Question and Answer

Hi Pat, I’m Matteo Prefumo from Genova (Italy), i’m 21 and i play jazz guitar. I saw your concert with the unity band in padova and it was totally cool!!!Amazing band, amazing musicians, amazing interplay. In the last days i listened much time Orchestrion, specially the tune called EXPANSION. I really like the melody of this piece and i found really interesting the harmonic part of the song... I saw that the melody that you play in the first 16 bars of the song (playing the chords) is the same that vibraphone and marimba play on the next 32 bars of the melody part. The result is as if there were two melodic lines at the same time and the sound is really amazing and the bass line is really cool. I saw that the harmonic changes are Fsus Bb6/9 Eb6/9 Db7sus ecc but you play only triads and the sound that came out is a melody that after is execute with the melody that you play on the next 16 bars. What is the way the process that you have follow to create this fantastic sound? This track is really brilliant :)

Thanks

Matteo

Hi Matteo,

Thanks for all of that. One thing about the Orchestrion project was that everyone was so interested in the method of how the sounds were made that the actual music part of it tended not to get talked about that much, which was really the most interesting part of it all for me. That tune in particular has quite a few unique features harmonically and in the way the bass notes set up and change the function of the chords as they move along. I would suggest you get the score for it (available from Hal Leonard) and follow along. There are quite a few compositional techniques throughout the suite that connect the whole thing together that give the piece it's shape. Thanks for listening.