My friend Matt reminded me recently that I’m far better at the business side of music than the whole “playing an instrument” thing. Of course, very few people in the world can handle a guitar as well as Matt. If you’re better than him at something, than you’re automatically a better that than musician.
Regardless, if you think I should provide a guide on how to turn your band into a successful touring band, let me know. It’s a 4-step process involving lying, cheating, stealing, and of course, courting controversy. But hey, that’s the game at the top, so you might as well play it from the bottom.
And no one ever got ahead in music by being forthright or honest. Not in Christian Rock, not Raffi, not David Cassidy. Ok, maybe those handshake guys from Jersey Boys, but that’s about it.
Let’s skip to the point of this article:
1. Good vocabulary of 12-bar variations, each from a different sub-genre
2. These identities are collected in Chapter 1 of each book
3. Chapter 1 of each book can be viewed online through Amazon.com
I’m really enjoying working with all these different forms for playing 12-bar, and seeing how some incorporate VI-ii-V-I and chromatic bassline movement. Also it’s actually kind of embarrassing how reliant Tonight You Belong To Me is on these 12-bar variations. And that I didn’t really notice before…
Welcome to another installment of everyone’s favourite songwriting blog. Listen and enjoy:
Today’s installment is the product of far too much Led Zeppelin. I will admit, I did review the main classic rock hits written by Free, Lenny Kravitz, Edgar Winter Group, Deep Purple, and Golden Earring within the same general time period, but I haven’t noticed any influence whatsoever on the resulting piece of music.
More so, not only did I clean out my collection of PowerTab files, but also found myself left with an insatiable hunger for a larger aural vocabulary at several stages in the writing process. What is amazing is that even though this resulted in my listening to the Zeppelin catalogue in my car for a few days, not as many ideas as you might think ended up in the final product. I blame two things: tempo, and the fact that I chose to limit myself to 3 guitar tracks maximum, or 4 where harmonies are required. The kind of intricate layering of multiple guitar parts is more fitted to a much slower song, so I passed.
Intro
The free time intro was inspired by Nobody’s Fault But Mine. I was listening to too much Zeppelin and realized I needed some slide (sometimes you just need to slide a bitch). Couldn’t find one in the house, so I bought one. Snap! Then I had to learn how to use it…
Man oh man, I’m not going to lie; this took a couple of takes to get something usable. So much can go wrong when you’re playing solo slide guitar, so so much. For example: on one of my takes, my house caught fire, and burned to the ground. True story.
I put a flanger on it because I had dinner tonight with among other people this dude John, and I told him that I bought a slide so I could play Nobody’s Fault But Mine, and he said “that’s the only song that uses a flanger that I can actually stand”. And there you go. I must have done something right, though, because I just want to listen to this intro over and over again. I just kinda hit notes all over the place, so it’s just so interesting – you can’t memorize the melody at all. That’s what we in the industry call “staying power”.
Verse
The main verse riff is a really simple A minor pent run with some chromatic transitions between the tones. You can do this too you know – you take every single place in the pentatonic scale where there is only 1 tone between notes, and you stick one in: that right there is the frickin’ definition of the frickin blues. And the 1.5-tone gaps – you leave those alone. What did they ever do to you?
Ok, so more on the verse riff: I have already expounded enough on how much I love to transpose up a tone for my solos; it’s generally awesome when you come back down to your tonic. Turns out it was Zeppelin’s Heartbreaker all along that got me loving this. I use the same tonal transposition as Heartbreaker for my verse riff, but faster, and with my chromatics in a different place.
Pre-Chorus
Yes, pre-chorus is a word. It’s like a premature chorus, and other male dysfunctions. Although women have pre-choruses too… My pre-chorus is based around E. E is the 5th of A, so it has a very satisfying draw back to A.
The pre-chorus used to sound a bit more like the ending of What Is And Should Never Be, but then suddenly I heard this chromatic pattern in my head. Then I got bored of everything else I had, and just played what I heard in my head. I do a Dadd4 – D transition, and a C – G transition, and double the chromatic part with a double-stop part of low 5ths to thicken it up.
The transition to the chorus used to be the same riff as is used in the chorus, but I thought this was a bit boring. That’s because it was. So I did what I always do: I stopped playing right before the part I needed to change, and listened to how my brain filled in the gap. Then I just played what I heard. That’s called insanity. It’ll be our little secret.
Oh, and the chromatic pauses into the chorus were inspired by the turnaround in Zeppelin’s Since I’ve Been Loving You where they play these fun little diads made up of the 5th and 3rd. They descend; I ascend; it’s all good.
Chorus
The chorus is just the traditional blues form used in Free’s All Right Now, lot’s of KISS and Ozzy, etc. It’s really just there to set up the pentatonic descending pattern, and thus will be the first do go during the Rapture. The pentatonic descending pattern has a few different variations depending on what part it’s going into, but it’s played so fast that you’d never win a copyright case claiming that one isn’t a copy of another.
Solo
This was hilarious to me. I pretty much just restructured Zeppelin’s The Lemon Song into a different structure and formatted it as 12-bar. With the slide solo, it makes for a nice break, and finishing with a bass solo version of the verse riff is a fun way to bring back the verse riff as the intro to the final pre-chorus and chorus.
Outtro
Until earlier this evening, I just had a let ring for the ending. But I kept hearing something like the ending of Zeppelin’s Over the Hills and Faraway in my head, so I play an Am figure with a descending baseline into an E major. This Am with a descending bassline is a classic feature of music, used in songs as disparate as Moonlight Sonata, Simon & Garfunkel’s America, and Carl Thomas’s I Wish, to name a few. The addition of the E major at the end is from Babe I’m Gonna Leave You. My outtro would sound even more like Over the Hills and Faraway, but I couldn’t figure out how to make the super-sustained notes. I think it’s an e-bow maybe, if they had such things in the stone ages that were the 70s. I think it’s more likely a country lap slide guitar, like Junior Brown plays.
At any rate, this is the second time writing up a blog about this song. I’ve discovered that the secret to making your writing interesting, as I should have learned from one of my earlier blogs, is sleep deprivation!
As for an update; I spent the weekend going over the balance of Led Zeppelin PowerTabs on my computer, as well as some Lenny Kravitz, Deep Purple, Edgar Winter Group, and Free. Last night I did some jamming over a drum track and put something together that is heavily influenced by Zeppelin’s What Is and Should Not Be, and Rock n’ Roll. I’d like to also blend in some Ramble On. It sounds pretty ballin’.
At any rate, new music is in the works. Once I have my 5-song portfolio, I’m going to tweak the drums a bit and submit them to the guitar player with whom I may be working. I also have a meeting in preparation with some other musicians to schedule recording.
I also have a post in the works on the role of music theory in songwriting. Should be pretty inflammatory.
I have recently deduced, at least partially scientifically through statistical analysis over a number of unbiased and wholly verifiable sources, and not entirely through magic and unholy sacrificial rituals, that this is the most popular songwriting blog on the interweb, ftw over 9000 herd u liek mudkips I accidentally the cheezburgerz.
Also, I have deduced that I am terrible liar.
And for those of you who don’t already know this, music is a popularity contest, so if you want to be famous, develop skill at being popular; don’t waste your time on learning anything about music.
Music streaming is back up for all the previous articles. I switched to a DropBox account, and re-coded the links, so hopefully they won’t go down again. In other news, I am going to eat some blueberries.
Music
In one of my previous articles I touched on how important it was to not get hung up on logically devising new and interesting rhythm patterns. This is Snoozefest 101. My recommendation involved interpreting the groove by playing over drum loops – your interpretation of the rhythm is typically different than anyone else’s. It’s amazing how little effort is involved in keeping things original via this attitude.
Last night I was working on a song inspired by Damien Rice’s Moody Mooday (a clear interpretation of Sigur Ros’s body of work) which came up on shuffle whilst I was driving home last night. I am using Ingrid Michaelson’s The Way I Am as a template for feel and structure, so it’s mostly based on bongos and acoustic bass. This brings me to my point, and the crux of this article:
Bongo players really have no choice but to be masters of rhythm
Think about how little musical information can be transmitted with bongos. It’s not like you can play bongos and have someone say “Oh hey, that’s Vivaldi’s Four Seasons” (happy birthday Vivaldi!). It just doesn’t happen. But what they do have is rhythm, and dynamics, and a little tone: they have groove.
I dumped a folder of about 60 bongo loops into my project and was blown away by the myriad of rhythms and grooves. If you are working on an acoustic project and are looking to create a less derivative rhythm accompaniment, look no further than your directory of percussion loops., and test some out over a straight drum beat.
Once you’ve locked into a groove and tracked some parts, you can always mute the percussion loop, or mix it down.
Percussion is also very popular amongst cultures for which we generally do not receive much exposure. You will often get a Latin or Indian feel from the percussion loops that are currently floating around the internet. The grooves to be derived from these cultures are far more interesting than anything you could have though up on your own. It’s a fact.
And if anyone can recommend a good guitar or piano teacher, I would really like guitar or piano lessons for my birthday this year…
