Just a quick note on something funny I noticed in Richard Cohn's Audacious Euphony that led me to a mild (and daft) reharm of Giant Steps.

I haven't played much with Sucharitra but today I worked out a few basic harmonizations -- in thirds, fourths and seconds, basically -- and I liked the sounds.

I've always enjoyed Messiaen's chords without really knowing what's going on with them, so today I looked at an article about them and cooked up some chords of my own inspired by it.

OK it's not really a "trick" but I've been using this a lot lately so I thought it was worth a note. The idea is that on a C minor you can pivot to Eb minor, and in general substituting "the minor up the minor third" sounds nice and unexpected.

I've been immersing myself in early 20th century piano music again lately and getting lots of ideas for the guitar. One thing you see happening at that time is increasing rhythmic flexibility and sophistication, and this often comes from the use of tuplets. You can see it all over Ravel and Debussy, not to mention of course the wilder folks like Scriabin and Sorabji, and it continues into more modernistic composers like Boulez and Xenakis too.

I've been playing with Common b6 Pentatonic from my previous post over the past view days and thought it would be worth noting some applications of this and the Hungarian Minor Pentatonic to major 7 chords.

Last night in the practice room I revisited this post about a mildly altered pentatonic so this morning I decided to pull out some more possibilities for combining it with familiar things.

I've been revisiting some Derek Bailey recordings lately and realised I never really worked on one of his most distinctive sounds: combining normal fretted notes with natural harmonics. These fascinating effects can be harsh, percussive or shimmeringly beautiful, and the technique can be applied outside Bailey's own very idiosyncratic style.

I'm told many people enjoy it when I can't sleep and do one of these "here's some data, you sort it out" posts. If you're one of those people, this is your lucky day.

I realise this thread of posts is probably getting a bit old but I've done a bit more tidying up of my (initially flippant) project around "Hungarian pentatonics" and have some moderately nice initial results.