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Stephen Gislason

From Music Notes
Music Theory
Musical Brain
Synthesizers
Pitch and Tonality
Music Styles
Jazz
New Music
Music Instruments
Composing
Scales and Chords
Arpeggios
Rhythm
MIDI

All About Sound

Arpeggiation

Music has vertical harmonic structures and horizontal moving lines. Scales are horizontal patterns of single semitone and 2 semitone intervals. Arpegiations are moving sequences of chord notes found in all types of music.

A 2 octave arpeggio in C major is played as C,E,G,C,E,G,C going foreword and backward (up and down.) A harp piece often consists of arpeggiated chords, often played in dense rising and falling note sequences. Students  learning to play  musical instruments are required to practice scales and arpeggios to master scale patterns and to develop performance agility. 

Professional electronic keyboards and sequencing software often include arpegiators  and other pattern generators that allow composers  to generate arpegiations with little effort. The most creative uses of note patterns explore polyphonies that exceed the capabilities of live performance both in speed and complexity.

Using midi composition tools, complex rhythms and polyphonies can be woven into a dense fabric of sounds.  One path to new music involves combing variable arpegiations with other patterns in evolving compositions that I like to describe as journeys of discovery. The problem facing a 21st century composer using digital tools is not lack of intellectual challenges and novel ideas but it is to discover pleasing sound experiences that avoid becoming noise.

EMU Proteus Arpegiators

The EMU Proteus 2500 includes sophisticated programming options that allows a player to trigger complex, multi-track sequenced data from a keyboard. The EMU arpegiations include up, down, up/down, forward assign, backward assign forward/backward and random patterns. You can also create unique patterns to control pitch sequences. You determine the tempo by choosing note values from a whole note to a 32nd note.  

Additional variables are count and extension  that control how often the arpeggio  plays with each key press, with the option of  transposing the repeating sequences. A recycle parameter resets the sequence to the beginning when the duration value has been reached. A latch function turns on and maintains the arpegiations until another key is pressed. The note range can be set to a user-defined section of the keyboard. It is possible to cascade arpegiations so one arpegiators controls and second, controls a third. I sometimes create performances using the keyboard to control several  arpegiators that can operate in sequence, overlap, and cascade.

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Many of the topics presented online are from Music Notes by Stephen Gislason. Download a free copy of the work in progress. Your comments are welcome.

Persona Digital Studio is located on the Sunshine Coast, Sechelt, British Columbia, Canada. www.personadigitalstudio.com  email  music@personadigitalstudio.com. Our Music catalogue includes recorded performances by the P2500 Band, Em4U, and the Persona Classical Consort. Music downloads are available from iTunes, Napster, AmazonMP3 and from our companion website: Persona Digital Online.  We enjoy association with Reverb Nation who provides an online service for musicians to present and market their music.