"You Wreck My Heart"
Written & Produced: 2006 Feb 20 / Mixed: 2008 Dec 19

This is a 2006 tune, written for acoustic guitar, piano, electric fretless bass, drums and percussions.
In the original recoding made at that time, the percussions were played from audio loops and it wasn't possible to separate each instruments contained in the loops. So, for this reproduction made in December 2008, I prepared separate samples for bongos, timbales and giro and programmed them individually so I could gain more control over the arrangement.
I searched Wikipedia and Youtube to learn about those Latin percussions. As it turned out, bongos consist of two drums one of which is called Macho("male" in Spanish) and the other Hembra("female"). The Macho bongo sounds higher and sharper than Hembra. Both are played with hands. And when you mute the drumhead with a part of your hand while hitting it, it produces "close" sound. When you hit it without any muting, it produces "open" sound.
The image above is an excerpt from the bongos part.
(hear) The upper half is the first measure and the lower is the second.
The notes written above the horizontal line are Macho hits and the notes below the horizontal line are Hembra hits. So, from the beginning, you have six consecutive Macho hits and then two Hembra hits. The notes marked with black ovals are "closed" sound and the ones with white ovals are "open". The 5th Macho sound is notated slightly higher than the others, meaning it generates higher tone.
Score ||
Guitar Part ||
Leadsheet ||
Download
(Continued from the left column)

This example is from the guitar solo.
(hear) The chord changes from Fm7, which is the tonic, to Bm7 and to Dmaj7. The B note is tritone away from F, therefore the two notes constitute the furthest interval among all within an octave. This makes the transition from Fm7 to Bm7 somewhat dramatic and surprising. In fact this type of progression doesn't occur within one diatonic scale and you need to modulate from one key to another to have it.
This example begins with Fm7 which is the center of the tune, and it takes Bm7 in the second bar to imply it has modulated into the key of Bm or some other key which has Bm7 as a diatonic chord. Then it goes to Dmaj7. Dmaj7 is the third diatonic chord in the key of Bm if you count from B, and the listener now gets convinced it went to the Bm key. Then on the next bar it goes to C/G, a diatonic chord of Fm, and to Gb7(b5) which is the subV("sub-five") chord of C7. So, this is a sequence which starts with Fm, moves to Bm and comes back to Fm. This 4-bar cycle goes on repeating for a while.

An except from the section after Guitar Solo.
(hear)