Icollections plus
The album artwork is based on a picture taken by Starlite in the late 70's of her Grandmother Betty Higgs. In addition to the band and session musicians Steve Gibson and Jonny Henderson, Valencian native Danny Boy Sanchez was co opted to play harmonica on track No. It was produced and engineered by Campbell, co-produced by Starlite and mastered by Jon Astley who is known for his work with The Who and other rock luminaries. The couple wrote the material for their debut album Blueberry Pie over two weeks in April 2016 and started recording in July at the Supertone Records Studio in Valencia, Spain, with the album mixed and mastered in October 2016. Their first recorded collaboration was on Campbell's second solo album, The Knife where they jointly wrote and performed Do You Want Me with Campbell on acoustic guitar, Theremin and vocals and Starlite on Mellotron and vocals. The art of the song is everything and they fly in the face of disposable music – writing, recording and producing their work and then releasing on their independent label Supertone Records. The love extended past each other's playing and the duo were wed in 2014 after a whirlwind romance, forming their new joint band, Starlite Campbell, in January 2016.Īs prolific singer-songwriters, they started writing together immediately and built up a large collection of songs in a variety of styles, from Americana, folk music, electronic music, progressive rock to British blues. I don’t want to get too much into the deeper theory of this, but that makes the ii-chord a so-called “secondary dominant” of the G7 chord, and the Roman numerals would look like this: I V/V V7 I.The duo had been recording, playing and touring independently in bands for many years until they met in 2012, when Starlite asked Campbell, who was British Blues Awards Nominee, to join her band as the guitar player. If you’re thinking in C major, that means playing a D major chord, then following it with G, something like: C D G7 C. Often when you change a chord that’s normally minor to being major, it works well to follow that chord with the one whose bass note is 4 notes higher. If you want to hear it in action, listen to the verse of Burton Cumming’s “ I Will Play a Rhapsody.” It sounds ethereal when used this way, because the major sound of the chord we expect to be minor makes the key of the song pleasantly ambiguous. There is an interesting “floating” sort of sound that comes from playing a I chord, moving up to the II (but keeping the bass on I), then moving back to I. Move from the tonic chord (I) up to II, then back again, keeping the bass on the tonic.
There are two other ways you can use a major II-chord: 1. If you decide to make that kind of change in your own progression, you might need to change a melody note from F to F#, so watch carefully for that. Listen to the following progression which uses a standard minor ii-chord, and then compare it to the next progression which changes the ii-chord to a major chord (II)Ĭ – Dm – F – G7 – C (with a standard minor ii-chord)Īs you can hear, that sort of straight substitution of a minor ii for a major II, then moving on to a IV-chord, works quite well. That one alteration makes a rather noticeable change in the sound of your progression.
This means changing the F in the D minor chord (d-f-a) to F# (d-f#-a). One chord you might want to try experimenting with is to change the ii-chord by making it major. If you then write a song in C major, the majority of the chords you use will be one of those seven chords listed above. But as you likely know, you can throw other chords into your progressions that don’t come from that list, and those are often the ones that can add a bit of interest to an otherwise predictable progression.
When you create these chords (also called triads because each one is a 3-note chord) the kind of chord they are (major, minor, etc.) stays the same regardless of the key: the I chord is always major, the ii-chord is always minor, etc. For example, take a C major scale and do that, and you wind up with these chords: If you take a major scale and build chords above each note of the scale, you know that some of those chords will be major, some minor, and one diminished.