🤦‍♂️ I've been doing this wrong

[plus: Piano Man]

RIFFS:

Van Morrison once joked about his song Sweet Thing.

He quipped that he didn’t write it, he “just made it up.”

In the same way, there are dozens of songs I never learned—I just started playing them.

So many of those were songs I saw a friend cover… and then poached for myself.

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You might call it “mission drift":

Over time, we lose the clarity of our original intention.

In the context of a gigging solo act:

• lyrics get switched up

• chords get misremembered

• the form gets completely mangled

But that’s ok. As long as the audience enjoys your interpretation, all is well.

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Put the two together, and you get some wild false memories.

It’ll be a song you’ve played for years.

You’ll be walking through the grocery store, singing along, and… wait, what?!?! This song has a BRIDGE?!?!?! I’m gonna have to go back and relearn the whole thing!

😆

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I don’t know where Sarkis learned Piano Man.

But 23 year old me squinted up at him onstage and thought I could to that.

• I’m Sarkis’s musical little brother, and I learned the song from him.

• Jasper is my musical little brother, and he learned the song from me.

• Lincoln is Jasper’s musical (and literal) little brother…

…that’s a decades-long game of telephone!

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RECS:

Here’s how I avoid that these days.

I like to see what I previously could only hear.

Traditionally musicians have done this with standard notation. But there’s an easier (and less error-prone) way of supplementing your ears with your eyes: the DAW.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, the DAW I recommend is Ableton Live.

But hoo boy it can be pricey—Ableton Live 12 Suite is over seven hundred dollars.

Luckily for us, we don’t need the ultra-fancy Suite edition to learn songs—the Lite edition is great for learning songs, and it’s FREE.

Or rather, it comes bundled with some:

• audio interfaces

• pad controllers

• MIDI keyboards

• etc

The Audio Owl keeps a list of gear that comes with a free Ableton Live Lite license code. The site is a bit of an eyesore, but you might find that something you (or a friend) already own gets you free access to Live Lite.

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CHARTS:

Alright, let’s relearn Piano Man.

Here’s my chart:

Dropbox folder with Ableton, Sibelius, musicXML, & PDF files

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SMARTS:

1/ SIX PAGES!?!?!

Unfortunately, yeah.

The form never repeats itself exactly. You might be able to shave off a page or two with 1st & 2nd ending repeats, but I doubt it’d be worth it.

Most commercially available charts simplify the form to save pages.

2/ quick hits & quirky bits

TEMPO & TIME SIGNATURE:

• It’s roughly 170 BPM

• in 3/4 time

KEY:

• it’s in C

FORM:

• with a chart this long, the tendency is to have your head buried in your iPad onstage

• to avoid that, it’s helpful to think about the discrete phrases…

3/ let’s look at those phrases

• the 6-bar phrase that walks down from C & ends with D7 G:

we play this TWELVE times in this song

• the 6-bar phrase that walks down from C & ends with F G:

this happens SEVENTEEN times!

• after that F G, there are three different possible endings:

  

  1. this 4-bar phrase | C | F/C | G/C | F C/E Dm |

     1. it’s always played twice (so 8 bars total)

     2. it happens for:

        1. HARMONICA RIFF - DOUBLE

        2. HARMONICA RIFF - 14 BAR

        3. OUTRO

  2. two bars of C

     1. it happens for:

        1. all three CHORUSes

        2. VERSEs 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, & 8

  3. this 4-bar phrase: | C | | F/C | |

     1. it happens for:

        1. HARMONICA RIFF - 10 BAR

        2. VERSEs 3 & 7

• the PRECHORUS:

• the SOLO is like the PRECHORUS, but the first 4-bar phrase happens twice:

• and of course there’s this INTRO

4/ here’s how I play that INTRO

SoundSlice here

5/ what do you think of this?

I added a “chord track” to the Ableton file, so you can see the changes in real time:

(This Ableton file is in the Dropbox folder)

6/ here are some of the chord voicings I’m using:

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That’s all I got this week.

See you next Wednesday,

Josh