It Gets Better

This is a seed, an idea for a chorus that I'm offering up either for collab or for someone else to take it somewhere and give it a damn good shagging. I got the idea almost immediately upon reading unSane's post and recorded this on the fly in an hour or two today in between cooking dinner. It's as rough as the proverbial badger's arse, but there is something there worth exploring. Perhaps it could get better....

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posted by MajorDundee (15 comments total)

Ooh, yeah I like that. The riffy guitar is just great. It feels like it needs another section to me. I'll noodle around with it a bit but don't let that stop anyone else for the moment.
posted by unSane at 7:58 PM on October 5, 2012

Triffic - be my guest unS! Not sure I have time for a full-on collab on this given that I'm supposed to be doing something with chococat and my non-musical life is a nightmare at the moment. So time is at a premium. But more than happy to review/contribute ideas etc. I'm slightly fearful that someone will ask what the chords are - I've no idea, except that they're non-standard and I'd have to try somehow to draw them as tabs (I can't read music, as I've said many time before, and I've no idea what I'm playing in technical terms).

There are three guitar parts on this. A telecaster right and left, but playing different inversions and a 335 up the middle playing the same as the lower-end tele part but pulled back in the mix and quite heavily overdriven. The three guitars are important in terms both of texture and emphasising some of the key notes in the guitar riff. Drums and bass are pretty nasty as usual.

The lyric - apart obviously from "it gets better" and the call and response bit, is bollocks and can be changed at will.

I did want to say that if this chorus met with a lot of interest, we could maybe use it as the basis for a MeFiMu collective effort for the It Gets Better vid - with people maybe sharing singing bits of verse and bits of chorus or guitar parts or whatever. I hesitate to mention Do They Know It's Christmas (which I detest as music/lyric but not as sentiment), but it's really that sort of idea. Probably too logistically difficult to pull off, being realistic. Which is why I dropped the idea of mentioning it upthread.
posted by MajorDundee at 4:43 AM on October 6, 2012

I really liked that.
posted by DMelanogaster at 5:24 AM on October 6, 2012

If you can tab out the chords that would be great and save me a bunch of time. Some of it's obvious but there are a couple of trademark Major Dundees in there that I know I'm going to be fretting (ha) over.

I'm sure you know this but the easiest way to write them is 022100 for an open E and x02220 for an open A and so on where you just write the frets for the strings in order from low to high string and x for a note that's muted or not played.
posted by unSane at 5:34 AM on October 6, 2012

Poppy!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:36 AM on October 6, 2012

Actually I didn't know that (I've never used tabs) but it's perfectly sensible once you've demonstrated it - so thanks for that! I'll upload something this evening. How do you show transients/chords where you're moving notes within them?
posted by MajorDundee at 9:40 AM on October 6, 2012

I hope this makes some kind of sense...:

Right channel

X 10 12 12 12 X

12 X 12 12 12 X

10 10 12 12 12 X

12 X 12 12 12 X

X 10 12 12 12 X

12 X 12 12 12 X

11 X 10 12 X X

10 X 10 10 10 X

8 X 10 9 8 X

11 X 10 12 X X

10 X 10 10 10 X

9 X 10 8 9 X

8 X 8 8 8 X

6 X 8 7 6 6

Left Channel

3 5 5 0 3 3

5 X 5 7 (5) 8 X

3 5 5 0 3 3

5 X 5 7 (5) 8 X

3 5 5 0 3 3

5 X 5 7 (5) 8 X

5 X 5 7 8 X – 5 X 5 5 6 X – 5 X 5 5 5 X

X 3 5 5 5 x

5 X 5 7 8 X – 5 X 5 5 6 X – 5 X 5 5 5 X

X 4 6 6 6 X

X 6 8 8 8 X

X 1 3 3 3 X


I guess I could always post the stems somewhere if you want to listen to the guitar parts individually (complete with howlers - this was a rush job remember)
posted by MajorDundee at 11:11 AM on October 6, 2012

Meant to comment too that when I mixed this I realised there was no reverb on the backing track - it's bone dry. That was sort of accidental really. But I thought "fuck it - it sounds ok without any gloop". There's a little early reflections/room on the vocals, but not so's you'd notice. It's perhaps a little bit too dry really when I listen to it at a distance as it were, but it fascinates me that the less reverb you use the more kind of stark and "immediate" the recording sounds...it's also a really good way of sorting out the balance between parts.

Oh and Flapjax - this ain't "poppy!" baby, given my beer intake it's more aptly described as "hoppy!". Har har....hic. Looking forward to hearing your track.
posted by MajorDundee at 12:42 PM on October 6, 2012

Hoppy and poppy but sure-as-hell ain't floppy!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:28 PM on October 6, 2012

Okay, Major, I've definitely got a verse part for this which drives into the chorus... I'll try to think about a bridge and then bung it on an mp3 and send it to you.
posted by unSane at 7:40 AM on October 14, 2012

(and it would really help me if you could send me the L and R guitar tracks, major!)
posted by unSane at 7:41 AM on October 14, 2012

For anyone following along at home the chorus chord sequence is:

/ G / Em7 / G / Em7 / G / Em7 / Cm Dm7 / C /
/ G / Em7 / G / Em7 / G / Em7 / Cm Dm7 / C# Cm7 / Bb /

more or less
posted by unSane at 7:43 AM on October 14, 2012

Hey MajorDundee! Great work! So many great contributions!
posted by jph at 8:20 AM on October 31, 2012

Let me know if you are going t make any modifications to it. We're still taking submissions to the video project, and so we've got some time for the final cut of music!
posted by jph at 8:20 AM on October 31, 2012

Well, bizarrely I picked this up again today. I had a verse part for it which has been nagging away at me for weeks and I finally figured out how to glue it all together. I'm in love with the chromatic descending part. I screwed around with the feel of it a lot... it's swung now and feels a bit like Jackie Wilson's SWEETEST FEELING. I might put some horns on it to complete the soul feel. Major, check your memail.
posted by unSane at 3:42 PM on March 9