SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  4/6/11; 2:23:43 AM Msg#:  5824 (top msg in thread) Prev/Next:  5823/5825 Reads:  275428

Watch This!

Yesterday, the Tunetext superuser of IP address 221.80.184.189 showed that they are also a master of the Excerpt Service and know how that can feed material for study or composing into a Tunetext window.

There's a small tune that I wrote in 1996, Tumbler, that's posted on SongTrellis under my listing in the Our Composers department. It's only 8 measure long, and has a busy active melody, with an unusual harmonic sequence as accompaniment.

The superuser used the Excerpt Service link that's available on the Tumbler page and used that to grab two repetitions of the harmony and melody from the published score. They would have set the First bar setting in the Excerpt Service form to 1 and the Last Bar setting to 16, like this.

Excerpt Service pages have a link that will copy an excerpt into a Tunetext window. He used that and shot that excerpted score over to a Tunetext window. Opening the Tunetext form for that new score, he erased the melody from that form and resubmitted it to produce a score that only contains the Tumbler changes.

Then he used the "Publish Tunetext Button to SongTrellis Public Ideas" link that is available on Tunetext pages, to publish that chord arrangement to the Public Ideas yesterday afternoon at 3:20:31 PM.

I saw that my harmony had been published as a Public Idea, and thought, sheesh, let's write a new song that uses that harmony, just as anyone else has a right to do.

There are operators built into the Tunetext language that can help a composer (this could be you, it's pretty easy) invent a new melody over existing harmony extremely quickly. I used those to build the phrases of my new tune. After 45 minutes I had it complete and posted the new composition, which I decided to call Tumbleweed, in honor of its Tumbler heritage, to today's Public Ideas.

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