Sunday, April 13, 2014

"Goin' out of My Head"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I recently remembered that I know the first half of the bass part for "Goin' out of My Head."

I also tried recording bass differently.

Saturday, April 12, 2014

Update

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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As part of my Collection Audit project, I'm listening to The Decca Stereo Anthology (& I wrote a short post about "Woman").  The enormity and impossibility of this project hit me while I was listening to it this morning.  Realistically, there is absolutely no way that I'll ever be able to play every part of every song exactly how the Zombies did.  Partially because I'm not as good of a musician as they were/are, partially because no matter how closely I listen to the songs, I won't be able to figure out every single note (especially in the keyboard parts), and partially because I'm obviously not them.  Probably other reasons too.

But despite all of that, I'm still going to try.  Because doing this project does make me a better musician and it's made me discover things about the Zombies' music that I probably would never have found out otherwise.

Thursday, April 10, 2014

"I Must Move"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I've been pretty Odessey and Oracle-centric lately, so I decided to learn something from the Decca era.  So I learned the bass part from "I Must Move."

I had all of this worked out last night, but I wanted to check it to-day before I posted it.  Sometimes it helps to check the studio recordings against live versions, and there is a live version of "I Must Move" on Zombie Heaven.  (I think it'll be easier to learn the guitar parts from that since Paul Atkinson uses an electric guitar there.  On the studio recording, he uses an acoustic, and at times it's hard to hear distinctly.)

While I was practicing this, I realized that it's an-other instance where Chris White uses a variation of D F#(m) G A (see also "Don't Go Away," "I Don't Want to Know," "Don't Cry for Me," "Brief Candles," and "The Feeling's Inside").  This is closer to D F#m A G though, but I'm not sure of the chords yet (most of the guitar part isn't straight chords, which makes it a bit harder to figure out).  In any case, the bass part includes that D F# A G variation.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

"Butcher's Tale"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I've been trying to practice piano more because so much of the Zombies' canon is dependent on keyboard instruments.  One of my problems is that I'm very inexperienced/under-practiced in making chords with my right hand.  (It doesn't help any that playing guitar has sort of solidified the left-hand-makes-chords paradigm.)

This was a big problem with "Butcher's Tale."  On all of the versions I've posted here, I multi-tracked the chords and the bass part so I could play them separately.  And when I did play the two parts at once (just for my own enjoyment), it was with this terribly awkward right-arm-over-left-arm position so that I could still play the chords with my left hand.  But I'm starting to be able to play it with more normal arm positioning, playing the chords with my right hand and the bass part with my left hand.  This also involved using different chord inversions.  I haven't compared this new way of playing it to the original recording yet, so I don't know if those inversions make a big difference or not.

Regardless, I'm slowly getting better at keyboard instruments, which will certainly be an advantage for this project.