question
Write for a trio using only pentatonic material
Man, this one took forever.
I simply don’t have the skill yet to pull off writing folk music, and definitely not in the style of traditional Japanese folk music. I definitely need to do more study.
I ended up going with composing an ambient track for guitar, koto, shakuhachi & a couple nice ambient synths.
To start with, I built a few score files for FL Studio to enable highlighting Japanese pentatonic scales, and tried out a few of them until I found one that sounded good. I settled on the In mode (Miyakobushi scale), in the key of A. As discussed in part 1, this is built up of 2 tetrachords.
X:1
T:Miyakobushi (A)
M: 3/4
L:1/8
A_BD' EFA |]
I started with a series of strummed guitar chords, which I added echo & reverb to – inspired by Klimek – underneath which I layered a repeating series of long, echoey pads and another quiet synth that simply walked the scale. Once I was happy with this, I started adding a little bit of variation – a different set of guitar chords, and then a sprinkling of chords where the top note was offset by a half note.
Once I got this to a point where I could listen to it on repeat & sorta zone out to it, I tried extending the song – basically repeating the pattern a few times, and adding a little more variation here & there.
Finally, I added samples. I sprinkled in some Japanese bells for color, and added a backing track of forest + babbling brook ambience.
Etude 4.3 - pentatonic scale.mp3