This piece is on my Tears of the Healer CD. For lack of a better label, I've characterized it as "country folk." It has a long history. I composed the acoustic 12-string part back in about 1977, but for years and years, I could never think of a melody that sounded right with it. Fast forward a few decades or so and I decided to give Band in a Box's ability to generate solos a try -- see if it came up with anything interesting. Well, there were none generated that appealed to me per se, but on one occasion, BiaB limited its melody to a pentatonic scale, and that's when it hit me. Try writing the melody in pentatonic. Bingo! I came up with the entire melody in less than an hour. I decided that, being pentatonic and all, it was crying out for a harmonica part, so that's what I gave it.

The 12-string guitar actually isn't. It's my Fender Stratocaster running through my Roland GR-33 Guitar Synthesizer. That GR-33's 12-string patch nails it. The GR-33 was slaved to my DAW so I could import the MIDI file and 12-string voice into the DAW. The harmonica's part is 100% MIDI; it's voice was courtesy of my Roland JV-1010 synth. To get it to sound as natural as I could required that I edit the MIDI events, which gives one total control over the MIDI output. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. All other instruments are MIDI and generated by BiaB. Their voices were courtesy of my Roland JV-1010 synth module.

https://soundcloud.com/michaelmcbroom/thankful-for-what-i-have

If you're interested in more of the album, you'll find a link for it at the bottom right of the page.

Best,
Michael

My Music:
https://soundcloud.com/michaelmcbroom/albums