hey, welcome to 12tone! quick question: what's the most iconic bassline of all time?
Under Pressure? Billie Jean? Come Together? I don't know, but I think there's a good argument
to be made that it's The White Stripes' 2003 single Seven Nation Army, off their fourth album,
Elephant. come on, you know how it goes. (sings the riff) that one. you've heard
it a million times on the radio, at sporting events, and in dozens of covers and remixes.
the sheer power of that one riff launched the band into superstardom, so… let's take it apart.
(tick, tick, tick, tick, tock)
the song starts like this: (bang) although some of you may take issue with the way I notated it,
don't worry, we'll get there. but before we do, I want to talk a bit about how important this
riff is. the song is 117 bars long, and 104 of those contain the riff or, occasionally,
a slight variation. in a very real way, this riff is Seven Nation Army. and I mean that literally:
if I asked you to sing Seven Nation Army, there's a good chance your mind would go to
this bassline before you even remembered there was a vocal melody. it reminds me of what Josh
Homme of Queens of the Stone Age calls "robot rock", where you take a simple riff and just
play it over and over until it becomes like a drone, engulfing you, surrounding you with
its sound. in Homme's words, it's an exercise in repetition. that repetition becomes inevitable,
that inevitability becomes powerful, and that power becomes endlessly compelling. the deep,
rich groove of the song is borne out in this constant, driving riff.
it's a really cool effect, but as you can probably imagine, it's hard to find just the right line. it
has to be simple on its surface but rich enough to reveal new layers as it goes. so how do the
White Stripes accomplish that? well, for starters, I called this a bassline, but there's actually no
bass in this song or, for that matter, anywhere else on Elephant. instead, Jack White played this
line on a guitar, then used an octave pedal to shift it down into the bass register.
this gives it a deep, booming tone that's crisp, but at the same time kinda dirty. it's got layers
of nuance buried inside it without feeling like anything more than a simple bass part.
in fact, I'd like to highlight one of those layers: the picking sounds. when you're playing
any physical instrument, there will always be things you do that make noise but aren't a part
of your intended pitch, like the clicking of piano keys or the sound of a guitar pick hitting
a string. listeners usually tune these out pretty easily, but since their pitch isn't based on the
notes you're trying to play, if you pitch-shift your whole recording, they start to sound wonky.
this is something the White Stripes seem to have been keenly aware of: listening to the recording,
it sounds like they isolated the frequencies where those percussive sounds are most prominent,
and panned them pretty hard to the left, creating further separation from the rest
of the tone. if I take that track and shift it up an octave you can hear what those strikes
actually sounded like: (bang) but shifted down, they become strange and echoey. (bang)
they almost sound like lasers, don't they? anyway, in the actual song this part is fairly
quiet. if they'd play it at full blast, it'd be distracting, but instead of removing it entirely,
they buried it deep in the mix, creating a little gem for us to uncover as we sink into the riff.
but ok, let's talk about the rhythm. as you may have noticed, I'm notating the walkdown in the
middle of the riff as triplets, which means the three notes are all evenly spaced. (bang)
triplets have this relaxed, laid-back vibe to them. they don't have anywhere important to be.
on the other hand, if you look up a transcription of this song online, it'll probably tell you this
walkdown is a slightly different rhythm called a tresillo. this is what you get when you try
to play triplets without leaving 4/4. these two beats have 8 16th notes between them,
and if we try to divide those evenly into three parts, we can get close: (bang)
but we're left with this slightly shorter note at the end. this gives the tresillo a lurching,
uneven feeling that creates a sense of urgency, like we're being pushed toward the next beat.
so which is it? is he playing a nice, relaxing triplet or a bold, pushy tresillo? well, the cool
thing about having the isolated instrument tracks is I can just chop it up myself and measure,
so I did that. I looked at every statement of the riff for the entire first verse,
and I can now say with absolute certainty that everyone is wrong. it's neither. the last note is
shorter than the other two, but not by a full 16th note. and to make things more complicated, the
first two notes aren't the same length either: the second one is usually shorter than the first, but
longer than the last. if I were to try to notate exactly what he's playing, I might do something
like this: (bang) but that is very silly. it might make sense for a band like Meshuggah or Sungazer,
but this is The White Stripes. there's no need to resort to 64th-note quintuplets when there's
a much simpler explanation staring us right in the face: Jack White just played this line kinda
sloppy. or, if you think that sounds too negative, we could also say his time feel is pretty loose.
this puts us in the realm of microrhythms, or rhythmic adjustments too small to be captured by
traditional notation. when we talk about someone really pushing the beat, or dragging behind it,
that's a microrhythm thing. in this case, though, the microrhythms are inconsistent:
while the basic structure stays roughly the same, the details are all over the place.
in some statements, the three notes are pretty close to even (bang)
while other times the last one is significantly shorter: (bang)
although if you couldn't tell the difference, don't worry. microrhythms aren't so much heard
as they are felt. for the most part, though, the rhythm Jack actually plays here is
somewhere between those two extremes: it has the free-flowing feel of a triplet, but the slightly
accelerating pace of the notes creates more rhythmic interest, driving us toward the next beat
like a tresillo would. I'm gonna keep notating it as triplets, but when I do that, it's important to
understand that I'm simplifying. what he's playing is much more complicated, and throughout the song,
it ebbs and flows, with subtle shifts in emphasis that keep it feeling fresh.
so is this just sloppy musicianship, or did he do it on purpose? well,
that depends what you mean. did he sit down and design this exact pattern, then map out all the
ways he was going to adjust it throughout the song in order to create the ideal rhythmic contour?
no, almost certainly not. but did he choose not to record to a click track? did he choose not
to align the beats afterwards with quantizing software? did he choose not to just record the
riff once, as perfectly as he could, and then loop it for the entire song? yeah,
I think he did all those things on purpose. The White Stripes, especially on their early albums,
were pioneers of the garage rock revival, and part of that aesthetic is underproduction.
it's supposed to sound like it was made not by professionals, but by extremely talented amateurs.
when you listen to Elephant, you can imagine Jack and Meg sitting
down and recording the whole album in a single take. I mean, they didn't,
but that's the vibe. if this rhythm had fit perfectly to a 16th-note grid and stayed the
same throughout the entire song, you might not have noticed, but to paraphrase Mr. Plinkett,
your brain would've. it would've felt too polished, too perfect, too artificial.
by playing in between the cracks and not worrying about maintaining a totally consistent time feel,
it creates just enough plausible deniability that you could imagine this really was just
two people having fun in their garage instead of a professionally recorded studio album.
it feels more real, more relatable, and more human. so in a sense, yes, it's sloppy, but it's a
very specific kind of sloppy, one that serves the needs of the music instead of getting in its way.
but I've spent the last four minutes talking about a single two-beat rhythmic pattern, so
we should probably move on. I mean, what else is there to talk about? notes? this riff has notes,
right? (bang) ok, great, let's talk about those. on the surface, this is just a walk down the minor
scale. we have this little ornamental G, popping up a bit to give us some contrasting motion,
and then we march straight down from the root to the 5th. simple. analysis over. what's next? or,
ok, fine. if I look a little bit closer… it's actually kinda weird that it's not simpler.
let me explain. often, these sorts of punk-influenced riffs don't use the full
minor scale, they use minor pentatonic, which avoids some of the more complex notes in order
to keep everything feeling nice and clean. we can see this in my favorite White Stripes riff,
Blue Orchid: (bang) which is literally just a guided tour of the G minor pentatonic scale.
coming back to Seven Nation Army, though, the vocal melody is exclusively pentatonic, and the
first half of the riff strongly implies that it is too. I mean, think about that G. it's an ornament,
sure, but it's a meaningful one. in E minor, the note above the root would be F# (bang)
so skipping past it, both on the way up and back down, is a pretty clear indication that we're not
supposed to be using the fancy notes. this first bar is practically screaming "this is a pentatonic
line!" between that clear melodic implication and the pseudo-triplets in the walkdown generating all
sorts of rhythmic tension, it could not be more obvious that what we're supposed to hear there
is B, the next note down the pentatonic scale. so that's what we hear, right? ...right? (bang)
ok. so. that's a b6. (play that
nostalgia note clip from the Adam Neely video) no, no, no. not today, Adam. this time, the b6
is serving a different purpose. we're expecting a good, strong resolution, and instead we get
probably the spiciest note in natural minor. it's a melodic gut punch, trading the rhythmic tension
of the walk-down for a massive pile of harmonic tension. the b6 sits a half-step above the 5th
we were expecting, and it really, really wants to slide down, but instead we sit on it for two
full beats to let you completely absorb it. it's a destabilizing sound, shoving the otherwise fairly
simple line off balance so that by the time we do get that B, it feels like a huge relief.
but maybe I'm exaggerating. maybe the b6 isn't actually a big deal.
what would it sound like if this line was just pentatonic? well,
there's a couple ways to do that. if we just got our B on the downbeat like we expected: (bang)
it would sound very bad. I don't know, maybe if we tried to walk back up at the end? (bang)
yeah, no, I still hate that. we could try to maintain the basic shape,
approaching the 5th from the next scale step up: (bang) which is probably the best we can do,
but it's still pretty lackluster compared to the raw power of that b6. and again, I think
that partly comes down to the tension of the note itself, but in a riff as simple as this, it's all
about how the different kinds of complexity interact. the fact that it comes right at the
resolution of that microrhythmic walkdown makes it so much more impactful than it would otherwise be.
if we replace it with just quarter notes: (bang) not only do we lose that rhythmic interest,
but the C doesn't feel as special anymore either. we need both, or neither one really works.
so, alright, we've covered the tone, rhythm, and notes of this riff, but after many careful
listenings, I eventually realized that there is, in fact, an entire song happening around it, so,
after 10 minutes on this single two-bar phrase, maybe we should talk a little bit about the rest
of it. god, I have no idea why anyone watches these videos. anyway, the structure of this
song is actually pretty interesting. instead of a more traditional verse-chorus thing,
which would probably have to include more than one riff, they decide to arrange it as a massive
dynamic ramp, starting small, building up to a thunderous climax, and then just starting over.
they play through that ramp three times, without all that much apparent variation,
and then they just end. again, this comes back to that exercise in repetition: Seven Nation
Army isn't so much a song as it is a groove, and that groove could go on forever if it wanted to.
so how do you build your own Seven Nation Army verse? simple, you just follow the recipe.
it starts with two statements of the bass riff on its own. this establishes it as the
foundational element of the piece. it's our lifeline, the thing we always come back to,
and at the start of each verse we get to experience it alone and uninterrupted. for
the next two statements, we're introduced to Meg White's drums. throughout the song,
Meg is doing a thing called progressive layering, where she starts with a pretty
stripped-down beat and slowly adds new components on top of it. to start, she's doing this: (bang)
playing quarter notes simultaneously on the kick, hi-hat, and floor tom. it has this deep,
rumbling quality to it, and the metronome pulse makes it feel like a marching army. of course,
much like Jack, Meg's time feel drifts throughout the song, so it's not a perfect metronome.
sometimes she's ahead, sometimes she's behind, but again that sort of apparent sloppiness serves
the song, making it clear that a human, not a drum machine, is playing this part. that's also one of
the cool things about a duo: the more people you have, the harder it is to synchronize and
the more important a consistent time feel becomes, but here it's just Meg and Jack,
so they can do basically whatever they want as long as each of them is listening to the other.
the next four riffs take place in the vocal set-up. here,
we're introduced to the basic vocal melody:
(bang) establishing a baseline for the song's sonic energy. everything before this was building
to it, and everything after will be building from it, but this is where we rest. this is
the song's ground floor. the melody itself isn't particularly noteworthy, mostly just sitting on
the root with occasional excursions to neighboring pentatonic notes, but the tone is interesting. it
sits halfway between pleading and whiney, calling to mind a petulant child whose complaints are,
against all odds, entirely reasonable. there's a desperation that somehow feels both hyperbolic
and appropriate. there also appears to be some digital distortion on the voice, not
so much that it feels fake, but enough to sound like you're hearing it through cheap speakers.
from there we get four more riffs in the vocal build-up. here, two things change.
first, Jack's melody opens up a bit: (bang)
showing off the entire pentatonic scale. this sudden jump upwards drags the energy level along
with it, and the longer vocal phrases tell us we're starting to really go somewhere.
more important, though, is that Meg starts to build her layers, adding in a snare drum. (bang)
this switches her from an undifferentiated metronome pulse to a more traditional rock
groove with a clearly defined backbeat. after spending so much time with just those primal toms,
it feels like a big event, and it gets us amped for whatever's coming next.
what is coming next, though, is an aggressive violation of our expectations,
because for two bars, they actually stop playing the riff. (bang) underneath it,
Meg drops her snare drums, trading them out for cymbals on the downbeats. (bang)
this lets her still outline the shape of the bar, but in a way that feels more explosive.
as for Jack, he's playing G, then A, the next two notes down the scale from the B
at the bottom of the riff. instead of continuing down,
though, he overshoots and starts on the lower one before rising back up, creating a lifting
sensation and providing some contrary motion to the overall downward shape of the main line.
it's a break from that sound, and the change in direction reflects that.
next, the riff comes back in the… solo? is this a solo? I'm gonna call it a solo. here,
Jack doubles his bassline with a normal guitar playing power chords. (bang)
or, I say power chords but I'm pretty sure I hear a G# on top of that first one,
which would make it a major triad, but I only really hear it on the first statement of the
riff, so I'm not gonna read too deep into it. maybe his finger just slipped. if so, though,
he still chose to leave it in, and it adds another layer of interest, albeit briefly, to give the
riff just a little bit more depth. it's arguably maybe an error, but if so it's a small one that
doesn't hurt the music, and small imperfections like this are the hallmark of that garage
rock sound. I have no idea how intentional this was, but I like it and I thought I'd point it out.
more importantly, though, this section features a slight variation on the riff:
every other time he plays it, Jack adds in a second bunch of pseudo-triplets on that C: (bang)
we've spent so much time with this riff that the C by itself isn't shocking anymore,
so the trill adds a fresh new element, emphasizing
the disruptive role of the C by stretching out the rhythmic tension into its domain.
underneath this, Meg's drums have reached their final form,
combining a cymbal on all 4 beats and a snare on the backbeat: (bang)
for a thunderously powerful effect. this is classic rock drumming at its finest.
there's no frills, nothing fancy, just a whole lot of aggression being pounded out on the kit.
or, ok, there's one frill: whenever Jack plays the fancier version of the riff,
Meg supports the first set of pseudo-triplets along with him: (bang)
which is a little surprising, since this part is always there and she doesn't repeat it under
the actually new rhythm. my guess is that it's to keep your focus on the main set of triplets,
making it clear that they're still the primary figure of rhythmic interest.
after four statements of the riff, we get that riffless transition again,
and then everyone but the bass drops out and we start our next verse.
this section is also the only one that's really, noticeably different between the three verses.
what I just described is the first version, but the second one is twice as long and
features something that sounds a lot like a real guitar solo. (bang) it's a pretty simple one,
sticking to the rhythm of the riff and mostly just harmonizing it in 5ths, first in a lower
octave and then a higher one: (bang) but it's a fitting solo, one that feels appropriate to the
piece. again, Seven Nation Army is this riff, so it only makes sense that the solo would be too.
as for the third time, it's pretty similar to the first,
but instead of going to the transition at the end, it just does this: (bang)
suddenly ending on the I chord before closing with a final button hit. (bang)
and again, this is fitting. the song is one long groove on a single riff. you can't just tack
on some random ending to wrap it up: the only appropriate way to end is to just stop playing.
be done. it's the sort of song that could easily have gone on forever, following the
same pattern over and over until Jack White ran out of things to scream on top of it,
but three times is enough to establish the pattern, so they decided to close it there.
and that's pretty much it. Seven Nation Army works so well because it doesn't try to be
more than it is. instead of trying to craft a long, drawn-out compositional narrative,
it draws you in through its incessant, anthemic repetition, exposing you to all the subtle
variations and nuances that exist within such a seemingly simple riff. it's a grand tour of
a single musical idea, and it shows that in the right hands, repetition is never just repetition.
and hey, thanks for watching. as always, this song was chosen by my patrons on Patreon:
the poll to pick the next one goes up over there next week. oh,
and don't forget to to like, share, comment, subscribe, and above all, keep on rockin'.