Lee Barry Composition Diary

The distorted bass is the bull in the china shop because the original is so wispy and breathy--the initial feeling I got from the lyrics when I began to write the music. As primarily a jazz player--or I played a lot of jazz in the past, the music is very harmonic and vertical with large extended chords. But the bass reduces it to the roots and to the chords stripped of their extensions. Embracing denial is an escape from certainty, so the edgy approach also fits.

A miniature piece exactly a minute long. (64 bars in 5/8 at eighth=320). The chords are inverted so as to make step-wise ascending and descending bass lines.

An idea generator.  Video Examples: The Original Book:     Alternate Tunings For Bass by Lee Barry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License . Based on a work at www.box.net . Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://barrystudio.blogspot.com/2020/08/alternate-tunings-for-bass.html . Miscellaneous Loops/Demos:    HISTORICAL NOTE Unconventional tunings, or scordatura (It., from scordare, to mistune); were first used in the 16th century by Italian lutenists. They were primarily used to facilitate difficult passages, but also used to alter timbral characteristics, reinforce tonalities through the use of open strings, and to extend the instrument's range. Violin scordatura was employed in the 17th and 18th centuries by Italian and German composers, namely, Biagio Marini, Antonio Vivaldi, Johann Pachelbel and J.S. Bach; whose Fifth Suite for Unaccomp...

This was a set of changes that I wrote around 1990 on an old acoustic that I bought for $50 in 1978. The original had the title ‘Americo’, that apparently is the name of an insurance company now. The original demo recorded on now-ancient technology, a Tascam Portastudio I bought in 1988. It's a personal flight of nostalgia I like to take because the new arrangements can be vastly different yet share the spirit of the beginnings. Lap Steel part: Technically it is in the Lydian mode, but not really. It has a Spanish flavor, hence the title. But I have changed it here to Dorothea, at least temporarily.