"Hung up on a Dream"

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I had an-other go at "Hung up on a Dream."

The bass part is more accurate, but I still don't know the little riff.

I also did the guitar and mellotron parts and a bit of the piano at the very end.  I'm pretty sure that the mellotron part isn't completely accurate; I was just having fun with it.  Still, I did learn that it copies the bass part during the verses.

I also realized that the chords on this are really interesting.  For the verses, the first three chords are G, Em, C (though there's an Esus4 thrown in between the G and Em).  Each chord has two notes in common with the next chord.

G, B, D > E, G, B

E, G, B > C, E, G

It was only through playing the guitar chords on the keyboard (my fake mellotron) that I realized this.  On guitar, constituent notes of a chord are all over the place; on keyboards, they're more organized, so it's easier to see those kinds of chordal relationships.

"Hung up on a Dream"

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While listening to the 30th anniversary edition of Odessey and Oracle, I thought the bass part for "Hung up on a Dream" sounded pretty simple, so I sat down, played it a few times, and learned most of it.

I haven't figured out the correct rhythms, so this is just an approximation of them.  There's a little riff that comes right before the final verses that I haven't figured out yet, and I may have played the middle part in the wrong octave.

Odessey and Oracle

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This is my 100th post, and, for the first time, I just listened to the 30th anniversary edition of Odessey and Oracle, which includes the album in both stereo and mono and bonus tracks.  So, monumental post.

Things:

• Aside from "This Will Be Our Year" and "Time of the Season," I'd heard Odessey and Oracle only in stereo, and I found that listening to it in mono was the same sort of experience that I had when listening to the Decca Stereo Anthology.  Because things were mixed differently, I heard stuff I had never known was there before, which was awesome.
• I can understand why Rod Argent didn't include the 'cello part in "A Rose for Emily," but the mellotron part is beautiful!  Why wasn't that in the released version?
• Related:  I love alternate versions.  I'd heard that 'cello part via Zombie Heaven, but the mellotron part was new, as was the not-muted backing track on the alternate version of "Time of the Season."  I was familiar with parts of those songs, but discovering that there were other parts that I hadn't heard (because they weren't there, not just because I hadn't noticed them)… I don't even know how to describe that.  It's sort of like seeing in color after being used to black and white.
• I had always thought that there was no guitar in "Care of Cell 44," but there is.  This is why I love vocal-less backing tracks - you can hear stuff you missed the other hundreds of times you heard the song.
• In general, I noticed that the mono versions seemed to make the vocal parts more pronounced (no pun intended).  They were just more noticeable.
• As was the harpsichord in "I Want Her She Wants Me."  If the mono version had been the version of the album I heard first, it wouldn't have taken me four years to notice the harpsichord.
• I don't know whether it was the guitar or the piano, but something in the mono version of "Maybe after He's Gone" made it sound a lot like the stuff the Zombies recorded at Decca.

Anyway, I'm super happy I got this.  It's sort of like hearing the album for the first time, but better because I knew what sort of things to listen for.

"This Will Be Our Year"

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On Thursday, I did some more work on trying to figure out the bass part during the key change, and I think I've got it.

"This Will Be Our Year"

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I felt bad that I knew only part of the bass part for "This Will Be Our Year," so I wanted to figure out the rest of it.

I did make some progress, but I'm having trouble figuring out the bass part right at the key change.  After that, it's exactly the same as the first half (except a key higher).  This is just the first half.

Update

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I think I'm updated with what I know so far (excepting a lot of little bits that I don't think are worth posting versions of), so this blog will probably lie dormant for a few months.

Unless I try to figure out more parts in an effort to procrastinate on my senior seminar project.

"Girl Help Me"

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I'll re-iterate what I said with the rough version of "Call of the Night," this is a re-working of "Call of the Night," but I consider it different enough to separate the two.

I do mess up once, but this was already the second take, and - unlike the version in A minor - there is no other way to play this but barre chords, which are tiring.

Although, listening to the original, the first Gm chord is much higher than I play it, so maybe there is a way to play it while avoiding barre chords.  Something to look into….

"Call of the Night"

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I just checked my tag for "Call of the Night," and in that post where I hypothesize (wrongly!) that all suspended chords in Zombies songs are based around A major, I say that the riff in "Call of the Night" is between Asus2 and A major.

It's not.  It's A minor and Asus4.

In the rough version I just posted, I played it with barre chords, but it may have been easier to do it with the "normal" version of Am.  I just have a tendency to play barre chords because - despite their being harder sometimes - I feel they give a more even sound.  I could go into a whole explanation of how barre chords help to fix the uneven distribution of chords' constituent notes (both in position and number) that occurs in standard tuning (which is one reason why I love open D tuning - it doesn't have that problem), but I'll just leave it that.

"Call of the Night"

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This was later re-worked into "Girl Help Me," but I think the two are distinct enough to separate them.

"Call of the Night" was recorded by the original Zombies (albeit only as a demo), but "Girl Help Me" was recorded after they broke up and - according to the liner notes in Zombie Heaven - may have featured Argent personnel.

Also, the lyrics are substantially different (I actually prefer "Call of the Night" because at times I feel like love songs as a genre have become a cliché, so it's interesting to hear something that's about something else - in this case, transience), and the chord progressions are slightly different.  "Girl Help Me" is also in a lower key - probably because Rod Argent sang it instead of Colin Blunstone.

"You've Really Got a Hold on Me/Bring It on Home to Me"

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I learned the chords for this last fall.  The other parts I've included are just what I was able to figure out in a few minutes after listening to it.  I'm pretty sure the riff during the verses is right, but the other one (which is actually the bass part) may be wrong in a few places.

"Woman"

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Figuring out this one has an interesting story to it.

I had already learned (what I thought was) the guitar riff and the bass part.  The guitar riff I may have known since last year, but I think I learned the bass part sometime this spring.

I went back to listen to it a few days ago, and I realized that the guitar riff isn't what I thought it was.  I thought it was just a continuous repetition, but there are two distinct phrases that are juggled.  I started wondering what would happen if you played those two alternative riffs at the same time, so I tried doing it, but it didn't sound that interesting.

But then I listened to it again, and I realized that the electric piano plays the alternate riff.  So you have the D D F# D G F D C riff and the D D A B C B A F# riff playing simultaneously, but every time, they alternate instruments.  (I think it's the instrumentational alternating that makes it interesting.)

And after I recorded this, I panned the electric piano part a bit to the left and the guitar part a bit to the right.  Doing that made me realize that Rod Argent employs this same technique at the very end of "Lothlorien" from the band Argent's Ring of Hands album (except that's with guitar and organ).

This hadn't been one of my favorite songs, but now that I see how he used those alternative riffs between two instruments, I like it a great deal more.

Also, I think I messed up in the bass part after the guitar solo.  Well, the blank part where the guitar solo should be.

"Work 'n' Play"

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This isn't accurate as far as instrumentation - this should actually be on twelve-string, and the chords are played on piano (though I'll have to check to see if the piano part is more than just chords or not).

I probably could have done the harmonica part - at least the parts that match the guitar parts - but I'm not a very good harmonica player and would probably take all day to get a good take.

"Indication"

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I'm not sure if it was really worth it to record this.  It's just the guitar part for the second half, which is the same five-note guitar phrase twenty-one times.  I also know the very end of the electric piano part.

Also, I'm pretty sure that this guitar part is the earliest thing I ever figured out by the Zombies.  I found a notepad dated 21 March 2010 where I wrote down the tab.  This was back when I was obsessed with writing out the tabs for everything, which is something I hardly ever do anymore.

And, actually, I may be playing this an octave too low.

"What More Can I Do"

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I'm dubious about the veracity of this (I can't really think of a way to say that simpler).  I'm pretty sure some of these chords aren't supposed to played so plainly; instead there are more distinct guitar lines.

It's more like I played the bass notes as guitar chords.  Still, it's a start.

"I Remember When I Loved Her"

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I've made a tiny bit of progress in learning the organ solo from "I Remember When I Loved Her."  I used to know only the first three notes, and now I know roughly the first ten.  It's not even half of the whole thing, but I'm getting there.

"Hung up on a Dream"

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I think I've figured out the mellotron part during the solo in "Hung up on a Dream."  I still feel I may be missing something though, but it's possible that that's just because my fake-flute-plus-fake-strings doesn't sound much like a mellotron.

Update

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Upon further review, that bit of "Chained" was not the last thing I knew.  Somehow, I had totally forgotten about a few other songs.  So between those and some other parts I've learned recently, I'll be able to keep this daily for almost an-other week.

"Changes"

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I learned most of the piano part for "Changes" and the rest of the mellotron parts (one of which I had never even noticed).

Because most of this is just voices (which I haven't even ventured yet), there is a lot of blank space.

Update

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That bit of "Chained" was the last thing I knew, so I spent maybe half an hour figuring out some other parts of other songs.

And it just made me think (yet again) how glad I am that I'm doing this project.  Because by learning these songs, I'm noticing things that I would not have noticed otherwise.  And I'm pretty sure it's making me a better musician, too.

"Chained"

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This is just the first few seconds.  Usually, I record these while listening to the original recording, so the tempi are the same, but I can't play this that fast yet.

"The Coming of Kohoutek"

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Some of the guitar parts from Argent's "The Coming of Kohoutek."  It does get more complex than the D A C repetition, but I haven't figured that out yet.  The other part is just a quotation of "Dies Irae," an allusion that I figured out at the beginning of June.

"Time of the Season"

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I've been sort of reluctant to do "the hits" because there are so many other Zombies songs that are just as good or better than the three that are always listed.  In any case, here's the bass part for "Time of the Season."  I've been working on figuring this out for at least a year, so I'm pretty sure of it.  The only thing I may have wrong is a few notes during the solos.

It does seem to just kind of break off at some points, but that's when the organ comes in.

"I Can't Make up My Mind"

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This comes with the usual disclaimers - I'm pretty sure I have some notes in the solo wrong and I'm not sure if the chords are broken up or not.  Also, I'm missing some notes at the end.

"I'll Call You Mine"

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I remember reading an article about the Zombies that said something about "distantly related chords" in "You Make Me Feel Good," which was sort of hilarious because the chords in "You Make Me Feel Good" are pretty standard.  It's mostly just the tonic, sub-dominant, and dominant chords in E major - which are the basis of nearly every three-chord song.  The only weird thing is the G# major, but even that still fits in the E major scale - it's a chord built on the major third.

But "I'll Call You Mine"…  Now that has weird chords.  So much so that I'm still questioning whether I have them right.  The chorus is pretty standard fare - G Em D C.  But the verses!  I think it's something like G E F D (which is what I play).

It seems weird to me that there are chords so close together yet none of them are minor.  Or even built on accidentals.  I would say that this is in G major, but the F major chord conflicts with that because the F has a sharp in the G major scale.  So….

Also, I play the piano riff (or most of it) on guitar because I don't know it that well on piano yet..  Also because playing it on guitar is simpler (I don't need to play so many notes, most of which I don't know yet).