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"Inside the guitar parts" Part II :: Superstition download notations (.pdf) |
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Hello again! This time we’ll take a look at ‘Superstition’ from ‘Tides’. This is one of the first two songs we ever started working on at the beginning of what became Leverage. I had a demo song that had the basic verses, the chorus chords with a different melody and a separate solo section that was partly in 6/4 and had the same idea than you hear in the synth riff, only with those two extra beats. I had come up with that fiddling with the guitar parts of UFO’s classic awesome ballad ‘Love To Love’ on the piano trying to break Schenker’s odd-time guitar riff at one point of the song into piano arpeggios and going from there. I seriously suck at playing the piano, so there’s really nothing of the UFO song part left in what I finally came up with... Now, Torsti liked the riff, but suggested that we simplify it a bit turning it into 2 3-bar sequences and he also brought up the idea of making it the main riff of whatever song this was going to be. He also introduced the idea of having those bubbling filtered 16ths from a sequencer happening underneath. Good stuff. For ‘Tides’, it was of course Marko who played the keys. The chords on top of the notation again refer to what Marko plays, just like in ‘Follow...’ Torsti and me play 5th chords. In the bridge (bars 24-25) the idea is that the background vocals and the synth arpeggio suggest a Bb – chord while the guitars and the bass stay at Ab, this is one way to get some nice “this is going somewhere”- tension to a part. The riff melody is written in bars 1- 6 in C-minor, it sounds off compared to the album since we tune down one half step. OK, let’s get to the guitars. If you play along with the album (again, tune down 1/2 step) you’ll hear what I’ve written here in your left channel, as it is where Torsti is with his 6-string. My 7-string is on your right, like it is throughout ‘Tides’ (and also on the new album and live, too). This song being very simple to play, we really tried to concentrate on accentuating, muting, pinching and squeling our guitars to bring them alive. The easiest way to play the song is to check out the chords and then just play along until you get familiar with it. It is pretty much all here in these few lines of notation. Towards the end, before the outro part, there are double breaks underneath the riff, and in the actual outro (which is the intro synth riff with that extra repeated harmonized vocal part) we open the guitars at half point and just bash out open 8ths with the same accentuation in the beginning,‘til the stop at the end. Have fun, TH |
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