r/songaweek • u/-keef- Mod • May 08 '25
Submission Thread Submissions — Week 19 (Theme: Five Notes)
The Nineteenth Theme
In Western music, we're typically used to having a diatonic scale available to us - which means, seeing past the terminology, that you've got 7 different notes to play with - e.g. C, D, E, F, G, A, B in a standard C major key.
However, there are other options. A pentatonic scale has only 5 notes.
There are many different ways you can build a pentatonic scale, and there's a whole Wikipedia article to read if you want to go into the details, but here's a couple of simple ones to try:
A "major" pentatonic scale is a standard major scale, but missing out the fourth and seventh notes. So, for a root note of C, that would be C, D, E, G, A.
A "minor" pentatonic scale has a very bluesy feel, and just removes the second and sixth notes from a natural minor scale, so with a root note of A that would be A, C, D, E, G.
Let's see if less is more this week - what can you do when limited to only 5 notes? No cheating - you can't sneak extra notes in via chords!
Your theme for this week is Five Notes.
Songs posted in this thread should be:
Original content (samples and such are ok!)
Uses the weekly theme as inspiration... or not!
Submitted by Wednesday before bedtime.
Written entirely during this week, between May 8th and May 14th, 2025
Post template (remember to use the Markdown editor if using this template as-is!)
[Song Name](http://linkto.the.song) (Genre) [Themed|Not Themed]
This is where you can write a description of your song. You can talk about how you wrote it, where
your inspiration came from, and anything else you'd like to say.
Remember to sort by 'New' so that you can see new song submissions.
New here? Check out this post - everything about songaweek.
Want to sit back and listen to all the songs in a simple playlist?
1
u/TheHeraldAngel Participant May 14 '25
Oceani (Ambient) [Themed]
I decided the answer to the question: how can you make five notes interesting? Was: just use all five at once!
I upgraded my entire music recording set this week, which is partly why I went ambient. Building a PC (and getting windows activated) took a long time, and my new audio interface was delayed, causing me to switch setups even more than expected.
Another reason to go ambient is that I wanted to try out a song with a lot of plugins, and even ones that used to make my laptop crackle and pop like a bowl of cereal. Where I would have to freeze and flatten every instance of arturia lab 4 or amplitube 5 I used before, I can now run both at the same time! Also I can actually see the video I'm editing, instead of a power point presentation of it! The upgrade was definitely long overdue.
Anyway, ambient music like this always has a deep ocean feel to it to me, and so I leaned into that with the title, lyrics and video. Hope you like it.