I’ve been playing in a
I’ve been playing in a salsa band recently - well, perhaps that’s talking it up a little. There’s me on bass, Carlos the Columbian on timbales and Alejandro the Mexican on guitar and vocals. And to be honest, we’re not much cop right now, but I reckon that with Carlos’s enthusiasm and a lot of practice we can pull together something that is at least a lot of fun to play.
Anyway, we’ve practiced three times so far, but each time we do little more than stick on a CD, play along with a track or two, and chat a little. It feels pretty unproductive. So to that end, Carlos agreed to put together a compilation of tracks for us to play (18 in total) which we will make a more concerted effort to play And I agreed to try and work out the chord progressions and arrangements. So that’s what I’ve been doing this weekend, a complete first to me, and I have to say it’s been really enlightening.
In the past, when I’ve had to learn a piece of music, I’ve tended to just listen to it bit by bit, playing along, until it gradually sinks in, usually over the period of about a month or so. During that time, parts of the music seem quite alien, I can get lost in verses, choruses and middle eights. The whole piece only comes together in my mind very gradually. When I played with Bone Turtle, Mark would hand out sheets of arrangements which was a real novelty to me, and I wondered where he got the patience to work them out and put them down on paper.
Writing music down is a whole different ball game from learning by ear. It’s quite painstaking at first, especially with some of the more syncopated Latin stuff (I’m trying to approximate things out to bar-by-bar chord progressions, and it’s not easy when bars seem to start and end in peculiar places). A seeming eternity (probably more like five minutes) of playing and re-playing the first few bars, trying to get them just so. But it’s very rewarding once I do, and gradually as I write down an intro, verse, chorus and bridge, everything else starts to fall into place quite naturally. And the incredible thing is, once I do have it written down, every subsequent playing becomes so much easier - there’s no anxious wondering, trying to remember which bit comes next (the fact that I got down and dirty with the original piece trying to figure out the progressions also helps in this respect). The whole piece just flows, and I can put much more energy into the individual notes rather than focus on structure. It’s a real joy!
(I even sat down at the keyboard - an ancient fan-driven kids toy that I rescued from a car boot sale - and managed to work out which chords are major and which minor. Now that is a major major achievement).
Actually, in many ways the hardest tunes to work out were the simplest ones - one song (Cumbia Suramericana) is the same chord, E-flat (hey, how come no sharp & flat in HTML entities?) all the way through, but trying to count bars and decide exactly where I would decree the bridge ended and the syncopated chorus began was a nightmare.
It’s also given me a greater love of the music. I’m especially keen on the aforementions Cumbia Suramericana, and especially especially keen on Colombia Tierra Querida, the music for which I hereby present to you:
| Intro:
|
Gm
D Em F-sharp Gm x 2
Gm Am Am Gm
|
| Verse:
|
Gm
Gm Cm F B-flat
E-flat E-flat D Gm x 2
|
| Chorus:
|
Gm
|
| Bridge:
|
Gm
D Em F-sharp Gm x 2
Gm Am Am Gm
|
| Verse:
|
Gm
Gm Cm F B-flat
E-flat E-flat D Gm x 2
|
| Chorus:
|
Gm
|
| End:
|
Gm
|