A fresh challenge for me!
This one came up in a lesson yesterday afternoon for the first time and I've been dragged off on a new journey which I'll document here. Knowing the song quite well but without ever having thought about how to play it, my instinct was that this was a straight 4 beat. Upon listening in with my student it soon became clear I was very wrong! There's a triplet feel which I first settled on as being a 6/8 count. The problem is that it underlies a vocal rhythm which doesn't appear to have any hard structure, at least in the verse sections!
I offered my student a reasonable way of viewing things and surprisingly quickly she had a functional version running, singing and strumming. I knew I wasn't done with this one though and spent half my evening digging through for a better understanding. That sparked off the challenge I'll be undertaking here ... learning to sing the verse along with a guitar part based on the bass line from the record. This looks exceptionally challenging and as of today I can't do it ... at all!
Practising what I preach
I'm confident that my own method will yield success. The basic approach is outlined in my blog article here "Caught in a Trap? How to sing and play guitar at the same time!". I've claimed that these steps can offer success with any singing while playing challenge, and this looks to be as tough of one as I've found to date!
First stage was to come up with a simple guitar part that matches the rhythm of what the bass plays on the record. Mixing the rhythm of "Don't Give Up" with the same twiddles I've used in teaching U2's "One" gives a pattern that works comfortably over the 3 chords Am, C and G (then Am again) of the verse. You can hear it in the video below and I'll be no doubt be examining it in great depth before long in this thread.
To the drawing board!
I wrote this out in 6/8 Taplature and then worked through the first couple of rounds of the sequence adding the syllables of the lyrics where they fall against the guitar part.
Watch this space!
And that's about as far as I've got. I'm no singer, so for me this more of an investigation of mental mechanics than anything especially musical. It's also the sort of thing that often holds hidden benefits; let's see where it leads!
Join me in this thread to ask any questions, cheer me on, have a laugh, show off your skills (if you can already do this) or anything else related. Hopefully we can all learn something!
I've managed a couple of hours on this today and have it to this stage:
While this is further along than I'd expected at the outset of this challenge and while it probably looks fairly functional from the video evidence it still feels a long way from solid. What you can't see here is that it took me about 30 attempts to record the 3 rounds in the video with no horrendous mistakes.
I've now ditched the safety net of the written version while playing (though I'll be going back to it for practice purposes) and this recording includes (as will any future ones) the extra requirement to stay in time with a backing track. That backing is running at 80bpm which appears to be the speed of the original Peter Gabriel version.
In practice earlier I'd pushed things to over 100bpm as a stress test and things in general seemed ok. Once the camera is on though things get a whole lot tougher!
Seeing which parts have been problematic shows me where my practice will be best spent. I've been jumbling words up quite a lot throughout the discarded takes but my biggest stumbling block has been the line "No fight left or so it seems, I am a man whose". Although I can get through it I don't feel like I'm understanding it properly and if it's ever to be easy I'll need to change that. I'll take a deeper look at that part here next time.