Hello, we hope you’re doing well. It’s entry number six for our Moon blogs and today we’re going to talk about our new track “Moon.” Moon is the fifth track on our first debut album. As you know, we’re planning 30 albums and we’re planning for every 5th track of each album to be the title track and an instrumental. I’m always trying to reinforce practicing different instruments or writing different kinds of tunes so I decided this instrumental should be a solo piano. I figured that would help me practice more piano and write more piano pieces instead of the all songs coming from an acoustic guitar!
Most of the music I write is inspired by the people around me and the places we go. I met some lifelong friends a couple years ago and this was the first song I wrote after meeting them. I want to warn you before we start that this is the most musically nerdy of all the podcasts so far. We’re basically going to break down the entire chord progression and melody.
You can hear if you’ve listened to any of my songs that once I pick a major or minor scale, I typically stick to it. This song is in F major but I quickly use the note C# to add a little flavor. This note C# is not in the F major scale. To explain where it comes from, I like to think in modes. If you’ve learned your modes then you would know that using C# in this case would be borrowing from the F Aeolian mode.
The song starts on F major and then goes up to C dominant 7 over G, then up to Bb minor major 7 where we get the C# and quickly turn the C# to a D making the minor third a major third. It then goes down to an Em, which is interesting because this implies that we’re borrowing from the Lydian mode because we’re sharping our fourth interval and making a Bb a B for the moment. Then it goes back to the first two chords we started with, F Major and C dominant 7 over G. The phrase ends with a D minor over A.
We then repeat that whole phrase. The only difference is that the end of the repeated phrase has a couple chords walking down the scale to prepare us for Part B. So going from our D minor over A, I play an A minor, then G minor, and finally down to our F major on the down beat to start our next part.
The bass on the next part plays F major, then Bb major, then you’ll hear two ascending bass notes, G and A. My left hand plays Bb and F then my thumb moves from F to G and then from G to A before returning to the F major chord again. The melody is playing octaves on notes B flat and A, then when the chord moves to Bb, the melody plays a G note. This phrase also repeats. Then we return to Part A starting on F major and going to C dominant 7 over G. It’s played exactly how the second time through was played at the beginning of the piece.
Nice, that wasn’t so bad right? Hopefully when you listen to the track you can identify some chords now. You’ll also hear some wolves howling at the end. Considering the album is called “Moon”, I wanted to add our favorite full moon animal to this album and this seemed to be the best place. There’s also a song later on the album called “Teacher Wolf”, so it’s a bit of a nod to that song as well. As always, thank you for reading!