Music lessons don't have to end with high school band. There's a whole world of playing opportunities out there for Northwest Indiana folks, read on to find out more!
WRCB is for adults, but hey, adults have kids. Cool kids, who hang out with us band members and play pianos and tambourines and musical saws. Have fun, no running, and don't cut yourself playing that chord.
Last Monday we welcomed a new player and a brand new instrument: Kody, I apologize in advance for misspelling your name, but am so happy to have you and your violin in the band! We played Groovin' and Crystal Blue Persuasion to introduce our newest band member into the mix. It may be the first-ever guitar-banjo-violin- musical saw-tambourine combo-- I just wish I had a recording of it. Next time.
We played Jamaica Farewell after we got nice and warmed up. Jamaica Farewell is a traditional song, but most of us (myself included) associate it with Harry Belafonte. And when I think of Harry Belafonte, I also think of the civil rights movement and all he did for it. Mr. Belafonte could be reliably counted on for financial support, playing benefit concerts and lending a hand wherever he could. He is one of the good guys.
At the end of class I handed out melody notes for the song. The song is in the key of C, and the melody notes can be found in that scale: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C-- no sharps or flats. I've talked before in class about how the melody is within the chord; it so happens that the melody is in the scale as well. Yeah, that's great Mary, but where is the scale? You'll see on Monday. :)
Last Wednesday we broke down two songs to see how they ticked. One, Girl by The Beatles, wins the award for the shortest chorus known to humankind.
The next song, Moonlight in Vermont... I don't remember the first time I heard it. Maybe from Maxine, she was a big Sarah Vaughan fan. I love it so much.
Two surprises for me. I never realized the song contains no rhyming lines at all, for one. Mark pointed out the other one, which brought us all up short-- "The first line has five syllables, the second line has seven, and the third line has five." A haiku. Haikus don't rhyme, and are often about nature and the seasons. A beautiful song I never realized was a poem as well.
First off, I want to thank all WRC band members, current and former, for playing and singing and raising a sweet ruckus at last week's Second Saturday event, where there was wine tasting, Valentine photos and surrealism. What more could a community band ask for?
Monday's class was on President's Day, but we had nothing presidential on tap as it was also the day after Valentine's Day. We decided to do one sweet, one conflicted, and one just downright sad love song. Here goes...
Song #1: Your Love, written by Dixie Jones and performed by Common Thread. Just a wonderful, straight-up, no-holds-barred, you-are-the-bee's-knees-on-sliced-bread kind of love song. It's on the CD A Bushel and Peck, and it's got a sweet mix of traditional and original tunes, performed by people who really care about music. It's ten bucks well spent, and the song deserves to be heard more.
Guitar folks had an option for their Your Love solo break. Take the D shape, shown here...
...and move it up two frets.
(Up meaning towards body of the guitar.)
Doing that, and only striking the top three strings of the guitar, gives you an E chord. Move that shape up five more frets, strike only the top three strings, and you have an A chord.
In conclusion:
D shape, second fret = D
D shape, fourth fret = E
D shape, ninth fret = A
And... viola! A,D, and E are the three chords you need to play Your Love. That A is a wee bit high, but it's nice to be able to play all the chords in the song without changing the shape of your fingers.
Song #2: If I'm Still in Love With You by Hank Williams. Linda Ronstadt's version is just beautiful.
This time the challenge was thrown down to the banjo players.
Strike the third string with your thumb: 3
Strike the second string with your index finger: 2
Strike the first string with your middle finger: 1
Strike the second string with your index finger: 2
3, 2, 1, 2. Do that over and over again until it's nice and smooth like banjo butter. (Ew.) Keep the same roll pattern and hold down C and D chords. You're picking while the rest of the band is strumming. It sounded really nice Monday night!
And finally...
Song #3: You Are My Sunshine by Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell. I copied the lyrics and chords from Rise Up Singing, which was in D, a key that managed to be exquisitely uncomfortable for all involved. Here is the song redone in G.
That's all for the world's longest blog post! Hopefully I'll see some of you fine folks at Hammond's 219 Day tomorrow, should be a good time. If not, Monday it is!
Two weeks in a row with a piano in the room! We're going to get spoiled if this keeps up.
Rich introduced a new songwriting exercise this week-- at the link is a blank sheet for folks to download and print if you need extra. Tom Bohling pulled the very memorable title Igloo Bungalow out of this, and I'm afraid it will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Lastly we discussed bridges and broke down the lyrics to Billy Joel's Piano Man, which goes to show that even in the best written songs there are still wonky lines like 'tonic and gin.' Funny how I never noticed that before: gin and tonic, tonic and gin. I would've sacrificed the words out of order for the rhyme, too. And besides, in Billy Joel's world he can order whatever he wants.
Today we got confirmation that the songwriting class will continue through the middle of May, so we're pleased about that. The new spring session will start on Wednesday, March 16th. Thank you South Shore Arts!
Puff the Magic Dragon, written by Peter Yarrow and Leonard Lipton. I know I'm supposed to think of Puff's abandonment as no more than Jackie Paper growing up, but all I hear is a poor animal discarded once the kid has lost interest. Give Puff a friend at the end of the song for Pete's sake!
Next we did Love Train by The O'Jays so I didn't remain in despair for the rest of the night. Video of the Soul Train line always cheer me up, especially Damita Jo and Scooby-Doo around the 4:09 mark.
We'll be playing those two songs and many more at Saturday's Second Saturday event at White Ripple Gallery. There will be a wine tasting, surrealist art show, and you can have your Valentine's Day photos taken by Martin Navejas. If you've never been before, you're in for a treat! February 13th from 7-10 p.m., 6725 Kennedy Avenue, Hammond.
As happens with us musicians, sometimes in class we get to talking about profound things that have little to do with music, but make us feel alive and in awe in all the ways that music can. Things like...
The Pale Blue Dot
This excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Carl Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
***
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
First off, I want to say Thank You to Shellie, J.B., and Tom for sharing their songs this week!
Last Wednesday we got to have the rehearsal space at Munster South Shore Arts. Oh, what a difference a piano makes-- not that Rich is a slouch on the guitar or anything, but when demonstrating the full tonal range of an E-flat minor 9 chord, 88 keys will always trump 6 strings. It's back to the Board Room next week.
This week we began to tackle the question of putting music to lyrics, so this makes it the second time in a week that we've touched on the Circle of Fifths (we talked about it here for those of you in our Monday night's White Ripple Community Band class).
Here's the Circle of Fifths in all its glory:
If you have lyrics and are unsure how to add music to them, a good place to start is with the Circle of Fifths. Let's say we want to put our song in the key of C, at the top of the circle. Look left, look right, look underneath, and you have F, G, and Am. There are so many songs that use those four chords. As Rich pointed out in class last week, nearly every song from the 1950s uses C, Am, F, and G-- Sherry Baby, Stand By Me, and Teenager in Love are just three examples. They all share the same bones. It's the skin-- the lyrics, how we arrange those chords together, that makes the song your own.
Another source of music inspiration is to move counter-clockwise around the circle. Say we start with our key of C again. Going counter-clockwise around the circle gives us C, F, and B-flat.
B-flat + F + C = With a Little Help from My Friends
C + B-flat + F = Taking Care of Business
A good way to find music for your song is to sing to the lyrics you write. Or, if lyrics give you trouble, sing the melody before you have the words. Searching for words? Keep your ears open, especially for conversations. It's hard (not impossible, because nothing is impossible) to rhyme irreconcilable differences, and so much easier to sing it just didn't work out. That's the way people usually talk.
See you next week! Mark and Sherry, hope you're both feeling better.
It's not January anymore! I don't know why that puts me in such a good mood-- we have a couple more months of winter weather no matter what the groundhog says, but turning another page on the calendar means warmer days are coming.
Last class we warmed up with Roadhouse Blues before going into Wild World by Cat Stevens. Rich chose it because it goes around the Circle of Fifths, pictured below:
We start at Am-- Am is the relative minor of C. Then we move to D. From D we go counter-clockwise around the circle.
Am, D, G, C, F, Dm*, E, G
Going around the circle counter-clockwise turns the Circle of Fifths into the Circle of Fourths. It's weird, it's confusing, but it'll make more sense the deeper you go and the more you get into the theory of it. The chorus is C, G, F, G, F, C-- do that two times, then back to the verse.
We finished up with Don't Pass Me By by The Beatles, written by Ringo Starr. The song is in the key of C and uses 3 chords: C, F, G. The interval from C to F is a perfect fourth. The interval from C to G is a perfect fifth. In music there are exceptions to just about everything, but a good rule of thumb is, when you know a song is in the key of C, you can safely assume that you're going to run into F, G, and the relative minor, Am, at some point. It's because those tones, perfect fourths and fifths, they sound good to our ears.
Next week I made a request for kid's songs because playing for anklebiters is fun, darnit. There may be whales, ducks, and dragons in store for you all...
*F is a good substitute chord if you want to play that instead.
