"Imagine the Swan"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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I recently went through some old songs I recorded, and I found the harpsichord introduction to "Imagine the Swan" that I did almost two years ago.  I got thinking about it, and - from what I remembered - the bass part seemed pretty easy.  "Seemed."

Still, I made a lot of progress on this.  I have a very rough version of the bass part, and I think I learned the chords.*  The harpsichord part in the middle is different from that at the beginning, but they have the same structure, so I just played the introductory phrase again because I don't know the actual middle part.

I also learned that, like a few other Rod Argent songs, this uses a 7th chord to start a chromatic descent in the bass part.  It's during "So it was with surprise…" and later "So I let you walk by…."

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*Originally, I put a parenthetical there saying, "If they are played on guitar, they're really low in the mix," but then I went to verify this and discovered that while the version I used as a template for this (the first stereo mix included on an Odessey and Oracle reissue, which is also the one on Zombie Heaven) doesn't have guitar at all, a second stereo mix on that Odessey and Oracle reissue has overdubbed guitar and organ.  I should have referenced that before I started learning the parts.