A friend sent me the StrumMachine file for Meyer/Fleck/Marshall Big Country. Hey, aim high.
Because I’m nitty, I’m trying to get it to display in something that resembles how I hear the piece.
Here’s the first part as a brick of chords.
But what I hear, and what I think will help people understand and play it, is that it’s:
5 groups of 3-bar phrases
2 groups of 2-bar phrases
1 3-bar phrase
1 4-bar phrase
Making a nice, square 26-bar A-part. Hey, it’s Bela, Edgar, and Mike. Whatchu expect?
Without breaking the A-part into three (?) pieces, can I display this in such a way that people will see and feel the phrasing?
Thanks!
First of all, great use of color in your illustration there! I hear the same phrasing. This is a great time to use the Line Length adjustment, which you can access through the Chart menu or by pressing the L key.
Here’s a demo of me updating Strum Machine version of Big Country (without the sus2 chords) to have better line lengths, using both the Chart menu and the keyboard:
I like it! I also am interested in what tool LeeJones is using for the colors. Good question. I wonder if LeeJones can share this tune with us so we can see what he’s up to.
See, I knew it would already be there. That’s 2-3 times now I’ve asked Luke to add some feature, and he was all "Try Cmd-Shift-Up-Up-4. Oh wait, that’s the secret dungeon easter egg. Try ‘L’. "
Such a fine piece of software.
Here’s the result after fixing line lengths.
The cool color lines? “Preview” on MacOS. I had to do that (before I got smarter with StrumMachine) so I could hear the phrasing, and help the band with it. Our guitar player was all “Hey guys, we should play this…” He’d left out a couple of measures in the A-part in his original version, not least, I think because of the twisty phrasing. After I played it on Spotify a few dozen times, I was able to reverse engineer it. Guitar man can put into those Rice-y sus2’s or not as he sees fit. Every once in a while, he’ll drop some sexy jazz chord in the middle of a straight-up bluegrass song at a gig, look at me and giggle. But they’re always spot on, so I just giggle back and get on with it.
BTW, I’m 67 years old, and spent all the time I was supposed to be doing homework during junior high and high school reverse engineer rock songs off cassettes. If I’d had StrumMachine, Spotify, and digital multi-track recording software, there’s a decent chance I’d have never graduated high school.
Which you know, coulda led to some interesting life choices.
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Good idea to put phrase lengths in the section name. I’ll start doing that! 65 - spending all my time reverse engineering very very old Irish fiddle tunes.
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