If you’ve hung around here much,
…you know I’m a big fan of Ableton Live.
Learning & practicing songs is MUCH easier with it than without it.
One area where Ableton Live is unrivaled is in the ease of creating custom arrangements:
change key
change tempo
repeat sections
shorten sections
rearrange the form
All of these are hilariously easy to do inside of Ableton Live.
Mission Drift
One of the perils of being a solo act is that subtle—often unintentional—changes to an arrangement accrue over time. You learn a song exactly as it is on the original recording, gig it out for a few years, and… now it’s a slightly different song.
3 x 5 is just such a tune.
I love this song, but:
I don’t really care for the singing portion of the bridge.
I like to tag the lyric “no more 3 x 5s” one more time than Mayer does.
And then in the instrumental outro, I want one fewer go-round.
No problem: this is why I write charts for bandmates in the first place!
Laziness is a virtue.
I can record myself playing this.
But then I’d still need to explain the drum & bass feel to the band.
Instead, I just used Ableton Live to Frankenstein the original recording to match my preferred form: