Yester-day I listened to Secret Messages for my Collection Audit project. The bass part for "Loser Gone Wild" sounded like it would be pretty easy to figure out, and I have almost all of it now. There's a faster section at the end that I haven't attempted figuring out yet. Unfortunately, the qualities that made this easy to learn also make it sort of boring to listen to by itself. The first minute or so just alternates between A and D notes. I'm not sure I have the rhythm right for the "But in the evening…" section. Here, sometimes I have a quarter rest and sometimes I hold the note. I neglected to listen carefully enough to the original recording to see what it does.
This morning I listened to Electric Light Orchestra's Out of the Blue. Last March I started a project where I look into ELO's music specifically (which I started because of this project, actually), and I've already written a fair amount about Out of the Blue there, but I noticed some more things this morning.
"Starlight"
I've had this album for years (it was actually the first original ELO album I got), but it wasn't until this morning that I deciphered the line "You've gotta stop" in "Starlight." Had I noticed that sooner, I probably would have understood long ago that there's a musical/lyrical connection there. After "You've gotta stop," the music stops before the lyric continues with "Foolin' around."
"Big Wheels"
There's a musical connection between "Big Wheels" and "Steppin' Out." After some measures of tied whole notes, the bass part in "Steppin' Out" has this figure:
I use the MIDI component of my digital audio workstation to make these examples of notation, and where I would have tied a half note and a dotted quarter note, it put two dots on a half note. I guess it ends up with the same value, but I haven't seen double-dotted notes anywhere else.
When the bass part finally starts in "Big Wheels," every other measure has the same rhythm as that in the bass part in "Steppin' Out." The phrase also alternates between fourths, although here it's a semi-tone higher:
I was going through my music collection last night, learning some parts, and I happened upon "From the End of the World." I learned the first minute or so of the bass part, but the more I listen to this, the more I think that it's actually the bass register of a synth part, not actual bass guitar. There's one point where it alternates between measures of G and F notes, and in between the last two, there's a part (which I haven't figured out) that seems too fast to be played physically, which makes me think it's a programmed synth. Since I don't know anything about those (yet), I guess it's just as well that I recorded it with bass guitar.
On Friday I listened to A New World Record for my Collection Audit project. In the liner notes for the CD re-issue, Jeff Lynne says, "The '76 Olympics were on TV and so we heard the phrase 'a new world record' over and over. It was Richard who suggested it for the title of the album." Coincidentally, the day I listened to it was the first day of the 2016 Olympics.
Anyway, I thought the little guitar phrases in "Mission (A World Record)" would be easy to figure out. They're interesting in that they have both F# and Bb notes. The phrases I copied for my recording are at the very end, where the same phrase is played in two octaves. There are some more guitar parts that follow that, but I haven't figured them out yet.
Yester-day I listened to Electric Light Orchestra's A New World Record, and I noticed something about the string parts in a couple songs. Aside from the key, the same string part is in "So Fine" and "Livin' Thing." I guessed on the keys based on the notes in the parts themselves, but here they are in notation (with the disclaimer that I might be wrong; notation still isn't my strong point).
"So Fine"
"Livin' Thing"
Having what is virtually the same part in two songs (which are back-to-back in the track listing) helps give the album a greater consistency.
Here's a thing I noticed about a couple songs on A New World Record when I listened to it recently for my Collection Audit project.
I recently learned about the song "Dixie," which had been lurking on my periphery for a while (by which I mean I was sort of aware of it, but it was only recently that I actually lookt into it), and I instantly remembered Electric Light Orchestra's "Down Home Town." I just confirmed that it quotes "Dixie," lyrically and musically.
At about 2:42 in the backing vocals, there's the line "Wish I was in the land of Dixie," and then the trumpets play almost all of the tune "Dixie," near the end of which some more lyrics (the overlapping "Look away"s) from "Dixie" appear. At about 3:30, those backing vocal parts ("Wish I was in the land of Dixie" and the overlapping "Look away"s) appear a second time.
For some reason, the chorus from "Ticket to the Moon" popped into my head yester-day. I already had my bass out, so I learned some of the bass part, but there's still a lot of it I'm not sure of yet. Instead, here are the first eight measures of piano. which I also learned. This morning, I even notated as much as I played in this recording. Eventually, I plan on posting the chords, notation, or even tabs for some of these songs, but since I started this project only a year and a half ago, I don't know very much yet (and a lot of the parts I do know are still incomplete).
I listened to Face the Music a few days ago, and the bass part for "Evil Woman" sounded like it consisted of only three notes in some places. I figured it out yester-day, and - for the most part - it is just three notes.
This is just a verse and a chorus, but I'm pretty sure the bass part remains the same throughout.
I remembered the guitar part that I figured out in January too, although I do have it written down somewhere, so I still have it in case I forget.
I listened to ELO II this morning for my Collection Audit project, and I found an-other mention of blue, which I missed when I did my initial notes on the album. In "Mama" there's the phrase "blue horizon" in the first verse.
Especially on the early albums, I'm still having trouble making out the lyrics, so I don't know how much I'll be able to write about them.
For the last week or two, I've been really into "Wishing." There are still some phrases in it that I want to talk about, but I feel that text isn't the best medium in which to do it (especially since the phrases in question are beyond my limited notation skills, so I would be unable to provide notated excerpts), so I'll wait on that. I have to do some more research anyway.
In the meantime, I learned the bass part. This isn't the complete song, but the sections are repeated, and there's at least one of each here. I learned the guitar chords too, but the first verse has some kind of effect (I think echo) that I don't have a good way of producing, and I haven't figured out the right rhythm for the rest.
In learning the parts and playing along, I found two things that demonstrate the titular wishing, or - more specifically - the lack of fulfillment that's related to it. There's a grammatical error in the bridge: "I wish that everything was gold" instead of "I wish that everything were gold" (because subjunctive verb forms are weird). So there's an imperfection there, which is similar to the lack of fulfillment the speaker/singer has because he's away from his "little darling." (I don't know if Jeff Lynne intended that line to have an error or not, but the point stands either way. I will say though that "I wish that everything was gold" sounds better when sung than "I wish that everything were gold," even if it is grammatically incorrect.)
While the song is in A major, the verses and bridges end with a G note in the bass, which doesn't provide a resolution, and - furthermore - is an accidental. So there's a musical sense of that yearning. In the verses and the bridges, the lyrics above that non-resolving, accidental G note are "I'm wishin'," which seems to emphasize that feeling even further.
When I listened to Discovery a couple days ago, the opening part of "Wishing" sounded like it would be pretty easy to figure out. I'm almost certain that it's done with a Moog in the original recording, but I don't have and can't afford one, so I used some other synth voice on my keyboard.
This afternoon I was playing around with this again, and I think I learned the guitar chords too, but I'm suspicious of a few and have some other phrases in the song that I want to look into, so I recorded just the opening for now.
I listened to Discovery yester-day, and even before it got to this part in "The Diary of Horace Wimp," I was pretty sure that the tubular bell part (after "And she did" in the Sunday verse) was just a scale. I figured out that it's a Bb major scale, although the last note is the same pitch as the first.
This is an extremely small part of the song, but at least now I can be pretty sure that the rest of the song is in Bb major too.
