Harnch
Please purchase Harnch on iTunes and support independent musicians like myself.
So as to facilitate actual completions of songs, I am going to post singles to iTunes until Jerk (my fourth solo album) is complete. It’ll cost me more money, but I’m already extremely happy knowing that I have something complete, online, and salable. You can purchase Harnch on iTunes, Amazon’s MP3 store, or you can stream it on Spotify. If you prefer some other digital music vendor, it’s probably available there too. Support independent musicians!
I originally wrote the primary theme to Harnch back in 2006 or so as a piano piece in some Lite edition of Finale. Over the following three or four years, the song kept surfacing from the back of my mind without my listening or particular instigation. When that happens, I know I’ve got something worth recording. And if I’m getting one of my songs stuck in my head, I’m sure someone else will have the same “problem” when they hear it.
So, sometime in 2009 I fleshed out the song a bit more and completed the composition in 2010. The guitar solo was added later to the middle section. It took some time to learn all the guitar parts, but the bass and drum parts came naturally in the space of one or two evenings. The guitar parts actually took weeks to learn and memorize due to the complexities in harmonics and time signatures. I like to call the licks in these songs “finger acrobatics.”
About the song
I’ve already given you the history of the song. Now let’s talk about the song. You should probably give it a listen first:
It’s predominantly in 5/4 in D mixolydian. My primary inspirations were Pat Metheny, Gentle Giant, Bill Bruford, and Al Di Meola. The guitar solo section is in 11/4 (don’t let the 4/4 drums fool you) and vacillates between D mixolydian and D harmonic minor. The outro is in too many time signatures to describe reasonably. The rhythm parts are probably as difficult as the lead parts. And there’s a heck-of-a-lot of syncopation throughout the whole track. It’s really a miracle that I was able to put something like this together. I can assure you, it was almost entirely a happy accident.
Vamp
The introductory vamp is really quite simple.
The Melody
The melody is not quite simple. It’s mostly finger acrobatics and alternate picking with the occasional pull-off/hammer-on. The notation below is broken into phrases and not into measures.
If that weren’t complicated enough, check out this next section. It took me days to play this up to speed, and I wrote the stupid song.
The 11/4 Part
At 1:24 into the song, a new section begins. It’s in 11/4 and is tricky for several reasons. The vamp begins with the turnaround, which is a very uncommon practice. I didn’t realize this as I was writing the song. Rather, I realized it when I was trying to teach my dad the song in an attempt to play the song live with a band. Furthermore, the drums play in 4/4 over the rhythm part and obfuscates the location of the beginning of each measure. Just now, I tried counting the guitar part out to confirm the 11/4 time signature and I could barely do it. Just stick with playing 8th notes (after the turnaround notes) and you should be all right.
I’ve notated the “turnaround” as its own measure below to help explain what I’ve just described.
Once that bit is played a few times, then a harmonic minor version of it is played:
The Solo
The guitar solo is pretty tricky because, at about 1:51, there’s an open D string being played at specific times, primarily dotted quarter notes. The notes in the higher register are being played with my middle and ring fingers on my right hand while hybrid picking. The notation would be too complicated to write out, so I’ll leave it to you to figure out if you feel so inclined.
The Outro
The outro is where the song gets awesome. Compositionally, it’s a set of arbitrary permutations of the main melody transcribed earlier. It sounds like a controlled cacophony of rhythms in the song, which I love.
When I listen back to this song, I still can’t believe I wrote and performed all the instrumentation (except the piano). Andy West, former bassist for the Dixie Dregs, tried learning the song and said: “This is one of the hardest songs I’ve ever tried to learn.” Coming from him, I think that’s a compliment.
Even though it took me about 4 years to go from idea to completed performance, it makes me excited to continue to write and record new material. Considering all the time and effort I put into it, I’d really appreciate it if you could threw a few dimes my way by purchasing Harnch on iTunes.
If you have any questions on how to play the song, please let me know.
File under: iTunes, Transcription