#indelicates

Elevator Music, the fifth album from The Indelicates, is now available to PREORDER. Get the tracks now, get the GORGEOUS merchandise in October.

June was a good month.  I kept busy socially, and I got stuck into some writing projects.  This blog helped unjam me.  Quite a lot of Transrealities #2 is drawn now; it should be finished in a couple of weeks.  I attended quite a few gigs (Penny Orchids, L7, Taylor Swift, The WI).  I practiced bass a lot, though not with anyone.

I’m learning songs, of course.  I’ve got better at learning them.  Part of this is practice: part is better tool use.  One main discovery is chordify’s editing tool.  Chordify does a fair job of identifying rhythm and chords, but it makes mistakes, so if you sign in, you can shift chord changes forward and backward beats, and change the notes, and save that for later.   This, combined with some poring over chord charts on the Internet, means I’ve figured out chords to a whole bunch of songs, including the Indelicates “Ill”, and “Sixteen”, which I can play basically from memory now.  In all these I found figuring out the overall structure to be as important as the chord progression.   When I first saw the Indelicates I wasn't going in entirely cold: I'd listened to a few of their songs. "Ill" was one instantly grabbed me. Decoding the tabs of it had puzzled me so much at first, but turns out to be fairly simple and basically alternates between stretches of E A E A C# A E A for the verses, and stretches of E/B C#/A in the chorus.

"Sixteen" (which I've rarely seen them do live) is a bit more complex. This is what I reckon: intro consists of F F F Bb, then moving to F F F A/Bb for the verses, until the final stanza (is that the word? I don't know, why do I think I'm qualified to unpick a song if I don't know what stanza means), when it approaches the chorus, with F F A Bb, so those last half-bars at A and Bb are given a whole bar. It then goes right into the chorus, with C D Bb C, twice, and as the volume of that increases it goes into another repeat but skips the C: D Bb, and then suddenly a low F, then back to C and D. It lingers for two bars at Bb before returning to the chorus's centre at C.

And repeat. But after the second repeat there is an instrumental bit introducing a new chord progresion. This goes A Bb F C, with two whole bars of each; before then providing the backing to the chorus - at first straight and then again but with a C# in place of the F at the "even though." Then the instruments cut out for a bit, before launching in to the end of the chorus again (at one of the Cs).

I've stopped bothering with the cue cards - I don't like writing with a pen (I've a blazer for the millennials in many ways - I've been typing for longer than I've been using a writing implement, and with every passing year it feels less natural to put ink on paper) - but what I have started doing is making little Google Docs for these songs. Because it was impossible to really do my numbering and string notation, I used the note names, which has had the side effect that I am properly learning the actual notes.