UPDATE: I have put together two more Gravités, and playlisted them as the Gravity Suite
On 10th February, I was listening to BBC Radio 4’s Soul Music, the episode about Eric Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1. It’s a piece of music I’ve always loved, I probably first heard it when I was an infant watching schools programmes on TV on a day off sick. I was going to arrange and record a guitar version of it, but got sidetracked by a delay effect that seemed to generate all this pulsing rhythm, all these gravitational waves.
I’d started with a couple of maj7ths (the sub-dominant G and a tonic D, like the Satie piece) but then I rebooted it to just a simple Am to Gmaj shuttle. I then switched guitars and soloed over the top of that with another delay effect and some pitch shifting to generate echoes on the fifths of the initial notes. Added a bit of bass thuddery and mixed it down and this is what I ended up with…
It was originally called “Circle of Fifths”, then “Berlin of fifths”, but it had nothing to do with the circle of fifths, nothing to do with Berlin, the photo was the view that evening from my studio-office window. I should’ve caught a wave and called it “Ligo” or “Einstein on the Fifth” or just “Gravitational Waves”, but I didn’t…having said all that, I’ve now settled on a Satiesque title – Gravité No. 1