Spent yesterday morning knocking together a very quick little tune. I’d been messing around with a Japanese pentatonic scale called the Hirajoshi for a while and wanted to do something with it. It’s a very easy way of getting a fake Japanese sound, and fans of crazy guitar playing may also have heard Jason Becker and Marty Friedman using it. I wanted to create something very calm and graceful with it, and a recent task in the Recording Collective called for a tune inspired by another country, so I went for the ‘fake Japanese’ approach.
The result…
A Moment of Clarity (2.7MB mp3)
I don’t expect it’s particularly authentic by Japanese standards of Hirajoshi scale use, but hey ho!
[For music theory fans: I'm using Mattias Eklundh's interpretation of the scale - root, 2nd, minor 3rd, 5th, minor 6th (E F# G B C in the key of E). However, other sources suggest this is actually the third mode, and the parent scale is actually root, minor 2nd, 4th, 5th, minor 6th (E F A B C in the key of E).]