Interesting way to write a weird vocal melody
KeithHandy posted in Composing, Old skool, Producing, Songwriting on October 9th, 2007
The usual (for me): really really old song gets rewritten with a new twist, but even then isn’t totally followed through on for a long time. In this case, we’re talking so old that the original lyrics were downright painful. It’s actually that “The Tube” song from the days of that old stapled-together loose leaf, pictured on installment one of the So You Want series.
Even at the age of 12 or 13 (early 1980s), I was already getting weird with chord progressions, almost by necessity. There was a guitar with only three strings on it, and I would tune them to either a major or minor chord (minor in this case) and barred it with my thumb while the guitar sat on my lap (and sometimes I’d also be tapping a tambourine on the floor with my foot). So The Tube was all minor chords, and the main gist was to start at the octave fret, go up one, down three, up one, down three, and so on, until it got all the way to the bottom. Then there’s another part from there, but using the same kind of barred minor chords.
Sometime later, in the mid 90s, I wrote a dumb poem about a recording session gone haywire, and then realized that it was written in the same meter as The Tube. I figured if I ever pulled that tune out again, I’d use those as lyrics, but they would have to have a more interesting melody than just following the “up one, down three” pattern of the progression. I have two different bits of sheet music for it, worked out at various points during the last several years, but neither one has a proper melody. One has a bunch of “pseudo-notes”; just notes drawn at approximate intervals to how my pitch would go up and down if I was speaking them, without any thought given to the chords, and no specific rhythm. The other sheet has a rhythm worked out, done separately, without any indication of pitch. So these were kind of like lost soulmates (or socks) that needed to be matched up.
In my Tracktion project for this song, what I’ve done is plunked all the notes in on a midi track (sounded as an electric piano, just as a sort of “musical scratch pad”), as they appear on the pages, and then fiddled with their pitches until they had some semblance of relationship to the strange chord movement underneath. But, I was losing track of which words went with which notes, so I did an additional guide track where I was speaking the words to the rhythm. Um, rapping? I don’t know. But the idea is that I can listen to this a few times until it embeds itself into my longer-term memory, then sing it in a more natural, less disjointed way. (Having a mental picture of what this sketch represents in terms of a real vocal part is what I mean by “hearing the greatness in the shit“.)
Regarding one line in there, “fat old maids that reek of booze” — I apologize for the social stereotyping, but I wrote the poem quickly, on a whim (on cardboard, no less), without much thought, and unfortunately, “full-figured, mature, single women who enjoy a good cocktail now and then” would not have fit the meter or rhyme scheme.
