So, being back on guitar in Casa has a few surprises in store for me, namely the tunes that I’d learnt the bass part for but hadn’t had to play “up the octave.” Stevie’s version of For Once In My Life gave me a headache trying to play Jamerson’s bass part (which frankly I never managed to get under my fingers), and now the chords are giving me some problems, though they are also quite an interesting piece of harmonisation. Stevie plays the song in F, but we prefer C, so for us it goes C, C+, C6, C#dim, Dm, Dm(maj 7), Dm7, Dm6. This looks like a jazz road accident but is just harmonies around a chromatically ascending then descending line: G, G#, A, A#, D, C#, C, B. It became particularly obvious when I played the chords:
E -0-0-0---5-5-5-5-- B -1-1-1-5-6-6-6-6-- G -0-1-2-3-7-6-5-4-- D -2-2-2-5-7-7-7-7-- A -3-3-3-4-5-5-5-5-- E ------------------
Nice. I don’t play it down there normally, I came up with that while messing around on an acoustic guitar post-rehearsal I really like it when you get this kind of pattern where there are stable notes in a chord contrasting with other mobile notes; an example from the busker’s real book is Oasis’ Wonderwall. Another example I’ve seen is a I7-iim7b5 change, something like:
E ------ B -5-5-- G -3-4-- D -5-5-- A -3-4-- E ------
Never having had any formal musical education, the thing I have no experience with is coming up with a melody and harmonising it in different ways. If I sit around trying to come up with song ideas I usually start from the chords and see what melody fits over them, rather than the other way around. It’s certainly another thing to work on!
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I remember learning My Funny Valentine back in my formal music education (high school only!) which has a similar kind of thing: Cm, Cm(maj7),Cm,Cm6,Abmaj7,Fm7,Dmb5,G7b9(or whatever you call a G7 with a G# on the top). The chord sequence takes you all around the I-IV-II-V sequence but only one note changes between each chord (I think) until the last leap back to Cm. Quite nice I thought at the time. I never come up with stuff that complicated myself, but after learning about that I do find that I think quite often about what I can do by changing just one note in a chord. Ah harmony, one of my favourite subjects!
[...] liking for moments where two chords require very few finger movements to alternate between, e.g. on For Once In My Life. The downside of this technique is that my practice is sounding less and less like the actual [...]
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