I’m still working on the Morning Noodle project. A few days ago I organized and labeled the pages; I’m up to 59. I don’t generate a page every day; some days just half a page, other days more than a page. I sit at the piano, toss the solfege dice, see what I can do with it, and work at it til I get restless.

My usual approach is to take the random notes in order and group them into chords. Lots of suspendeds and chord extensions! I play slowly, because I don’t know my way around a keyboard well. For several days this past week I felt bored with what I was coming up with (“It all sounds the same”) so I added a complication by treating the string of random notes as a melody, and rolling a separate die for the note durations. This particular die is a D60. It’s huge (larger than a pingpong ball). and solid metal. The way I’m calculating note values is — 60 is a whole note, 30 is a half note, 15 is a quarter note. 20 is a dotted quarter and 40 is a dotted half. I guess I could say 8 is an eighth note and 4 is a 16th note, but right now I don’t want to get that crazy — I’m just rounding the numbers up or down. Thursday when I did this I wound up with a melody in 12/8, which I thought was cool. Not a meter I normally work in. Yesterday it was in 4/4 and sort of ponderous and lumpy, so instead of treating it as a melody I used it as a baseline for chords — throwing out anything I didn’t like. It’s as if I’m rounding off the edges. I’m sure someone like Adam Maness could take even the oddball notes and metric intervals and make something interesting out of it!

Today I’m having trouble focusing. I’m too tired to roll the D60 and figuring out note durations. Back to the easy route of taking groups of notes and making clustery chords. I got 3 chords then went off on a tangent. If this had been a conversation it’s like you were talking about the weather and that reminded me of something and I started talking about a dream I had. It would be rude if I treated you that way, and somehow it seems rude to today’s random notes to treat them that way too. I should respect them and let them say what they have to say! If this were a homework assignment I had to hand in — if I had to compare my work to my classmates’ efforts — I would be trying much harder today. My desire for recognition and praise would motivate me. Even more so if someone said “hey, that’s cool, can I add a countermelody to that” and it became a group effort.

Working on my own without a class to check in with and get energy from, without a teacher for me to entertain…is its own kind of struggle. I think if Jay Allen were here he would encourage me to take the digression. In one of his Skillshare lectures he demonstrated a technique where he took some random notes, played them in a canon against themselves, and listened for anything interesting that emerged. “I kinda like that, now lets transpose it…” A very gentle and exploratory approach. And I think Adam Maness would say that simply sitting at the piano and playing what I hear in my head is a good exercise.

The Power of Habit author would say that simply sitting at the piano the same time every day is a good exercise.

It’s hard to focus today, I’m tired, not feeling very imaginative — well — I was outside in the fresh air for several hours yesterday planting trees! I didn’t think it was very hard work at the time. We were moving slowly and it was just 3 little trees. The weather was exhilarating — brilliant sun, breezy, and just on the boundary of being warm enough to take off a sweater. Every few minutes the sweet scent of the neighbor’s invasive wisteria would waft across the street. I was digging the final hole and backfilling it with compost as the sun was setting. OK, I give myself permission to be tired today lol.

My “morning noodles” project is going well! I’ve only missed a few days, and there are other days when I produce more than one page of noodling. Lately I have been tossing the solfege dice and working with whatever RNGsus gives me.  It’s a set of 15 blank D12 dice. On 12 of them I wrote the solfege syllables, and 3 of them I left blank.

Why solfege dice instead of dice already marked with the notes of the scale? Well, someday I hope to say “alright, today I’m thinking in a different key” instead of orienting myself with the key of C all the time.

The 3 blank dice are often useful; they usually break the 12 random notes into nice phrases. For example, this morning I got

fi fa la (blank) fi di si mi ri li fa la (blank) li

I started out by thinking of it as [F# F A]   [F# C# G# E, D# A# F A]  [Bb]. Then I realized, I could think of it as in the key of Bb minor, with just 2 “spicy notes”,  E and A. That would take advantage of the fact that I tossed a Bb there at the end, all set apart by itself.

I HATE thinking in keys with multiple “black notes”. Starting at the top of the circle of 5ths I’m OK with the top, a little to the right and a little to the left. No more than a quarter circle either way. So when I saw F# C# G# E, right away I was thinking an E chord shell with extensions, or some kind of F# chord. How could that fit with the Bb at the end? F# can’t exist in the same key with Bb!!! — uh, yes it can, if it’s Bb minor.

The chords in Bb minor are

Bb minor

C minor b5

Db major

Eb minor

F minor

F# major (whaaaaat??) — actually Gb major

Ab major

 

That means that using E instead of Eb is a tritone (or sharp 11th), one of my favorite chords. The A is less weird — it’s the major seventh.

I moved the phrases around so I currently have

Eb Bb  F A,  Gb Db Ab E  (down up down, down up down)

Eb Bb F A, ….Bb  (up down up, up)

Yes it’s March 5th already. But I have been Marching Forth.

I’ve been ordering parts for my new PC one item at a time, in case Amazon delivery had a problem. In the past I’ve ordered multiple items from Amazon, and if one of the group doesn’t arrive and everything else does, it’s complicated to clear up. As a result of the daily packages it’s been like the 12 days of Christmas around here. (On the 1st day of Christmas my true love gave to me, 64 gig of DDR5…)

I still haven’t ordered the storage — solid state drives (what types? my motherboard wants 2 different kinds), hard disk drive (“spinner disk”), external storage for backup? Part of me wants to get a NAS* “because then I could share projects between computers”. My computer tech suggests not buying things until it’s clear that I need them. Ok, yeah, but…having the fancier version makes me feel important, like I’m taking my work seriously, like my work IS important. It’s motivating and empowering. On the other hand, I don’t want to irritate my computer tech.

(*) There was a video recently where the narrator was explaining why he didn’t need an ass, there wasn’t really a situation where he would use an ass, he might get an ass later. At least, that’s what it sounded like he was saying. 😉 So the question is, do I need an ass now, or should I wait, maybe get an ass when they go on sale?

Meanwhile — the Morning Noodles —

I haven’t photographed and stored away the last 3 noodles. There have been Morning Disturbances that interfered with the Morning Noodles. For example, one morning I got a phone call from Matt the Concrete guy, could he come by in 20 min?

For all 3 of these days I’ve played experimental chords at the piano and have written down the chord spellings, but I did not finish filling up the pages. Today my other family members went out to eat and I had the house to myself for an hour. Instead of finishing the Noodle page, I played the prologue of my planet suite at full volume.

At some point I’m going to sit down with each page and translate the chord spellings into music notation. I guess that means right now I have 3 servings of leftover Noodles.