Two Sides Of The Same Coin
I may not have been tremendously creative with the laptop lately, but I have seen a definite upswell in the amount of time I have spent thinking about music. I'm not going to claim an extraordinary amount of knowledge about scales, modes and lines, but I have a decent basic understanding of the underlying nuts and bolts of music theory... enough so that I am able to sometimes deduce what the next chord or note should be not necessarily by trial and error, but by what relation certain facets of music have to one another.
For example, the piece I was writing on tonight uses a great deal of minor chording and dissonance in the chord relations. While major steps (a full note difference, or the difference betwee the second and fourth frets on a guitar) are genrally used in sunnier-sounding music, half-steps and tritones (the largest dissonance possible, the distance between a Bb chord and an E, or an F and a B) are the order of the day in most metal, speed metal and thrash compositions. Yes, there is actually a method to the madness of bands like Slayer. You learn something new every day. By using this basic theoretical mechanism, I was able to fill in the last two bars of a nice riff I was working on, and felt pretty damn good in doing so.
In a way, writing functions on the same sort of level. There are generally accepted conventions and movements within stories that follow the same sorts of rules that are laid down in the music world. It takes a lot longer to learn them based on how varied the basic palette being used is (250,000 words or so in the English language versus an octave consisting of twelve notes), but while the composition itself may sound much different, in the end for both disciplines, the song remains the same.
So the current dry spell I am experiencing? My guess is that it will either be time or "writing theory" that will solve this. Just a bit of chin-scratching on this side of midnight.
For example, the piece I was writing on tonight uses a great deal of minor chording and dissonance in the chord relations. While major steps (a full note difference, or the difference betwee the second and fourth frets on a guitar) are genrally used in sunnier-sounding music, half-steps and tritones (the largest dissonance possible, the distance between a Bb chord and an E, or an F and a B) are the order of the day in most metal, speed metal and thrash compositions. Yes, there is actually a method to the madness of bands like Slayer. You learn something new every day. By using this basic theoretical mechanism, I was able to fill in the last two bars of a nice riff I was working on, and felt pretty damn good in doing so.
In a way, writing functions on the same sort of level. There are generally accepted conventions and movements within stories that follow the same sorts of rules that are laid down in the music world. It takes a lot longer to learn them based on how varied the basic palette being used is (250,000 words or so in the English language versus an octave consisting of twelve notes), but while the composition itself may sound much different, in the end for both disciplines, the song remains the same.
So the current dry spell I am experiencing? My guess is that it will either be time or "writing theory" that will solve this. Just a bit of chin-scratching on this side of midnight.