once you get more comfortable and it's second nature - it simply reinforces your ideas... when I come up with a melody and chord progression, I can already come up with variants both melodically and harmonically to change the mood... this is what john Williams is KING at. theory is simply a way of understanding HOW to get what you want out of your listener... and it is 100% based on reversed engineering... that's the funniest part... people wrote music by ear... a man by the name of J.S. Bach decided to start keeping tally of different pieces and patterns that people were drawn to, and how they effected the listener - and he proceeded to write formulas to reproduce these effects easier, and deeper understand them.
that was the birth of western music theory as we know it - and it's 100% based on reverse engineering... and when I make my music - I use my brain to reinforce my ears. and sometimes I use my brain to kick start my ears... i.e. making a chord progression with the brain - looping it and just listening until a melody comes to me...
and fair warning : this song is before I got any good sample libraries, and I never got to add drums - but you can hear very clearly where my ears and my brain worked together.
I really want to make a phrase jump from C# minor, to G minor... a dim 5th... that's the brain - setting a start point... now how do I make that "make sense"?
I go from c# to G#7(okay, so i-V7) and then I "resolve" the G#7 as if it were an augmented 6th, down to G - but I'll play minor instead... now if i play the same phrase in G, i'll end up on D major, which happens to also be the neopolitan of C#, so i take it to a ii(dimished in first inversion) to make it feel like a plagal cadence back to 1. that dim chord also shares the 7th of D major, so it fits as both a plagal cadence to C# - and as part of an implied dominant 7 of D major(containing both the 7th and the 3rd).
then later - i created a melody - and my brain REALLY wanted to continue the descending half step pattern at the end of each phrase - even though it would take me to a B natural - and my ears REALLY wanted A minor underneath it... so I'm sitting on an A minor 9th because my ears want it, and to make sense of it - i resorted back to trusty D major, as D would be an ascending 4th(something your ears expect) and the major would let me swing back to a C diminished to tie it back to C#.
so its constantly using both intuition and your brain - to create something special. and in the very same song i use the abrupt flat 5 chord changes to effect - because while i did make a chunk of it make sense, purposely making your listener feel chaos/danger/malice/anger/whatever is something you might also want to do... and making smooth shifts in tonality isn't the best way to bring out those emotions...
theory just helps me figure out how to use the paints effectively... i still choose the colors and what I'm painting.
Nice piece dude and a very analytical breakdown really enjoyable from both stances.
