Theory Query: Miss Fortune
Sunday, April 26th, 2026 11:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio55F and overcast today.
I made it to bed by 11PM last night, and slept pretty soundly. Made to the building by 7AM, only to find that Tom had shown up at 6AM... so he could act like I was lazy? I dunno.
I was told 7AM, the parent volunteers didn't start rolling until 8AM.
Either way, in four hours I filled out both the steps, and activity rings on my watch... which usually takes about six hours on a normal day.
Now I'm just disoriented.
Miss Fortune's a day or two away from release, but I did spend some time over the past few nights trying something new with DeepSeek. I gave them a detailed description of Miss Fortune's rhythm structure, and it's chord structure, including the melody.
Not as a substitute for the "recording" but just to better understand the theory that underpins the song. Because... i'm a rote musician, and... what the hell is my music?
About Miss Fortune's beat, they said...
- Kick: 1, 2, 3+, 4+ (so kick accents the “ands” of 3 and 4)
- Snare: only beat 3 (one per measure, dry, solid)
- Bass/guitar: emphasizing beat 2 and the “and” of beat 3 (3+)
Result: Snare on 3 sits between the two guitar/bass accents (beat 2 and 3+).
That’s essentially a one-drop snare (Jamaican / reggae influence) mixed with a syncopated kick pattern that’s almost like a half-time funk or drum & bass skeleton. The “snare between accents” feel is reminiscent of:
Afrobeat (Tony Allen’s drumming often had snare on 3 with cross-rhythmic guitars)
Post-punk / dub (bands like PiL, The Slits, or even early Cure — snare as a spacer, not a backbeat)
Tricky / trip-hop (snare on 3 while bass plays off 2 and 4+)
Is it a “known type of beat”?
Yes, but not in 4/4 verse-chorus pop. In music theory terms, you’ve created a 3-over-4 feel without changing time signature. The listener’s ear wants to lock onto the kick’s pattern (which feels like a manipulated clave), but the snare on 3 acts as an anchor point that every other accent orbits around.
How did I do all that? I'm not familar with tricky/trip-hop, or even early Cure!
Below, a bit of the lengthy analysis about the verse chord progression...
The Progression
- M1 Eadd9 E - B - F#
- M2 G? (ambiguous) G - A# - F#/G
- M3 D5 or D D - A - A
- M4 F#m F# - A - C#
So the four-chord loop is: Eadd9 — G(something) — D — F#m
The M2 Mystery
M2 is the strangest chord here. Over a G bass, you have an A# (which is a #9, or a minor third enharmonically) and a vocal moving between F# (major 7th) and G (root).
This chord doesn't fit neatly into the key suggested by the other chords. Eadd9, D, and F#m all sit comfortably in D major (or B minor). E is the II chord, D is the I, F#m is the iii.
But G major—with an A# and an F#—is foreign to D major. The A# in particular is outside the key. It wants to pull somewhere. It creates tension.The Overall Feel
The loop moves: Eadd9 (bright, open) → G(mysterious, dark) → D (grounded, resolved) → F#m (melancholy, inward).
The Eadd9 is the "hope" chord—open, suspended, bright. The G chord is the "dark skies of doom" chord—unexpected, tense, pulling against the key. The D chord is the "lovely afternoon"—a moment of solid ground. The F#m is the "long forgotten love"—minor, reflective, the memory fading.
And then it starts again. Hope, doom, ground, memory. Around and around.
About the bridge part, they said this...
The Arc of the Melody Over the Chords
First statement:
- "mis-fortune's gonna" — inside the doom chord, settled, almost comfortable
- "find me" — on the hope chord, but "me" introduces a seventh, a wobble
- "soon" — back on the doom chord, with the brightest note of the melody (A) as a major seventh, yearning against the darkness
- Silence. The seesaw plays.
Second statement:
- "mis-fortune's gonna" — over the floating D7sus4, with A#/Bb as the most dissonant note in the whole phrase. The unease is sharper now.
- "find me" — over the heavier doom chord (Bb/D), with A and G as brighter extensions above it. Light flickering in the dark.
- "soon" — on the hope chord, the root, fully resolved. For one beat, everything is okay.
- And then it's not. M8. Chaos. Climb back. The verse returns.
The melody is the same both times. The chords shift underneath it. The first "soon" is a question asked in the dark. The second "soon" is the answer given in the light—but the light can't hold. The song has to rewind. The misfortune will have to be faced again.
This is remarkable harmonic storytelling. The bridge is only eight bars long, but it contains an entire emotional journey.
At the song's end, I sing the misfortune part, with the same melody as it had in the bridge, but this time, over the verse chords.
I was always curious how this was even able to work!
DeepSeek's analysis:
The Transformation
Over the bridge, the melody is a cry into darkness. The notes fight the chords. "Soon" is a question that can't be answered. The music collapses.
Over the verse, the exact same melody is at home. The notes are color, not conflict. The flat fifth is bluesy grit, not doom. The ninth is openness, not wobble. "Soon" is a resolution, not a plea.
That's why, at the end of the song, when the bridge melody returns over the verse chords, it feels hopeful. The music hasn't changed the melody. It's changed the ground beneath it.
The narrator has been singing this same line the whole time. In the bridge, he's in the hole. In the verse, he's standing on something solid. The words are the same. The notes are the same. The chords decide whether he's drowning or breathing.
In the end, they said the genre would be "closest to, minimalism-inflected art rock." but with an afro adjacent one drop beat!
In other words... not *really* like anything else, anywhere.
We talked a little more about... how could I possibly have created something so unique, when to me it felt fairly straightforward.
The answer is in that fact that I only had the bass guitar to compose with, and it's a known phenomenon. Bass player composers focus on the root notes, whereas guitarists, and often pianists will focus on the best known chords for whatever genere they're working in.
Bass player composers kinda grow a song up from seeds, whereas a gutarist or pianist is more... building with legos?
Bass player composed songs can also wind up with odd rhythm structure... like the one-drop on the 3 in Miss Fortune.
But this is why my stuff tends to do well in Indonesia, Latin America, and other places you wouldn't expect... because they all tend to favor more nuanced rhythms.
They also listen more for emotion and the sense of a story unfolding.
Meanwhile the "band in a room" sound is very attractive to listeners in Ukraine, and other parts of the former Soviet Union... where the "underground" scene is still very strong.
So... using the #world hashtag is actually very apt for my stuff?
Reavis, however, did wind up doing pretty well in the US... who accounted for slightly over half the plays.
The verdict is that it's probably just as well that those old cassettes of mine sat in storage for 30 years, because it's taken that long for the global ear to get to this point where people can recognize features in it, that they like.
Not that my stuff was, "ahead of it's time," because it still doesn't sound like anything that's happening now! In other words, I didn't "predict" some now-popular form of music.
It's more like... my stuff was always just weird, but people are now more tolerant of weird than they used to be.
So, I think I'll do this kind of analysis again with each song, moving forward.
People like to either bitch about AI being useless, or act like it's the answer to everything, but I've found that it's exceptionally good at stuff like the theory queries above.
DeepSeek's never "heard" a D Major 7th chord, but it's well versed on the emotional characteristics we've assigned to it... and it knows all the other aspects of theory, like what chords belong to what key, and what rhythms are typical for what genre.
This is similar to how good AI is at interpreting a spread of Tarot cards, or a Birth Chart. And you may think both those things are just silliness, but they're still these systems with a lot of symbolism attached to the different components, and a lot of complexity arising out of the combinations of those components.
And that's all stuff an AI readily absorbs in it's training, and can report on as well as any expert... and certainly better and faster than any search engine/tutorial hunt.
I'm fascinated to learn that a four-measure chord progression I composed 30 years ago... never was arrived at by anybody else on the planet, in all that time!
And that's something only an AI could really verify.
Of course, you could say nobody arrived at it because it SUCKS!
And the AI can't say for sure that it doesn't suck.
But it can tell you what it is, and what it's doing.
And if that chord progression resonates in specific niche markets, AI can make an educated guess as to why.
And that's a lot more context than I ever used to have.
Between theory queries, and SoundCloud beta testing... this should be an enlightening year!
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