Take That, George Harrison! (part 1)

I can remember a little while back, I was laying in bed and listening to Rubber Soul with my eyes closed and I seem to remember thinking to myself that Mr. Harrison’s “If I Needed Someone” was a song that deserved more fanfare than it actually got (I should remind you that this was pre-Beatles Rockband, in which this song is nicely featured ((You should go buy it if you have the facilities.. It even converted my girlfriend to a Bealtes fan)) Now that I think of it, there’s plenty of George all over that game… It’s about time!)

And I must admit, with all the lacklustre Beatles covers floating around recently now’s a good time as any to unleash mine onto the world! This is one of my top five Beatles tunes (But that DOES change frequently.. Heck, I even remember one time when Bungalow Bill was all up in there!). It’s a nice little ditty that is open to a lot of interpretation, so let’s add some weird sounds over top of it!

*WARNING* Boring theory stuff highlighted in green!!

So according to Wikipedia, this song is in the key of A mixolydian for the verse/chorus and B minor for the bridge. What does this mean for the oft confused guitarist (like me)? Well both the A mixolydian mode and the B minor scale share the same notes as the D major scale. I thought I could get a nice strummy sound if I hit the melody notes at the same time as a chord, so I tuned the SSH to open D and gave her a whirl. And BOY did it sound awful! Upon further research Commandant Harrison plays this jingle (alongside with Here Comes The Sun) with a capo on the seventh fret, his parts sounding a perfect fifth above Lennon’s rhythm parts.

Beatles! WOOOO!

So to experiment, I grabbed the ol’ pearly white  SG and slapped a capo on the 7th fret which put the whole thing under a D chord.  And what do you know… Playing the melody with that setup sounded rather impressive! The verse and the chorus rang out nice and pretty, but it left me with a little bit of a pickle…

This post got mighty skint on the black font. On a side note, I once had a chance to buy all the Beatles Yellow Submarine toys mighty mighty cheap, but I passed on it… I kinda wish I bought them, for they might look quite boss above ye olde televisione…

As it turns out, the bridge’s chords don’t fit rather nicely at all with this particular tuning. Kind of a bummer, right? Not to fear as the actual Harrison VOCAL melody fits like the cat’s meow, so I just strum those single note lines alongside the D chord.

So with the rhythm parts written and ready, it’s all about L’AMBIENCE… Or “noise” to the layman. This is actually my favorite part, and the musical swellings can really make a song interesting. If I may, I would direct you to Joe Satriani’s cover of the Santo & Johnny classic “Sleepwalk”. With the aid of Robert Fripp’s “Frippertronics”, it really makes it something different… And that’s totally exciting.

Part Two coming soon!

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~ by octopiemusic on 2010/02/24.