John Hendow

On Saturday 2/16 the 1 Uppers performed at the Highway 99 Blues Club in Seattle. We were on a 4 band bill with Liam Fitzgerald and the Rainieros, The Roy Kay Trio, and the B-Stars. One of the guarantees of a multi-band bill like this is that it’s going to run late and be chaotic. It’s always interesting to me to hear other country bands. The B-Stars are based in San Francisco, but the other bands are all local and well-known to us. It was a great night of fun music.

In the past several months I’ve increasingly been focusing on playing baritone guitar in this band. It fits more cleanly into the sonic landscape with so many other instruments. It gets me out the guitar range which allows Kris Geren to stretch out, and it gives me a distinctive range of my own to work within. The more that I play baritone guitar the less I’m inclined to add much in terms of effects, so for this show I didn’t bring my pedalboard. I spent a great deal of time sitting in the bar waiting for our turn to play, and during that time I wondered if I had made a mistake by going without pedals for the show. Once we got into our set I was quite satisfied with my tone and didn’t miss having my pedalboard for any of my baritone guitar parts. I had to do a bit of amp knob twiddling to adjust the reverb for some songs, but overall it was great. I brought the trusty black strat because I knew we’d do a few things that just require me to have a regular electric guitar, including “How Soon Is Now”. For that one I switched my amp into its lead channel – the FIRST time I have ever used it at a gig – to get the grind that I usually evoke from my Wampler Sovereign. That might have been the only time during the night that I really missed my pedalboard. Otherwise, playing “naked” was refreshing and challenging.

Our next show is coming up 2/21 at the Royal Room in Columbia City. I’ll have the challenge of being the band’s only electric guitarist that night since Kris will be out of town. It means that I’ll definitely be bringing my pedalboard and filling up some additional sonic landscape in the mix. A new challenge is always just around the corner! Hope to see you there.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few weeks preparing for upcoming shows with both of my bands. In the case of the Dudley Manlove Quartet, many of our songs are requests from customers who hire us for private events. Those requests tend to us to recreate a specific arrangement of a song. Case in point for this week is the request for “Love is All Around”, originally performed by The Troggs, and recently reworked by Wet Wet Wet. The customer that made this request specifically asked us to refer to the newer version.

Here are the steps I took in working up the arrangement:

1. I find the song on YouTube or Pandora and give it a listen from end to end, observing the general arrangement and noting any especially challenging aspects. I don’t attempt to do this with my guitar in hand; I just focus on hearing what the song sounds like.
2. I sit with my guitar and start to determine the basic framework of the chord structure. I sketch it out using a free software application for music notation called “MuseScore”. I can usually establish the general framework of a song in a few repeat listenings.
3. If we’re changing the key of the song – which we do pretty frequently – MuseScore can do that automatically after the score is written, but I like to know that in advance because sometimes it makes the song much more difficult to perform in the new key. Once that’s locked down I proceed to the details. For “Love is All Around” the recorded version of the song is in Bb. I was tempted to move it down to A because it would sound so much better on guitar using open string crossings, but we decided to keep it in Bb.
4. Most songs we perform have idiomatic passages and solos that need to be performed verbatim. I’m very detail-oriented for these elements and explicitly transcribe solos. Putting the effort into really decoding the solo makes a big difference in performing it with authenticity. The song I was transcribing for this event doesn’t have a solo, but there is a little descending guitar lick before the chorus that required a few repetitions to play smoothly. It’s just parallel 6ths, but I want to get the same phrasing as the recording.
5. Finally, I publish the finished score as a PDF and print a copy for the gig. Usually by the time I’ve gone to all the trouble of writing out the score I’ve already memorized it, but there is something reassuring about having it as a reference before we hit the stage.

By the way, when I first starting doing this process back in my early 20’s, this seemed impossibly difficult and took me a long time. I’ve been transcribing my own parts for a long time and it’s become a big part of how I approach learning music, and after you do it for a few years it becomes much easier. Jazz musicians will tell you: transcribe transcribe transcribe. I completely agree! It’s a very good way to really understand a composition or solo.