Weekly Music 2
This is the second edition of the weekly music post – I have been mostly listening to the same stuff this week but a few songs I haven’t heard in a while which were great to hear again, as well as a song I wasn’t familiar with before, which I’ll start with.
I’ve been watching a lot of Rick Beato on YouTube this week, and he does a great series called “What Makes this Song Great?” You can find his channel here. The first song I would like to mention is “Clocks” by Coldplay.
Beato’s video on this is fascinating and highlights lots of aspects of the song, including the clock-like consistency of the bass and drums which really provides a great foundation for the song, and something I’ll look into improving in my music in the future. Additionally, he talks about the chord progression, and how it doesn’t really change throughout the song, yet the song changes key in terms of feel, sometimes simply due to the register that the bass is playing in, which is fascinating.
One of the most interesting parts of the song is the vocal harmonies and how they add to the songs atmosphere, especially when they go into slightly dissonant-sounding thirds but eventually resolve themselves to essentially being a double track.
The second Beato video I watched was on a song I know very well, “The Pretender” by Foo Fighters.
One of the best features of this song is the vocals. They have an extremely tight double track, creating a great chorus effect, especially in the intro before the bass and drums come in. In the final chorus, the three vocal parts, along with the bass, make an inversion of the same chord that the guitar is playing, which puts great emphasis and feel into the chorus.
The song also has a very interesting drum part, with some great fills and changing parts throughout, keeping the song fresh. The drums go into a half-time kind of groove at one point building to a chorus and this allows the chorus to hit harder. The idea of emphasising the 4th beat in a bar isn’t really something I’ve explored before but definitely will do after noticing the great effect it has in this song.
Again, the rhythm section in this is brilliantly tight, and allows the harmonies mentioned above to really shine through the mix, really proving the belief that capturing a great performance is more important than anything you can do in post production.
The third song for this week is “Blackbird” by Alter Bridge.
As always, the guitar work from Mark Tremonti and Myles Kennedy is extremely powerful, with great tone and amazing performance, and the clean guitar especially, with the swells behind it really conveys a great feeling of the performance in my opinion. The guitar solo is wonderful, a perfect example of showing how playing fewer notes can really say a lot more, whereas the second half contrasts this, as the band gets heavier and the solo becomes more technically complex, but loses no fluency in the playing it serves the song perfectly.
Although the instrumental work on this song is brilliant, I feel that the real highlight is the vocal performance. You can tell the confidence Myles Kennedy has in his ability, in the loud, full sounding chorus, with some great, strong high notes and really beautiful vibrato. This is one of the songs I think of when it comes to emotional vocal performances – there are lots of different vocal sounds across the song, and the quieter, almost whisper-y sound where you can really hear the breaths in the voice is one of my personal favourites.
Please do check out these songs and let me know what you think 🙂
