Are you ready for a tiny bit of music theory?
Suspended chords are fairly common, and you’ve assuredly heard them many, many times. There are two common types: the Suspended 4th and the Suspended 2nd.
Wikipedia gives a nice explanation: A suspended chord is a musical chord that omits the third and replaces it with a perfect fourth or a major second. This creates an open sound, while the dissonance between the fourth and fifth or second and root creates tension.
I think the Sus4 is more common, but that’s just me and my ears, and that’s what I’ll be dealing with here.
Take, for instance, a C Major chord:
To make it a Csus4, you just raise the 3rd (the middle note in the triad) a half-step:
leaving the root (the C) and the fifth (the G) as they are.
Normally, the suspension resolves back down to the original triad.
But I started wondering how it would sound if I didn’t resolve the suspension. What if I used that suspended note as the root of the next chord of the sequence? How would that sound?
The 4th of the C Major chord is an F, so the next chord in the sequence would be F Maj.
and if I followed that up with an Fsus4, raising the 3rd the A to B♭ I’d get this:
I would then continue that pattern all the way up until I reach C Major again (the whole length isn’t shown…it’s too long to fit comfortably here).
Unfortunately, that sequence attempts to cover over 5 octaves and starting where I started, I ran out of piano keys. I needed to transpose everything down 2 octaves to get all the notes in, or I would have to change the key. I don’t want to change the key at this point in the process, though. Even so, I still had to do an inversion on the final C chord, making it E-G-C (which is technically an Em#5 chord. Shhh…don’t tell anyone.) And, overall, it sounded awful.
This experiment probably isn’t suited to piano. How about strings instead of piano? I’d need a complete string orchestra to cover the range: basses, celli, violas, and the 1st & 2nd violins. And I still had to do that little transposition at the high end to get all the notes in.
It sounds…meh. Maybe if I arpeggiate it?
It sounds better, or at least more interesting, but it has lost the tension of the suspended fourths. I’ll have to combine the chords and the arpeggiated notes to bring the tension back, I think.
Much better, don’t you think after a little editing and mastering? There’s tension, and it all sounds like it’s leading up to something.
But what is it leading up to?
I have no freaking idea. Yet.
That’s what I do: I experiment with patterns and sequences, hearing how they sound, and what I can do with them to turn them into actual music. My Evita Amenda was an example of that as well.
I’ve got a million of them — patterns or sequences I like but haven’t been able to expand on them to my satisfaction. Yet.
I guess we’ll see where this one goes. Eventually. No guarantees.