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)