Awesome, you just got this well-paying gig for this weekend!
It's crunch time, though, since you need to learn fifty songs by then. Are you ready, Adam?
So ready! Let's do this. Let's learn some charts.
There are a couple different kinds of charts you can write. If you're like most people you might write something out like this, which can
be a very helpful guide. You have the chords and the different sections...
and maybe some notes on what sort of riffs to play when, but the more songs you end up learning,
the more of these charts kind of tend to blend together so every song looks the same. This makes them harder to remember and of
course the entire point of writing a chart is to remember the song. This is why when I write charts for myself,
I write sheet music with as many details as possible.
Sibelius and Finale are the industry standards for musical notation programs
(I personally use Sibelius)
But MuseScore is a great open source
alternative if you don't want to spend any money on anything. When we're writing full charts out like this reading becomes
extremely important. Being able to read later on what you transcribe now can make it so that you can accurately play
hundreds of songs without forgetting any of the details, like that specific riff that happens only on the third bar on the fourth verse for
example. All of it is right there on the page is this reason why reading music can be so
important for reasons that weren't so obvious when you're first learning how to read music. If you've completely forgotten how to play a song
but you can read music well, that's no problem, because you have the music right in front of you that you yourself wrote down
it's in this way that written music is kind of like an
extension of your
musical memory and reading music is the way that you actually access that memory. You can sort of think about like when oral literature was
first being transcribed down into the written word. Great epics that previously only existed in the minds of storytellers
now are accessible for anybody who could read. For spoken language the written word
greatly expanded our collective ability to remember things and reading sheet music does the same thing for our collective ability to remember songs. Hey Adam,
why write your own charts when there's tons of published music out there that you can torrent?
I mean, buy? Well Adam, for me the big reason is I just don't trust the music
that's being written in most of published sheet music. Even if they might be
99% accurate,
and that's extremely generous, by the way, that's still not enough to engender complete trust in the written sheet music. Instilling that trust is
absolutely essential to feel confident in what you're playing.
I trust my own ear and my ability to write down bass lines, chords, and riffs more than anybody else.
I also like to lay out my charts in a very specific way that no publisher does.
Here are a few tips for laying out your charts: 1) Write as accurate a version of the bass line as you possibly can.
It can be tempting for certain songs to just write chords and slashes. Slashes meaning play
whatever feels appropriate to you with the given style. For example, in the first chart
I ever wrote for Sister Sledge's We Are Family,
I completely missed the bass fill that occurs the third time through the chord progression every chorus. Instead,
I just sort of played over that. Being accurate is very important. 2) Write everything out.
Try and avoid repeats if you can and God help you if you write a
D.S. al coda. These conventions were mainly for the benefit of people who are writing music out by hand or maybe music engravers who needed to
squeeze as much music onto a sheet of paper as possible, but in this digital age
where copying and pasting music is so easy on notational programs, they really don't matter.
I know it might sound a little strange and counterintuitive not to use D.S. al coda or repeats or anything like that,
but try it sometime. It ends up being a lot easier to read.
I write a lot of jazz big band music and all it takes is just one
person out of 17 musicians who forgets to take the repeat to completely ruin the music (usually the
guitarist). If you're laying out page turns logically,
it's just much safer to write it all out.
3) Name the sections of the music like chorus or verse. This helps to keep your place in the song and also gives you a
general framework from which to play. Preparing sheet music is almost kind of a
psychological endeavor that helps to get you the information that you need to feel comfortable
while playing from the sheet of music.
Knowing that you've started the second verse or that the bridge is coming up in four bars can be very very useful.
4) Write in some chord symbols.
This is also a psychological tip but it also can give you some harmonic context in case you ever want to improvise around a written
bass line. Little things like this can go a long way to creating an effective chart for yourself. 5) Write in instrumental cues or lyric cues.
Knowing which lyric occurs when can give you a very strong
guidepost. God forbid, if you ever got lost, you know exactly what's coming when you hear that
particular lyric. With these little cues you're kind of acting as your own
conductor. Just as conductors cue different groups of sections with music, you are acting as your own helping hand. The more information
you can give yourself, the better.
It's better to
have a chart stuffed with information than completely devoid of it. There are other ways of writing out charts other than sheet music.
My friend Shawn Crowder is a drummer
And he got something from Mike Mangini,
the drummer from Dream Theater, called block form and this sort of idea is nice for drummers because you can lay everything out on a
single page because page turns are a lot trickier for them. To give you an idea for laying out a chart my way,
I filmed myself through the entire process of learning a chart and laying it out. The whole process took about 15 minutes,
so I condensed a little bit for your viewing pleasure.
Enjoy. So I have to learn some new songs for this wedding that I have coming up on Saturday.
This is the main sheet that the Metropolitan Players sent me for learning songs and all the details from the wedding and
these are all the requests that typically we don't play on our repertoire sheet. Fortunately
I know most of these songs and I've charted them out for other weddings before,
but I don't know Forever Young - Bob Dylan, and I also don't know Just Like Heaven - The Cure, so
let's (I dunno) let's
tackle the Cure song. So typically whenever I'm learning a new song, I'll go to Spotify not YouTube. YouTube...
One of the unfortunate things
with YouTube is a lot of times people pitch
songs up and down a half step just to avoid like the algorithms that help detect copyright infringement.
So sometimes you'll learn a song;
it's in a completely wrong key.
That's happened to me several times before and it's very rude awakening because I find out on the gig when people start
playing a song in one key, and I'm playing it in another, so that's not good. So this is Spotify.
I have the unpaid version, so we might ran into an ad but that's alright, so Just Like Heaven
I'll just edit that out in post.
Okay, cool. So before I start playing it, I'm going to
start sitting up my chart, so this is Sibelius. I use Sibelius. New chart bass staff,
Whatever, whatever. I'm assuming it's going to be in 4/4, but we'll find out. We'll figure out the key later.
Just Like Heaven, The Cure. Finish. 'Kay, this is
our new chart that we're going to work out. So, before we start anything,
I typically, well, I'm going to assume that there's going to be an introduction, so I like to create an intro tag like that,
just before we start listening, and okay. Let's start listening.
Okay, so it's in the key of A.
That much I figured out. A major woohoo. Now there's a little bit of a drum thing
I just want to listen to this a couple times to make sure that I got the right rhythm.
So it looks like the drums are kind of doing a little fill.
They're kind of filling on beats one and two and that was a little confusing the first time I was listening to it
so, but the bass starts actually right from the beginning, so we're going to go bum bum bum bum bum
bum [Ba] bum Ba bum
Something like that. So is that the actual rhythm? Let's test it out.
bum bum bum bum dum, ba da dum
Duh, Da duh. Something like that cool.
I generally like to be as specific with the rhythms as possible in the beginning of the piece
when I'm writing stuff out, and then eventually I'll change the different things around.
Cool and
ok so there we go. That's probably the first four bars. Alright. Write some chord symbols.
That sounds like an A chord. Even though it's just bass and drums, this is still important.
That's probably going to be a B minor chord and
it's a D chord all right, so let's keep listening.
Okay, so
one of the best things about Sibelius is the [r] key so I can select a
bunch of measures and actually just press R
and then it just repeats. So, if something would repeat that many times, I could literally just keep pressing R.
So what I like to do is just a road map for myself. I'm going to write in a
description of what the other instruments are doing. So this is guitar in
thirds. You could hear that the guitar was playing the same riff, basically the same rhythm in major and
diatonic thirds, and that sort of repeated twice.
And I also like to draw double bar lines just to show exactly the beginnings of new sections. So the beginning,
that's just the intro on the guitars and thirds right there. Alright, so let's keep going, let's keep listening.
Okay
Okay, so so far, we had the strings come in here, and again
it's the same bass line going on
but I really really like to know what else is going on, just in case I get lost,
I need to know how many times. It also helps me, just feel like I'm playing
playing the song a little bit more. Guitar riff 2
enters
And then just playing the same bass line over and over and over again,
which is essentially so far what's been going on. Now sometimes, people will
will sometimes like to use one of these guys, a
four-bar repeat and eventually I might start using this but when I consolidated everything down but for right now
I'm just going to keep keep going the way that I've been doing it. Okay,
so guitar riff 2 enters, enter two times. Okay? Cool. Let's keep going.
Actually, I've kind of lost my spot, so let's slow down, let's
Alright, there's where guitar riff 2 enters. I have a hunch and this section is just going to repeat.
It's a different riff, so we're gonna have two sections repeat like that.
Oh, no, you know what? It's really legitimately a
16-bar phrase.
Okay, so just remember that.
That was the verse or whatever that was okay, so this is the guitar riff section.
16 bars okay, just so I have a reference right here and again all the same, all the same notes, all the same everything.
Okay, so I'm gonna create another page, just because it's getting a little crowded here.
then we have
Okay
Then we have verse again. All the same thing. Cool. Good to know
Okay, new section. Nope. Alright, back to the guitar riff section.
I'm gonna hazard a guess, just musically speaking, that this is only going to be for eight bars.
Nope! Going the full 16. Alright
Get another verse-y sort of thing.
Alright, new section. Yeah, there we go.
Okay, so we got
um let's see that's a F-sharp (uh buh uh) Okay the G (um buh duh da)
I'm just going to call this the bridge
I don't really know what you would call it, but it's usually my go-to for new sections. Bridge
So, like, a F-sharp minor-y sort of thing.
G. Cool
That repeated at least three times, and then we had some more stuff
That's where I stopped. Oops. Nope, don't delete those. Okay
You know what, just for the sake of it. I'm going to just use this symbol.
Double, because that means that these two measures are repeated right there like that.
So I'm just going to do that for the sake right now.
We might go back and consolidate some of this stuff. Okay, so that was for three times, and we hit a new chord. What was that?
- Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun
So I think those are 4 times. Let's do something like that.
Something like that. I don't know. Sometimes, I just notate some of these rhythms, and they're not 100 percent. Let's see.
Yeah, okay. I think that's right
Okay, cool
Okay, so now we got the bridge coming in here.
Oh, interesting. Okay, so that's an interesting ending. We just sort of end on the note.
Not another Cure song.
Okay, it's interesting. We sort of end on that D chord which was the one at the end of the first bridge, okay? Cool, so
So right now, what I'm doing is I'm preparing the part.
I'm sort of getting it to look correct. I've been using this groups, this
four-bar repeat symbol just to sort of
tamp down a little bit on the total number of
bars that have the exact same music because that can get a little bit taxing on the eye when you're trying to read it.
Let's see, uh, I also want to try and space out the music so that it's it's logical and you don't really
It's not too cramped on any one page
Let's see let's generally speaking. I like to put eight systems per page, eight or nine. This is four five six seven eight
This might be a little bit too spaced out, just because this music doesn't really work too much.
Maybe I'll do it here. Now, it does mean that I'm splitting the bridge onto two separate pages, this section,
which is not super ideal, but I think it's going to be okay in this instance. Yeah, that looks like a decent spacing.
Okay, cool. Especially if I continue using this four bar repeat symbol in here a
couple times, okay. There we go, that sort of spaces everything out okay, so yeah, there we go.
This is Just Like Heaven by The Cure. This is probably going to be my final version of the chart.
Yes, it does take up three pages, but I like to have, like you saw, I like to have everything laid out
so I know exactly what's happening.
You know it feels like you're playing the song a lot more if you have it written out like this,
so you can like hear and catch whenever everybody else is playing
what they're going to be playing, like the string to the guitars and thirds guitar riff section, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera. And also the advantage of doing this is that I
never really have to learn the song again. I basically have it
committed a hundred percent, even though I just listened to it basically once all the way through. I didn't even
listen to it all the way through. I just listened to it in sections.
But now I have this song essentially forever, which is great.
Uh, yeah, cool. A pianist with whom I work writes incredibly detailed charts for himself and he says even though it takes about 45 minutes to
an hour for every chart, he considers it time saved, because once he has that chart he never has to relearn that chart again.
He has it.
It's set. Write well-thought-out charts and Future You will forever be grateful to Past You. This has been Adam
Neely's bass lessons, please comment, like, and subscribe if you enjoyed what we've been talking about and yeah, until next time, bass.