Monday, April 27, 2020

"Stereotomy"

I was going through some old notes last night, and I found one about "Stereotomy" from 7 March that I'd forgotten about.  Almost all of the "Turn me to stone" lines are sung to a single pitch:  the first two (at ~1:35) are sung to F notes, and the later two (at ~5:10) are sung to A notes.  (The last two [at ~5:37] are both sung to more than one pitch).  This constancy of pitch musically represents the immobility of being a stone.

Saturday, April 4, 2020

"Eye in the Sky"

Aside from the introduction, my first post for this project was a recording of the palm-muted guitar chords and electric piano phrase in "Eye in the Sky," and I commented that one of the chords "sounds a bit weird, but I don't know if that's because it's wrong or just because the rest of the parts aren't there."  It turns out it was wrong.

After I listened to Eye in the Sky last month, I discovered that I'd never written down the electric piano phrase, so I re-learned it (and wrote it down).  I had written down the chords, but in revisiting the song, I discovered that what I'd thought was a Bb major is actually a G minor.  It doesn't particularly come across in my new recording because it's mostly the bottom three strings of the guitar that are played (G D G').

When I made my recording five years ago, I was limited in my keyboard sounds, but since I got a Nord Electro 5 about two years ago, I can now more accurately reproduce the Wurlitzer that Eric Woolfson played on the track.  I added some chorusing and panning too, but I'm not sure if the original has that or not.

Unlike last time where I played the chords for the whole song, this is just the introduction and the first verse.  Were it not for my previous mistake in the chord progression, I wouldn't have even recorded that much because all I know of the verses are the chords, and they're a bit boring to listen to on their own.


Here are the chords, which I still might have wrong, but which are at least a bit more accurate than what I used in my last recording:

Introduction/Coda
|: B minor | G major :|

Verses
|: D major | B minor :|
G major | G minor | D major | E major
D major | G major | D major

Choruses
|: D major | F# minor :|
G major | G minor
|: B minor | G major :|

EDIT (29 April):  YouTube deleted my video, citing it as "inappropriate content" (!?), so I posted it on Twitter: