D#susFoo, A, Am
E, D#susFoo, A, Am
E, A, D, A, E
E, D#susFoo, A, Am
E, D#susFoo, A, Am
E, A, D, A, E
C, A, C, A
C, D, E
E, F#Foo
G6Foo, F#11, CMajFoo, E
Solo Work in the key of E