Thursday 3 June 2010

Help, how do I get out of this song?

I got another book of sheet music the other day and was learning to play How Deep Is Your Love. Only oldies will remember this was sung by the Bee Gees in that Ur-Disco Film, Saturday Night Fever. It's quite a catchy tune actually. But when I started playing it, I couldn't find an appropriate final bar. I decided to investigate why it was taking me around in circles.

The structure of the song looks like a normal A-B-C-B-D, where A is the opening, B is the main section, C is the bridge, and D is the coda. Uh wrong, there is no D, after B, here's what happens: while a Gibb brother is singing how deep is your love, his brother starts singing how deep is your love a 13th down, always taking you into C. So that's why I got stuck in a loop of B-C ad infinitum.

How to solve this? Well in the soundtrack album, they simply fade out the second time on the bridge. In fact the sheet suggests an alternative start to the second bridge consisting of few tacit bars while progressing through the chords Ab Eb Gm7 Ab followed dal segno and fade. I can't do that so I devised my own ending. I play Ab on the arpeggiator and then tack on Eb6 to give it a chord of finality and halt.

I suspect this looping is what allows some dance songs to keep going until the band or the dancers tire of it. It sounded like the same trick I heard in Northeastern Brazil dance music.

Now I have to master that song and stop it running around in my head!

No comments: