Friday, March 8, 2024

"Sirius"

A couple months ago, I watched this interview with Alan Parsons.  Starting at ~17:34, he briefly talks about how he wrote the riff in "Sirius" using a Clavinet sample on the Fairlight.  I think I figured out this part last night.  Much of it is characterized by the delay that Alan mentions, and I don't really have a way to duplicate this, so I'm not sure if what I have is the entirety of the part, but it's at least something like this:


Some of these intervals seemed familiar to me, and I realized that they're basically the same as those in "Day after Day (The Show Must Go On)," played on what the APP website calls "jangle piano."  It's also doubled with a synthesizer.  These phrases repeat through much of the verse:


The phrases in the two songs begin in different places and have a different number of notes, but each consists of a root note, the fourth, the fifth, and the octave.  In "Sirius," the order is fourth, fifth, octave, root (with the seventh substituted for the octave every other time); in "Day after Day," it's octave, fifth, fourth, root, fourth, fifth.  Obviously, the parts aren't the same, but they do have the same sort of musical vocabulary.