"Pure Love"

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A tiny bit of Argent's "Pure Love."  (A very tiny bit, considering the whole song is about thirteen minutes.)

This just popped into my head, so I figured it out.  (Although first I had to figure out what it was.  For a few minutes, I wondered if it was a song by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.)  I had to adjust the second part a bit because, in my head, the second part was just a repetition of the first.  Surprisingly, when I figured it out by memory, I was in the right key - G minor.

I think I may have figured out the bass part too, but I'll save that for later.

"I Don't Want to Know"

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I tried figuring out that little bass riff in "Hung up on a Dream," but it's still too elusive.  So instead, I worked out at least the majority of the bass part for "I Don't Want to Know."  I'm not sure of the accuracy during the solo or the very end.

"Tragedy"

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I listened to Argent's All Together Now yester-day, and for the first time I noticed that there's a piano part in "Tragedy."  It's sort of buried under Russ Ballard's guitar.

I'm pretty sure there's more to it than what I play here.

It seems like this semester will be pretty busy, so I might not have a lot of time to put into this project.  If I do anything, it'll probably be just easy parts like this.

"Changes"

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It seems like I post a version of "Changes" every few months.  This time, I think I've figured out how to do the panning from hard left to hard right.  For almost four years, aside from "This Will Be Our Year" and "Time of the Season," I'd heard Odessey and Oracle only in stereo, so, for me, that panning was as much a part of the song as the mellotron.  So many parts on the album work so well in stereo, that it's weird to think that it was originally planned to be only in mono.

Anyway.  I'm not sure if the way I did the panning is the same way that the Zombies did it, but it's a method I'm really excited about (I wrote a whole page about ways I could use it).

Odessey and Oracle

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I've been working on learning all of the Zombies songs since about 2010, but I really started working on it in earnest in August 2012.  In October last year, I finally got to the point where I know at least one part for each song from Odessey and Oracle (although I know the rejected 'cello part for "A Rose for Emily" better than I know the piano part), so I thought I would post a rough version of what I know of the whole album.

I plan to do this once every year, so that you can hear how much I learn as time goes by.  There are certainly some dead spots that I should fill in.

I first heard this album in January 2009, and it's really weird for me to think about how much I've grown musically since then.  In January 2009, I was a month away from learning how to play guitar - the first instrument I really learned - and now, five years later, I can play through the whole album on various other instruments.

"Imagine the Swan"

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I read in the liner notes to Zombie Heaven that the first part of "Imagine the Swan" is just arpeggiated chords like in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.  So I just sat down and figured them out.  The first two chords are F major and G minor, and I think the rest of the song is in the key of F major.

Falling Fifth

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I just realized that both "Hung up on a Dream" and "I'll Call You Mine" start with a falling fifth (D to G).

"This Will Be Our Year"

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I just tried out a thing with the bass part of "This Will Be Our Year" where I jump octaves after every other note.  I'm pretty sure that Jim Rodford plays it this way on the Live at Metropolis Studios album (I'd have to watch the DVD to be absolutely certain), but I think on the original record, it's just a straight descending chromatic phrase.

Still, I quite like the alternating octave version, and - while I'd have to do a bit of looking to find which ones - I think that sort of octave-jumping descending chromatic figure is in some of the organ works I have by Bach and/or Mendelssohn.  (Incidentally, the versions I have were recorded by Peter Hurford, who was the choirmaster at the St Albans Cathedral Choir while Rod Argent was a choirboy there.)

"Care of Cell 44"

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I tried to figure out the ending part of "Care of Cell 44."  I'm not sure what I have is right, but it's at least close.

I'm not a very good keyboardist, so I had to overdub some stuff to record this.  I simplified it a bit too.

"Beechwood Park"

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I learned a rough version of the organ part from "Beechwood Park."  Very rough, in fact.

I'm not sure whether it's the organ part or the guitar chords, but something's wrong during the "and the breeze would touch your hair / kiss your face and make you care" part.  I played a B major on guitar and an E note on the organ, and they don't go to-gether.

Odessey and Oracle

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I've been focusing on learning songs from Odessey and Oracle lately, so when I listened to it this morning, I was paying more attention than usual.  And I noticed some things.  (It's a bit weird to me that there are still things I'm only just now discovering about it.)

• The piano figure that occurs near the end of "Care of Cell 44" is musically foreshadowed by the a cappella parts earlier in the song.  They're the same notes; it's just that one is multi-tracked voices and the other is on piano.
• The final G in the first bass riff in "I Want Her She Wants Me" is an octave lower than the rest, which is not the way I'd been playing it.
• In "This Will Be Our Year," the chord progression goes from D minor to D major at the same time as the proclamation of love.  "And I won't forget the way you said [minor to major modulation] 'Darling, I love you.'"  It gives it more emphasis.
• I'd been suspicious of this, but I'm now pretty sure that the guitar solo on "Friends of Mine" is double-tracked.  In the stereo version, you can hear how one comes in just a little bit later than the other when it's repeated.
• "A Rose for Emily" and "Butcher's Tale" contain the same three-note phrase:  F E D.  Those sorts of musical phrases appearing in multiple songs may provide the album with some coherence.  (But I don't want to emphasize that too much - I don't know whether Rod Argent and Chris White consciously thought of that, whether it just illustrates musical sensibilities that they liked and unknowingly used frequently, or whether it's just a coincidence that these songs have similar musical features.)  Additionally, "Time of the Season" has a three-note falling phrase, but that's E D C.  And an-other similar feature is a bass part centered around two A's an octave apart, which occurs in "Care of Cell 44" (where they're separated by an E) and "Brief Candles" (where it's just an octave jump).

"Care of Cell 44"

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This is just the middle part - what I've been working on for a few days.

I'm really unsure about this one.  It doesn't sound wrong, but it also doesn't sound right.  Maybe it's just because the original has a tack piano or maybe Rod Argent played the chords with different inversions than I did.