After a little pondering I felt like some good ole banjo rolls would probably do the trick and from there on I wrote the piece you are now looking at. How I play those arpeggios is that I pick the first note with my trusty jazz 3 pick. I then pluck the next two notes with my middle and ring finger (ascending). Later on while descending I just reverse that movement. This is an age old banjo trick that every country player (with self respect) on earth masters fully.
Like I mentioned before I was writing it for a haunted house song so I used some tricks I stole from the great film composer John Williams (which he stole from Strauss and everyone then stole it from Williams) and it involves alot of harmony from the diminished scale. This creates that eerie feeling and this is how I was thinking. You can hear this being used ALOT in the movie score for example the first Indiana Jones movie and more prominently Star Wars.
Starting off the C# half-whole diminished scale (C#, D, E, F, G, G#, Bb, B) we can get a whole bunch of triads. Namely, C#, E, G and Bb. We can also get the same starting notes as minor triads (C#min, Emin, Gmin, Bbmin) and as diminished triads (C#dim, Edim, Gdim, Bbdim). Oh the wonders of the diminished scale. The cool thing about this is that it gives you alot of harmony from one scale and it's got a really cool vibe to it. And here's how I was thinking as I wrote the piece:
The first two arpeggios is just C#min (gotta start somewhere right) triads and then I throw in a Emin triad to stir things up a little. Gives you that diminished feel. It continues on with some more C#min and then another Emin for the sake of continuity.
On the first descending part (bar 3) I went to the Dominant chord (G#7) which I sprinkled ever so gently with the b9 and b13 for added hauntedness. Followed that up with some more b9 triads and in the middle of bar 5 the whole triad spectacle takes place. If you read the mapping of the half-whole diminished scale triads above you'll see that all of the arpeggios here is part of that scale. Namely C#min, G, E, Bbmin, Gmin and C#dim. As a closer I threw in a G#augmented chord (or #5 as you also could call it) that nicely leads us back to the tonic C#min.
Hope you liked that one and next time I'll come back with something that actually resembles music!
