Stuck in China with a Zither

I suppose I should writes something about my number one online hit (approaching 500 downloads on archive.org as of this writing): Zigong Blues.

I created this song about a year ago. I was messing around with a software kit of Asian percussion and came up with a cool sort of cricket-chirp rhythm. So I decided to build a song around it. One thing I was interested in was tempo. Feedback on my previous songs indicated they seemed chained to a particular tempo. I was still working with GrarageBand 2 at the time which doesn't let you change tempo within a song. So I thought maybe you could create an illusion of a tempo change with rhythm.

I opted for a basic but slow blues beat using Asian percussion instead of a trap set. At first I drag out the beat using two layers of percussion, moving in a staggered fashion from whole notes to half notes to quarter notes etc. until everything is double-time at the end. This, I hoped, would give the illusion that the tempo of the song was increasing even though, as far as the computer was concerned, it was the same tempo throughout.

Thinking about other instruments, the story forming in my mind was that B.B. King was stuck in some city in China (hence Zigong) without his band or his guitar. So he sits in with a local group and plays a Chinese zither. For a bass I use a Chinese erhu violin. In the real world, it's a rather high-pitched instrument with a textured tone. But through the magic of MIDI, I'm able to play it impossibly low, giving it a kind of deep, eerie, scrapey tone.

Along with the zither, the other lead is a Chinese flute. I start out with lead melody being carried by the zither and the flute repeating a simple line in the background. Later, the flute takes over the lead and brings the song to a climax. I'm imagining the local Chinese flutist trumping B.B. King.

Why is this song my most downloaded? One reason is that one of the guys who cowrote the now seemingly defunct blog, Black Sweater White Cat, found the tune while rooting around archive.org. So he posted it in the blog and, what's more, played it on the associated radio show at a small community station in Great Barrington, MA.

Woo hoo, I'm famous!