A question, a few comments, and an idea or 2 all in one brand spanking new post:
Question: Does anyone use MMA (Musical Midi Accompaniment) and consider themselves proficient in its use?
This was prompted from the BIAB video from Bobby Watson's She's Just A Tempress post.
Bobby's comment there that ends: "It's up to the next guy to put the polish on what I come up with." gets close to my thinking. I want to use such tools to help me write my words, not to produced a finished recording.
Then I saw the TheoryBoard Live On Kickstarter post.
Makes me want to get one to see if it can help me with my lyric writing. I have been thinking for years about a device or program that I have been thinking of as a Nashville Number System keyboard.
In its simplest idea: Turn a dial to set the key for the song. Press 1, get the 1 chord, press 5, get the 5 chord etc.
Slightly more complex: allow for setting strum/arpeggio patterns / rhythms that get played instead of simple sustained chords.
Again, for me all of this is in aid of writing lyrics that come to me, often in small pieces that I feel need some music to help me coax their friends out of my head...
Having super ambitions thoughts this morning... Might love it if I gave a program a chord progression and bpm and had it fill in multiple takes on the "song"... (12 bar blues), (verse - verse - verse), (verse - chorus), (verse - chorus - bridge), in 4/4 time and 3/4 time and others if needed. let me skip around in each and see if any prompts any ideas in my head, then pick one and let it give me several takes closer to the one I chose... (fuzzy thoughts here...)
All of this as I can't seem to find the people to work with me consistently.
In an alternate effort to resolve this problem, I have taken to posting spoken word and poorly sung versions of my ideas and bits of ideas hoping someone will find something and run with it. Most should have a text file with lyrics so far. (Some are missing. I am working through that issue sporadically. If you want to work with one that is missing its words, let me know and I will try and fix promptly.)
