PSYCHEDELIC
Roll up, roll up! Let Simon Barnard take you on a magical mystery tour of The Beatles’ more psychedelic moments in this brand new series.
Simon Barnard begins a new series with the band that owned ‘60s psychedelia: The Beatles.
Arguably Liverpool’s biggest export, and almost certainly the most successful and influential band of all time, in a few short years The Beatles released some of the most important records ever, from 1963’s Please Please Me up to their final studio album Let It Be, released in 1970.
Throughout this relatively short career, the band’s output became more complex and diverse as each album was written. With producer George Martin and manager Brian Epstein at the helm, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and later George Harrison and even Ringo Starr, wrote and recorded hit after hit. With 17 number one UK singles, and half a billion album sales worldwide, the Fab Four literally changed the face of pop music.
Our lesson this month concentrates on The Beatles’ psychedic period, from around 1966’s Revolver album, through the following year’s Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour, dipping into the White Album, Abbey Road and Let It Be.
Bars 1-16 featured some Eastern inspired lines paying homage to George Harrison’s love of Indian Music. The melody uses the b7) Indian Pentatonic scale (1-3-4-5- hinting at tracks like Within You Without You featured on Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. With the entire melody played on one string, accuracy is key. Ensure that each note is smooth and fluent.
Bars 17-28 continue the Indian theme with some extra colour and dynamics. Inspired by Tomorrow Never Knows from 1966’s Revolver, this solo uses Phrygian Dominant b2- b6-b7) mode (1- 3-4-5- before moving on to b3- b7), the Minor Pentatonic (1- 4-5- and Indian Pentatonic scale once again.
Bars 29-35 feature a ‘Walrusy’ overdriven descending chord progression reminiscent of the Magical Mystery Tour era. A number of Beatles songs utilise descending chord progressions, including Something, I Want You (She’s So Heavy) and While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Make sure that the bass notes of each chord are played clearly and cleanly, to emphasise their descending motion.
Bars 37-44 continue in similar vein but with an A Minor Pentatonic solo drawing on Harrison’s signature string bends. This section was inspired by tracks such as Back In The USSR from The Beatles (otherwise known as the White Album), released in 1968. Make sure that each note is bent to the correct pitch, and add light vibrato to help achieve the Harrison sound.
In bars 45-49 the piece transitions from 4/4 into a 12/8 time signature inspired by the intro to With A Little Help From My Friends from Sgt Pepper. This features inversions of the A major triad, going from root inversion (1-3-5), to first inversion (3-5-1) and then second inversion (5-1-3) before landing on the 5th degree of the scale, E major.
Bars 50-51 utilise a descending 6ths figure inspired by Across The Universe from The Beatles final album, 1970’s Let It Be. This is best played by using hybrid picking, where the pick plays the third string and the ‘m’ or ‘a’ finger plucks the first string. This then modulates from A major to A minor and was inspired by songs such as While My Guitar Gently Weeps where the verse is written in A minor but modulates to A major in the chorus (moving from major to minor, or vice versa, is known as parallel modulation).
The final section looks at The Beatles’ use of descending arpeggiated chords, as found in I Want You (She’s So Heavy) from Abbey Road, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds from Sergeant Pepper, and The White Album’s Dear Prudence. The challenge is to cleanly descend the bassline while maintaining a fluent arpeggio on the top three strings.
NEXT MONTH Simon looks at the pre-12-bar era of Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt’s Status Quo
throughout their relatively short career the band’s output became more complex and diverse with each album