A Minor Major

Welcome back to Tea with Liya! Today, I'm playing a jazz song that I composed called "A Minor Major." (That's an indefinite article, not a key.) It has some chord patterns that you might not expect (but, of course, there's still minor and major ones). That's because I wrote the song differently than others, where I used the chords from an existing song. I hope you like listening to it!






Maybe instead of actually thinking of something to write today, I should simply type some letters and see if those come together to make a sentence.

a c d e f a s o p i j c b w y t

That isn't anything like a sentence, is it? It would take a lot of letters before I actually found anything I could understand - for example, seeing so or I have in the list of letters. 

However, maybe there's another way I could use them. What if I tried to write words that started with the letters on my list?

Although counting does eventually fill a sheet of paper, it just can't be worth your time.

That doesn't fit in very well with what I'm saying, but it's still a sentence that makes sense. I was able to write that using what looked like a sequence of random letters. 

Maybe now I could say something that sounds similar to that. 

Although counting does eventually fill a sheet of paper, it just can't be worth your time. There are far better things to do than using up pieces of paper writing numbers. 

What if I added in another piece?

You could read, you could sing, you could pour tea into teacups. All that's more valuable than filling your time by filling papers.

Look at that. I started with a random list of letters, and now I've found something to say with it. Now you're starting to understand how I wrote the song that I'm playing today.

 

(2026: Since I failed to mention that my music teacher helped me revise some of my compositions, I came back to say this. Also, I'm almost certain he gave me this idea for starting to write. How would I have come up with it myself? Coming up with licks sounds easier.)

I actually just started with a list of letter names for notes...

C E D Ab G B C D

...and a list of numbers.

6 5 7 6 3 6 1 4

Using those numbers, I could find the right chords to play with the melody notes I had written down. But I still didn't have that many melody notes - they still looked like a random sequence of letters. I would have to do something similar to what I did with my sentence... fill in the spaces to connect the notes together.

It's hard to make sense of a c d e when there's nothing written to say what they stand for. In the same way, it's hard to hear C D E Ab as a melody when they're just sitting there on their own.

Now if you look at what I said at the top, you can see why there are some chord patterns you wouldn't expect. I wasn't using any framework to put the chords together - I just used some letters and numbers, and then found ways to connect them. 

So that means I didn't really know what the song was going to sound like - not any more than I knew that I would write some sentences about counting on pieces of paper. That's simply what I decided to use to connect my letters.

If you have a skill in connecting random letters together, you can make them sound not so much like random letters anymore. That's why you're listening to this song today.

Keep filling your teacup with music!
~Liya