A fresh challenge for me!
This one came up in a lesson yesterday afternoon for the first time and I've been dragged off on a new journey which I'll document here. Knowing the song quite well but without ever having thought about how to play it, my instinct was that this was a straight 4 beat. Upon listening in with my student it soon became clear I was very wrong! There's a triplet feel which I first settled on as being a 6/8 count. The problem is that it underlies a vocal rhythm which doesn't appear to have any hard structure, at least in the verse sections!
I offered my student a reasonable way of viewing things and surprisingly quickly she had a functional version running, singing and strumming. I knew I wasn't done with this one though and spent half my evening digging through for a better understanding. That sparked off the challenge I'll be undertaking here ... learning to sing the verse along with a guitar part based on the bass line from the record. This looks exceptionally challenging and as of today I can't do it ... at all!
Practising what I preach
I'm confident that my own method will yield success. The basic approach is outlined in my blog article here "Caught in a Trap? How to sing and play guitar at the same time!". I've claimed that these steps can offer success with any singing while playing challenge, and this looks to be as tough of one as I've found to date!
First stage was to come up with a simple guitar part that matches the rhythm of what the bass plays on the record. Mixing the rhythm of "Don't Give Up" with the same twiddles I've used in teaching U2's "One" gives a pattern that works comfortably over the 3 chords Am, C and G (then Am again) of the verse. You can hear it in the video below and I'll be no doubt be examining it in great depth before long in this thread.
To the drawing board!
I wrote this out in 6/8 Taplature and then worked through the first couple of rounds of the sequence adding the syllables of the lyrics where they fall against the guitar part.
Watch this space!
And that's about as far as I've got. I'm no singer, so for me this more of an investigation of mental mechanics than anything especially musical. It's also the sort of thing that often holds hidden benefits; let's see where it leads!
Join me in this thread to ask any questions, cheer me on, have a laugh, show off your skills (if you can already do this) or anything else related. Hopefully we can all learn something!
The power of "latent learning" (click for definition) is well advertised by the following video. After forgetting about this one for 48 hours I sat down tonight and without any warm-up practice, recorded the following sequence. This time things felt so much easier that I was able to push the speed substantially higher than on my last attempt where record speed (80bpm) felt about my limit.
"Stress-testing" any piece of music like this is a useful way to highlight any weak spots. As you can see in the video I don't really have any major problems with "Don't Give Up" until over 50% faster than the original, leaving the actual performance speed now well inside my comfort zone.
I've made similar Youtube videos in the past for a couple of guitar solos ...
1) Albert Lee's Country Boy back in 2010. (See a recent lesson on this one here in the Taplature Blog:
https://www.taplature.com/single-post/2018/06/01/Pick-it-Son-Country-Boy-Slow-and-Close-up-Lesson
2) A Django inspired solo over "Melancholy Baby" which I needed to get in shape to play live.
While "Don't Give Up" would be unlikely to benefit from being performed live at higher speeds this approach of "stress-testing" by pushing the speed is a great way to find out where work needs to go in. Try it with anything you're working on! I guarantee you'll learn a lot!