Ok, I know, a bit of a strange title for a blog, but here's the thing, this is actually what I was doing last night. The "Chocolate Cake" I was creating was an instrumental piece which you can now here on my "Songs from the Hobbithole" ReverbNation Page - the bread was a culinary achievement to be enjoyed by me and my Mum when I visit her for the Bank Holiday Weekend.
As some of you will know, a while ago I set myself a challenge, to write instrumental tracks to order, on subjects, or with titles dreamt up by the ever-inventive minds of my Facebook Friends. They didn't disappoint and I've now completed 4 of the 8 which have been suggested (I'm happy to take more suggestions by the way.
Initially when I was given Chocolate Cake as a title I was thinking of making a sweet, slightly soulful ballad with plenty of Rhodes Piano and slap bass. However, I then chose to take a different direction with it and came up with a way of musically re-creating the word "Chocolate Cake" in the form of, what turned out to be a 3 minute "prog" piece.
So, how did I go about it. Well, thankfully for me the word has 3 chord names in it, some repeated C, A and E, so that was somewhere to start. So, the structure of the song, is intended to spell out the words Chocolate Cake and here's how:
The opening chord of the song is a C minor the second chord is a C minor 7th which is a Harmonisation of that chord, the next is the same chord but played an Octave higher, the next chord is a C but this time it's a major, to bring a little sweetness in, this then moves an Octave lower on the keyboard. Now to the tricky letter L - I decided that in terms of musical theory there wasn't much to play with except for tempos such as Largo so I went with the term "Lament" - here I used what is, in my opinion a very sad and poignant chord, Fminor 7th, ok a small cheat, but it worked for me. Next onto the A, or in this case an A flat as it fitted better with the preceding chord. Now, for T I decided that Tune was as good a word as any, so here is where the melody of the guitar solo kicks in and after once more round the chord sequence it does a key change to land on a juicy E minor Chord. So, if you read all the letters in bold, you should now have Chocolate.
Now back to the C minor as that's the underpinning chord of the piece, then a move to A flat and of course the obligatory Key Change at the end to resolve to an exchange between Es, both minor and major, sweet and bitter chocolate, if you will. You should now have your Cake and be able to eat it too :)
There is another layer to this story however, and that is the number of layers the song has, i.e. how many tracks I laid down to make the whole. There are, in total 13 tracks, which is exactly the same number of letters as there are in Chocolate Cake - see, told you it was a bit geeky!
What pleases me about this, is that I was truly challenged by this task, but I don't think that challenge can be heard in the track, it just sounds simple, and rolls along nicely in just under 3 minutes - and the wonderful thing is, I even managed to find an arpegiator to mimic the sound of an oven timer going off at the end of the track. Chocolate Cake? Definitely. Half Baked? Almost certainly.
Hopefully it's as pleasing to the originator of the idea as it is to those who like their "prog" instrumental, short and to the point :)
