Geeky Bob

If, like me, you were ever forced to read Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," here is my 21st-century homage to his most-famous work:

POSTSCRIPT:

While I admire Frost's usage of iambic tetrameter throughout this poem, I thoroughly dislike the rhyming scheme that he employed. Nevertheless, my trifle of a poetic offering is more or less a form of parody, so I tried my best to stay true to Frost's pattern.

My brother shared the following video on social media of Rush during their "R30" tour, in which they were celebrating their 30th anniversary. Despite having seen the video before, I quickly found myself wrapped up in nostalgia as I rewatched Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee, and Neil Peart as they treated their fans to a musical retrospective of their storied career.

It's difficult to believe now, but the first time I saw the "Triumvirate from Toronto" in April of 1981, Lerxst and Dirk were just 27 years old and Pratt was just 28 - yet they were already on top of their game and the undisputed masters of progressive rock's heavier side. Rush was touring to support their Moving Pictures album, which came rapidly on the heels of their Permanent Waves, Hemispheres, A Farewell to Kings, and - of course - 2112 albums.

There are few bands who have managed to release a comparable collection of monumental, musical masterpieces in so short a time. The Boys from Willowdale join the ranks of The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Yes, and a handful of others whose sphere of influence spans across tens of thousands of other world-class musicians.

While I admit that the occasional uneducated malcontent will utter some senseless trifle like, "...but I don't like Geddy's voice," those people can easily be discounted because they're generally not musicians. To put that another way, if you're a musician and you've seen Rush, then you know.

UPDATE: This post used to link to "https://youtu.be/F9NTk0qG1Ig" for the video.

Today's transcription is a song that I began transcribing a couple years ago, but I never took the time to sit down and finish until today: "Love, Salvation, the Fear of Death" by Sixpence None The Richer. This song does a great job of showcasing J.J. Plasencio on the bass (and I'll say more about him in a moment), and Matt Slocum's amazing skills with myriad, layered guitar parts. I briefly mentioned Matt Slocum a few years ago in my Transcribing Girlfriend in a Coma by The Smiths blog when I was discussing Johnny Marr, and the two of them fall into something of the same category for me. As always, I'll have some notes to share after the following video.

Here are my notes about this transcription:

• J.J. Plasencio's intro on the bass does a great job of setting the tone for the piece with a fast tempo and high energy, and it took some experimentation in Guitar Pro to get the effects to sound like the dotted eighth note delays that guitarists have been using for years.
  • If you're sitting down to work on this piece and you're trying dial in Plasencio's sound, all I can say is that a lot of experimentation with a delay pedal will go a long way. For what it's worth, my early skills with delays date back to David Gilmour's and Alex Lifeson's guitar work in the late 1970s and Eddie Van Halen and The Edge in the 1980s, and the skills in question were how to use the delay to create complex melodies that sound like more than one instrument.
  • I saw a live video of Sixpence None the Richer playing this song with Plasencio on bass several years ago (see https://youtu.be/ihwk5ndxhmA), in which Plasencio played his parts on a 6-string bass. However, the song is quite playable on a 4-string bass in Drop-D tuning, which is an instrument that the majority of bassists will have handy, so that's the direction that I chose to go with for this transcription. That being said, if you have a 6-six string bass, some of the parts can take advantage of the high C string and you might not need to jump around the fretboard as much. (Note that in the live video from 1:20 to 1:35, the physical pain that Plasencio is clearly suffering is not imagined; it's a challenging bass part if you're playing with fingers on your right hand, which is why I use a pick.)
• There are a lot of sonic textures going on within Matt Slocum's guitar parts, and I spent a good deal of time listening and re-listening to this song while trying to dig out every little nuance that I could. That being said, I know that the three guitar parts that I ultimately arranged for this transcription may not be perfect, but they're more than good enough for a cover band to sound like 99% of the original.

As I have always said in the past, this is a free transcription. So if you're upset that I left something out, or you don't think something is correct, then it sucks to be you.

NOTE: See https://youtu.be/iOiR8IFcKi4 for the official video for this song.