DESCRIPTION: Robin Mullarkey - co-writer of Brotherly's musical mind melter "System" - breaks down the rhythms and harmonies of the piece with a blunt pizza wheel to make it a bit more digestible.
www.robinmullarkey.com
transcript: Hi this is Robin from Brotherly. Just thought I'd make a video to try and explain some of the technical, musical elements from this song System from the album One Sweet Life by Brotherly which we wrote a long time ago! It's had a lot of attention from music students and people who are interested in the rhythmic and harmonic elements which are quite complex actually and difficult to notate, even though i've had a go at it. You'll see that later. This is me plonking along. This is the A section of the song. It's in 6/4. So it's kind of a pushed "1". You can see in this example it's the 2nd stave down is the bass line. And that's where i feel the beat. I know that some people don't, and that's fine! Some people feel it more... and actually my perception of where the "1" is kinda changes throughout the song anyway. It's a funny one. That Eadd4 over Bb is a bit of a juicy one. It's not something I'd use every day but it just serves as a tension element really. OK here's the B section. Lots of juicy chords. That bit was just a little descending device that i did, alternating major and minor 7 chords that kind of got me back to F minor. So the top score is the beat that you're hearing in this 6/4 section and the bottom one is the kind of time-shift that happens in a second. It kind of pivots around this tsss-ka....... and what's happening is the red snare note that you see that has moved, is the only thing that has changed in the kick and snare pattern. The green kick is the one that becomes the one that sounds like the "1" in the slower hiphop 4/4 implied tempo. It's a bit of an aural illusion. This is a new C section with different harmony and the chords in the right hand stay the same throughout this whole section, even tho the bass notes change a lot and just add some more tension and colour. You'll hear now that all the chords seem to have a different quality but actually they're all the same at the top. Just the bass notes have changed. Whoops - made a mistake. This is the section where i got my friend Jan to play guitar and just said "improvise on the pentatonic but catch that little bluesy hook every time". I think they were just his 2 1st takes and i just panned them left and right and it was finished. Sounded so good. Little pedal - C pedal there. OK this is the A section again. the next thing that's going to happen rhythmically is I'm going to use the chords from the B section along with the time-shift so it's all still technically in that original 6/4 but feels like it's in 4/4. The final step that i took with this was to take the implied feel of this section and make that the actual pulse AND turn into 6/4... So this is the first time the length of the measures has actually changed throughout the whole piece. So it's all been elongated even though the subdivisions are the same as before ... those are the semiquavers from the earlier section, but now they're kind of semi-quaver triplets in this new feel and i think there's 36 of those in a bar instead of 24 which there were earlier. That's the best i can explain it. If anyone's got a better way can you have a go?.. I think that's everything. Obviously I'm completely paying no attention to the lyrics but that'll be another video from Anna maybe one day. Anyway if you've enjoyed this, you can buy our music. It's on iTunes and various other places so here's a link and yeah, enjoy. Seeya later
