Was trying to decide which song to notate for my next “Hearing & Writing” assignment and remembered how much I love the bass line of Chic’s classic hit “Good Times”. First I wrote out the bass part and programmed it into Logic. I then added some drums, guitar and piano. Afterwards I notated all the parts on one sheet of paper and put together this video.
One of my all time favorite artists is Peter Gabriel and my favorite record from him is his 1989 masterpiece “Passion: Music For The Last Temptation Of Christ”. Musically and sonically it stood out from everything else at the time and still sounds great today.
One of the assignments from the “Hearing & Writing Music” book that I’ve been working through was to “find examples of drums or non-pitched percussion instruments to transcribe”. I could have chosen anything but this album was the first thing I thought of and I picked the beginning section of “A Different Drum”.
At first it was daunting, but I notated a little bit a day over a few days and then played it into Logic using Native Instruments “West Africa” collection. My version is far from being “just like” the original but I like how it turned out.
Photo taken while visiting Kyoto Japan.
I’ve always wanted to write my musical ideas down in standard notation but each time I tried it took way too long and never seemed quite right. I bought this book back in 2004 hoping to fix that.
After trying to go through the material with my old approach (wanting to dedicate hours of study and only moving forward when I thought I had mastered each and every subject) inertia kicked in. This became yet another book that sat on a shelf for a long time with the “some day” label assigned to it in my mind.
“Some day” came and I started going through this book as part of the “little bit every day” experiment that I’ve been doing the past few months and I’m about half way through it. I have to say that it is one of the denser music books that I’ve gone through but I’m glad that I’ve stuck with it. Between this book and ear training I’ve started being able to write simple melodies from memory.
Things like nursery rhymes, holiday melodies and early Beatles songs, etc. I know it’s not the level of Quincy Jones taking a complete symphonic score and distilling it down to it’s core elements and then re-orchestrating it in all twelve keys without an instrument, just using his mind, pen & paper. But I’m happy to be moving in that direction.