🍕 Putting It All Together
[Six Skills 6/6]
Let’s put it all together.
So far in this Six Skills series, we’ve covered:
Let’s have a look at how these inform each other.
It starts with a song.
Songs are the currency of our musical lives.
People don’t dance to modes.
Nobody requests a technique.
No one ever got a music theory concept stuck in their head.
Those things are all in service of songs.
Learning songs is the meta-skill.
Let’s learn one together.
I think this Ben Rector song will crush at a wedding ceremony:
1/ DIY Before Google!
It shrinks your world to have “take the shortcut” as your default setting.
It’s a tortoise & the hare kind of thing. Yes, I could just look this song up in the Ultimate Guitar app. But that would rob me of the chance to flex my figure-it-out muscles.
Besides: the Ultimate Guitar version is probably wrong.
If you can afford it, buy it.
Amazon sells mp3s for $1.29.
I don’t know how much of that makes it into an artist’s pocket, but it makes me feel good. If it’s not available there (or if you’re broke and/or the exchange rate sucks), there’s always 4k Video Downloader.
Put it into Live or Logic.
Your eyes are stronger than your ears.
Just because we’re DIYing it doesn’t mean we have to hold everything in our heads. Seeing a song on the timeline lets us easily offload information. (Use Adapt Tempo in Logic or Auto-Warp Long Samples in Live).
Eyes & ears together as we…
2/ Listen & Hear
Real-time notes as I listen through:
pickup measure (+a)
intro is 4 bars?
is this a double verse before the chorus?
does he do this chorus up an octave later?
oh maybe it’s just the “it’s a million things about you”
re intro is two bars
strings enter here
ah double verse here too
(or really, 8 bars is the length of the verse)
I like how the melody changes to build a little
let’s see how this second chorus ends
sets up a bridge, no?
yep, no re intro
ooh until after the bridge
and it’s the full length a la the beginning
ooh I love how he sets up the tag
interested to see what that chord move is
re intro to end
there’s a ritard
This is “listening”—“hearing” will come later (when I start to play it).
3/ Label & Communicate
I like to label the parts right there in Ableton Live:
Then I communicate the form (to myself) in Sibelius:
4/ Start Seeing Chords
Last week we talked about seeing chords on the neck:
But equally important is seeing chords in relation to each other.
These chords don’t exist in a vacuum. Just like Sudoku or a crossword puzzle, every chord that I figure out gives me hints about the chords around it.
It starts on a D chord, so I look to the “diatonic” chords first:
The very next chord isn’t one of these!
Where do I look next? At the “borrowed” chords:
And again, I’m collecting hints.
The melody goes:
And it’s on this note where I’ve got a mystery chord:
Because I’m seeing chords everywhere, I know there’s a really good chance that the chord will be one that has this note.
And sure enough:
Keep going.
Just like the crossword, I get stuck & unstuck a few times.
But before long, I get the form all filled in with chords:
From here, I can flesh out this chart more:
refine the chords
eg the second chord of the chorus might have A in the bass?
write the INTRO/RE INTRO melody out
write the vocal melody & lyrics into the chart
But since it’ll be just me playing this one, I’ll start making a guitar arrangement.
My chart in PDF + Sibelius + musicXML files here.
5/ Invisible Technique
Not gonna lie: this is tricky to play.
The piano of the original is adaptable to guitar, but it isn’t idiomatically guitar-like.
That’s ok. It’s doable. But if I’m gonna play this in someone’s wedding…
it’s not enough to play through it, holding on for dear life
it’s not enough to practice it until it feels easy
it’s got to be so smooth that it no longer sounds like good guitar playing…
…and starts sounding like good music.
(And ideally, until it disappears altogether and simply evokes a feeling.)
Here’s my arrangement of the intro, practiced until it’s a little past “holding on for dear life” but definitely not until it feels easy:
Recording it & listening is the only way for me to truly hear myself.
Anything else is willful self-delusion.
That’s all I got this week.
See you next Wednesday (when we’ll return to our regular Riffs Recs Charts & Smarts format),
Josh
Wow that song is a "home run". So moving. AND your quote "Anything else is willful self-delusion" was a home run as well!