When sitting down to write a song, I think harmony and melody are often at the forefront of one’s mind. Musicians love to talk about harmony (the vertical component) and melody (the horizontal component) as two sides of the same coin. That “coin,” of course, is the domain of pitch.

But yet in much popular music, pitch seems to play less of a central role in the structure of a song than the role pitch plays in classical music. Take for example rap music. In a lot of rap music, there is typically no discernable vocal melody since the vocalist is speaking more than singing, and the underlying harmony is often static throughout the entire song. So our interest in the music, therefore, must be activated by another domain.

Beck’s breakthrough hit “Loser” provides what I think is a good example of how variety in a domain other than pitch can sustain our interest during the course of a song. In “Loser,” Beck uses just a small assortment of repetitive samples. But throughout the tune, the combination of these samples is constantly changing - the instrumentation is always reshuffled in new and different ways.

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Warning: this post will be discussing face-melting guitar solos, so please don’t read any further unless you are OK with the melting of your face. Heed your potential future forecasted in the album cover below:

I have to admit that I was recently jamming along with Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” (from their album Machine Head). I probably haven’t jammed along to that song since I was 15, so my memory of the song was a little faded. On casual listening, I always assumed the form of “Smoke on the Water” to be basically a pair of verse/chorus parts, followed by a solo over the verse/chorus part, with a final verse/chorus and riffs inserted in the middle. In other words:

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I talked about organicism in a recent post about the Beatles, but I thought I’d return to the subject again. In the Beatles tune (”With a Little Help From My Friends”), the chorus could be seen as constructed from the chords of the verse simply transposed down a whole step. Of course, there are other ways of achieving organicism within a song.

Take for example the track “Long Time Gone” as recorded by the Dixie Chicks off their album Home from 2002. I should preface the analysis by mentioning that “Long Time Gone” was not written by the Dixie Chicks, however. The song was composed by Darrell Scott, who is a professional songwriter in Nashville. I think the organicism that exists within “Long Time Gone” is a testament to its professional-level quality of songwriting.

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Rhythm guitar is an instrumental role that can found in almost every popular style of music. As well, the approach to rhythm guitar playing is fairly similar across a variety of genres. For example, in bluegrass, the rhythm guitarist mostly strums big open chords on an acoustic guitar; in rock, the rhythm guitar player typically pounds out power chords; and in jazz, rhythm guitarists usually comp chords through an often complicated set of changes. In each case, the rhythm guitar part mainly functions to fill up the sonic space with purely harmonic content.

As basically harmonic filler, some may think that the particular notes played by the rhythm guitar part are not very important as long as those notes fit into the chord. The rhythm guitar’s foremost job, as its name implies, is to simply keep the rhythm. On a lot of country albums, the rhythm guitar is equalized to the point where it almost sounds like someone is playing a washboard; all the bass frequencies are rolled off and only the sound of the pick hitting the strings is what is left to cut through the mix.

The duties of the rhythm guitarist do not always have to be relegated to mere timekeeping, however. In the guitar parts of Freddie Green, for example, we can see rhythm guitar playing transcend its original function as solely a rhythmic and harmonic element. With Freddie Green, the rhythm guitar becomes an integral melodic and contrapuntal thread to the musical fabric.

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Amy Winehouse seems to be everywhere these days with her hit “Rehab” off her Back to Black album. I saw her play on the MTV movie awards and now she’s on the cover of Rolling Stone. I admit I like the song; it’s catchy. But does anyone agree with me that it’s a little repetitive?

A little more than half way into “Rehab” I start to get bored. The same chorus, albeit a catchy one, keeps reappearing without much if any variation. The B section keeps coming back unchanged as well. To show this lack of development, here’s a quick sketch of the form of the song (CH = chorus, B = B section):

CH - B - CH - B - CH(1/2) - B - CH

Admittedly, when the chorus comes back that third time, it is cut in half. But my boredom begins exactly on the downbeat of this chorus, so by the time the song slightly alters this third chorus by shortening it, I have already started to lose interest. Even though it’s a great chorus, I think listeners start to get tired of something the third time they hear it; we crave variation as much as we crave unity, and there isn’t enough of it here.

So my questions is: what could she have done differently to improve on the structure of the song? In trying to answer this question, I thought it would be good to take a look at some girl groups from the 1960s since they are often cited as sources for Amy Winehouse’s music.

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One of the underlying premises of tonality, arguably, is that there is a well-defined key. Moreover, this well-defined key is centered on a particulary chord, which we call the tonic. In F major, the tonic is an F-major triad; in C minor, the tonic is a C-minor triad, and so on. Some schools of thought (e.g. Schenkerian thought) define musical composition as basically the moving away from and the returning back to this central tonic triad. The whole piece of music, one might say, is simply an expansion of this fundamental chord.

But what happens when a musical work does not include any instance of this tonic triad? Does the piece cease to be something that we can categorize as tonal? Are songs without a tonic necessarily modal, or is the Schenkerian definition of tonality in music unnecessarily limited?

As a case study, let me use “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction from the album Nothing’s Shocking as one instance in which a song appears to be in a key for which the tonic triad never arrives. Here is an little excerpt to refresh your musical memory:

Jane’s Addiction: “Jane Says” (opening vocal)

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Are you familiar with the album The Crane Wife by the Decemberists? The local radio station was playing the last track (”Sons and Daughters”) a lot last year, and I really liked it, so I picked up the album. The song sounded as if it were something by Neutral Milk Hotel, who haven’t yet really followed up on their amazing 1998 release In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, which at this point is almost a decade old.



The Crane Wife has a number of great tracks in addition to that last one. I was struck however, by a certain similarity between track 6 on the album and a tune by Led Zeppelin. The song by the Decemberists in question is called “When The War Came,” and it reminds me of “No Quarter,” which is the penultimate track on the Led Zeppelin album Houses Of The Holy. Here are some excerpts from each song, along with a mash-up of the two that I have created to help make the similarities more obvious (listen with headphones to best appreciate the mash-up since the songs are in separate channels):
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In my previous post, I talked a bit about the Beatles tune “With A Little Help From My Friends,” and I would like to follow up on that post with a look at yet another song by the Fab Four, their early hit from 1965 entitled “Help.” The constructions of these two songs actually share some interesting similarities, which I hope to show in this post.



The structure of the song “Help” is very straightforward. The song has only two main parts: a verse and a chorus. The song alternates between verse and chorus three times, and that’s pretty much the basic form of the tune. The third verse characteristically has the instrumentation stripped down to add some variety and a break. But otherwise, the song is basically just these two short sections.
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Did anybody see the finale to American Idol last night? I’ll admit I saw part of it. It’s not a show I watch, but my Netflix had run out, and I stumbled upon the finale and figured it was maybe worth watching. Anyway, there was this cheesy medley of Beatles songs near the end. I’m not sure why some producer thought America really wanted a Beatles medley, but all the old Idol winners came together to sing on those old tunes.

I was struck by how badly a good song can sound when it’s run through the generic production values of the mainstream music industry. Then again, there were worse songs played that evening, so I guess the Beatles tunes were not so bad. But a lot of why I like the original songs by the Beatles (and why I think a lot of people like them) is because of the performances and arrangements, which are a little bit more subtle than their incarnation on American Idol.

I thought I would take a look at one Beatles song, in particular the song “With A Little Help From My Friends” from the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and also look at what I think is a pretty good cover of the song (as opposed to those covers last night) by Joe Cocker from his 1969 album With A Little Help From My Friends.



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One of my most favorite albums of all time is Beck’s One Foot in the Grave from 1994. I like Beck’s later albums well enough and am happy that he has received a lot of commercial success, but to me, none of them compares in terms of soul, truth, musicianship, and creativity to this early album of his. Sadly, it seems One Foot in the Grave has gone out of print, and new copies of the CD now sell for upwards of $100 on Amazon.

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Sixty-five years ago today, Charlie Christian died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 25. Despite his short lived career, he left behind some ground-breaking single-string solos for electric guitar.

Many people cite Charlie Christian as the father of jazz guitar. Although his solos perhaps sound fairly complicated on first listen, only a few simple formulas seem to actually make up more than 90-95% of his improvisatory material.

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Some many years ago, I sat down to figure out the chord progressions to the songs on Nirvana’s Nevermind album. I think there are a lot of curiously interesting ways that melody and harmony are treated in those tunes.

After figuring out a few songs, I started to notice a pattern in some of the chord progressions for the “B” sections, especially in the first half of the album. Take a listen to these snippets and see if you can hear a similarlity:

		Nirvana: “In Bloom”
		Nirvana: “Come As You Are”

What should be obvious is that the music goes back and forth between two chords that are a distance of a minor third apart. That is a common pattern in Nirvana’s music. For “In Bloom,” the chords are {C} and {Eb}, while for “Come As You Are,” the chords are {A} and {C}. Since “In Bloom” is in the key of {Bb major}, we can see that the chord progression goes II-IV, i.e. supertonic to subdominant. Yes, the supertonic has been changed to major instead of minor, but it really is not acting as an applied dominant. Minor chords are freely changed to major in the songwriting of Kurt Cobain.

Since “Come As You Are” is in {E minor}, then the {A} and {C} chords from that song are actually the supertonic to subdominant progression of the relative major ({G major}), just like we saw for “In Bloom.”

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I’ve been listening to a lot of swing-era Benny Goodman lately, i.e. stuff from the mid- to late-30’s and early 40’s, particularly the small groups recordings (trios, quartets, etc.–not the big band music). It’s surprising to me how similar a lot of the licks and riffs in the solos are to early 50’s rock and roll. There are lots of blues patterns, chromatic runs, and pentatonic scales, features with which most guitar players should be familiar.

As I was transcribing some solos by Benny Goodman’s vibraphone player, Lionel Hampton , I noticed a little trick that he uses which, as opposed to his other soloing techniques, is *not* common in a rock and roll style. It’s a trick that classical composers use all the time, but more as a harmonic tool than a melodic embellishment.
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I mentioned in a previous post how most music tends towards phrase structures in groupings of two, four, eight, etc. Verses and choruses that are built on some sort of pattern in groups of three, on the other hand, are fairly rare. That is, unless you are listening to music by the Pixies.

The Pixies have a neat little trick that they used throughout their career on a number of albums. The trick is that they build chord progressions in groupings of three instead of the standard two, four, etc. The triple groupings help give the Pixies a very unique and fresh musical signature.

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Have you ever tried tapping your foot along with “Stairway to Heaven” and gotten confused somewhere near the end of the bridge? If you don’t know what I’m talking about or just haven’t tried it in awhile, give it a shot. At some point right before the solo, do you get a little off as to where the beat is? Here’s a snippet of that section:

Well, maybe you don’t get confused. I think a lot of people, including myself, initially hear those big kick drum hits in the bridge as where the beat falls, though. I overdubbed a click track to coincide with where most folks hear the beat in the bridge:

You can tell that at some point, however, there is what seems like a bar of 9/8 or something, because by the time the solo comes in, the click switches from being on the beat to being off the beat.
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My first post to the blogosphere! Since this blog was inspired by my good friend Christian Patterson, who runs his own fancy blog about photography, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss a special song called “The Christian Life.”

“The Christian Life” was writted by Ira and Charlie Louvin and first appeared on their album Satan is Real in 1959. The song is a fairly traditional tune about one’s love for Jesus and staying on the righteous path. A few years later, the Byrds did a version of the song on their 1968 album “Sweetheart of the Rodeo.”

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