Exit Stage Right  - Tribute to Rush

Haven't written anything for a while. Feel I should because there have been changes.

With Marc's exit comes new responsibilities. In a previous post I mentioned how I couldn't come close to Marc's expertise on keyboards, but Rush kind of lends itself to the bass player being the keyboard player and ,well, that's me. I'm becoming more and more like Geddy Lee every day!! We've decided to become more Rushlike and have since acquired a set of foot pedals, and I'm playing keyboards. It makes for quite the choreography on stage, no more spacing out on easy bass parts because the keys are playing (I've caught myself doing this, old habits are hard to break) but now it seems I'm using my whole brain every time we rehearse.

We started out incorporating the foot pedals first. That gave us the ability to perform most of the better known Rush tunes, since most of those are pretty basic as far as keyboards. Now I'm working up Tom Sawyer, Subdivisions, Analog Kid, a little bit more involved on the keyboard parts, and I'm not sure what I'm going to be working on next after I get those down.

I don't mind, as a matter a fact in some weird way I welcome the change. That's the great thing about a being a musician, you're never done, there's always new territory to conquer and ironically you never really conquer it. Whatever area you "conquer" still needs to be tweaked and maintained, constantly. But everything you take on gives you a bit more perspective about any musical situation and affects your response to it.

Speaking of changes, we are doing a cover show for a private event soon. They want Rush but they also want some other stuff. We've all played and are playing in multiple bands but we haven't yet considered playing non-Rush material until this opportunity presented itself. Not one to step down from a challenge we decided to try it and see what happens.  These are un-Rush tunes we're doing...

Hard to Handle - Black Crowes
Honky Tonk Woman - Rolling Stones
Cissy Strut - The Meters
Fire - Jimi Hendrix
Feel Like Makin' Love - Bad Company
Rocky Mountain Way - Joe Walsh
Little Wing - Jimi Hendrix
Crossroads - Eric Clapton
One Way Out - Allman Bros.
Scuttle Buttin'/Couldn't Stand the Weather - SRV
Man in a Box - Alice in Chains
Machine Head - Bush
Interstate Love Song - Stone Temple Pilots
Cold Shot - Stevie Ray Vaughan
My Own Worst Enemy - Lit
Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
Basket Case - Green Day
Billy Idol - Rebel Yell
Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) - Jimi Hendrix

What's great about playing Rush tunes is that everything else you try that is not Rush is a piece of cake. It's amazingly easy to sing and play bass over a straight 4/4 once you have sung  over changing meters (i.e. Natural Science, see previous blog). I can happily say we're overqualified. This is only a temporary digression of course, and once this gig is done, it's back exclusively to the Rush tunes, but it is a nice...change.

My bio is truthful - my brother did buy Moving Pictures and that's how I first heard of Rush. I had just acquired my first bass about year after the album came out and had been listening to a variety of different bands and bass players, all within the rock genre. I learned from album songbooks, piano reductions, which saved a lot of time rather than learning by ear. I had a bunch of different books, a couple Foreigner books, Cornerstone by Styx and others that I have since forgotten. I was kind of scared to buy Moving Pictures since what I heard from that album seemed incredibly daunting. But I did ended up buying it.

All in all it took me probably about four months to get through the whole thing, excluding YYZ which at that time was way beyond my skill level. I didn't try to learn YYZ until I got a few more years under my belt and was in a band. If I remember right, we never got through the whole thing. Later I  got the book for Signals and learned that album all the way through. The tough bass line on Signals for me was getting that riff in the beginning and between verses in Analog Kid.

The amazing thing about Geddy is that his bass playing is such a large part of the sound, no one can play his lines like he does, and no one performs improvised lines like he does. John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, Jack Bruce of Cream, maybe Chris Squire of Yes, are the only rock bass players that come close to Geddy's level of technique and creativity with bass lines. I honestly can't think of another rock bass player that plays the chord changes during guitar solos like he does. The solo section of Freewill is a work of art because Geddy seems to play a solo underneath Alex but retains enough of the chord changes so the listener still knows what is going on. It's more the way a jazz bass player would think, not a rock bass player. I can guarantee those lines weren't thought out note for note and were probably different for each take in the studio. Maybe he had a general idea, a roadmap of sorts, of what he was going to do, and possibly he worked out a few signature licks, but I'm guessing that's about it. He does this on a number of songs, but really seems to take it to a new level starting with Permanent Waves and continues the tradition with subsequent albums.

I bring this up, because becoming Geddy Lee on bass guitar requires a knowledge of music beyond what is normally required for rock bass players. Moving Pictures inspired me to to practice more than just the notes on the page and start expanding my musicianship so I could not only emulate his technique but also understand what he was thinking and spirit behind his playing. He has become such a big part of my overall technique that he comes out in my playing in other genres in my other bands.

And I still keep learning from the Ged Monster. I wanted to play Secret Touch off Vapor Trails because I thought the bass line was technically very cool. In the song, he plays 16th notes throughout the entire verse and during the solo. But these aren't just any 16th notes. If you listen closely you can hear a bright click on each note and the sound is very aggressive. This tells me that he is not just plucking the notes but is pulling the strings slightly and letting them slap back against the frets which is what provides the bright clicking sound. I went to a bunch of bass forums and discovered that he is not plucking the strings but is using his index and middle finger with his thumb providing leverage as though he is actually using a guitar pick. His downstroke consists of playing the strings with his fingernails and the upstroke is the fleshy part of the finger, which provides the punchy slap back on the frets. I have since used this technique on a number of gigs, thanks to Geddy.

When it comes to rock, Geddy is a bass player's bass player.

Of course singing is another thing altogether. I realize I don't sound like him, but my voice has improved dramatically since I started with this band. I've probably added a few notes to my top end as my voice becomes stronger in this range. The key for me is a smooth transition from chest to head voice, not falsetto as some would assume. Head voice is a stronger vocal technique than falsetto that lets a person sing beyond their normal range into high registers without ruining their voice. To Geddy this seems to come naturally, as far as I know, and in his earlier recordings I can't tell if he is still using his chest voice or is going up into head voice - the verse tag after the solo in, once again, Freewill is a good example. Either way, I didn't want to shirk my responsibility as a singer and "sing it down an octave" which was suggested at one point. I had a feeling that people would start throwing tomatoes at me if I did that. Some previous voice lessons came in handy to help me with endurance and not push the high notes which is another key to emulating Geddy's chops, and of course I drink lots lots of water.

So anyway, I'm not quite where I want to be yet covering all of Geddy Lee's parts, he also plays keyboards and pedals. I can tell you that I'm probably not going to go there anytime soon. I can play keyboards but Marc is way, way, way, way beyond my skill level. Pedals? Yeah right...

JT

The joy of singing and playing bass. When I joined ESR I made it a point to be able to sing AND play bass, not just play bass like I do in other bands to which I belong. That was the decision I made when I first contacted Peter on Craigslist. My thought was that I already play bass I need to step up and try something new and be a lead singer. Before ESR, I was at most a sporadic background singer.

I didn't realize at first what I was getting myself into. My first audition tunes were exactly what you'd expect Tom Sawyer, Limelight, The Spirit of Radio... all songs I knew relatively well and could pull off on bass guitar. Playing them was easy, singing and playing, not so much. Even though for Rush tunes I think singing and playing guitar would be equally as difficult, generally playing guitar and singing is easier because either you're strumming throughout the song and just changing chords, ala John Mayer or David Matthews, or in some cases you can simply drop out and let the other band members cover your part. But the bass can't drop out, it's and integral part of the song, establishing both pitch and rhythm. I'll stereotype at this point to mention most bass lines are extremely easy, usually straight eighth notes or something simpler. That's not Rush, of course.

Geddy's bass lines can be over-the-top difficult. I don't think he considers the bass line/vocal line juxtaposition while writing and recording.For instance, in Natural Science, there are a few parts that are excruciatingly difficult to sing and play. The "Hyperspace" section where both Geddy and Alex play the same riff simultaneously and Geddy sings "A quantum leap forward..." is hard but it's the same riff, repeated over and over again without any change in rhythm or position. The same thing occurs in the verses of Vital Signs, it sounds and looks difficult but doesn't take much concentration once you have the riff. The section in Natural Science that is very difficult is during "Permanent Waves" where he starts singing "Science, like nature, must also be tamed..."  The bass line changes from a 6/8 feel to a 4/4 feel back to a 6/8 feel but, this time, just in the bass while the drums continue in 4/4 - this all happens mid sentence and occurs continually throughout the rest of the section. Sometimes it still messes me up. Secret Touch is another song that has some difficult sections where the vocals don't coincide with the accents being played on the instruments.

The most interesting song to play bass and sing to is Jacob's Ladder, I think this where the term "math rock" came from. The rhythm sequence set up before the singing starts is short-short-short-short-long-long-long and short-short-short-short-long-long-long-long (for those more musically inclined 4 eighth notes followed by 3 quarter notes and then 4 eighth notes followed by 4 quarter notes) which repeats and continues once the singing begins and is completely unrelated to the vocal line. Another way of looking at it is that the vocal line is in 4 and the rhythm sequence is in 11 (two "shorts" equal one "long", making the first part of the sequence 5 beats and the second part  6 beats, giving 11 beats total for the whole sequence). The least common denominator is 44 which means they will both end at the same time on the 44th beat, which is the measure of "twilight premature", but before that the vocal line and the sequence will start and stop in different places. It was quite the conundrum coming up with how to sing and play this at the same time. The answer? I figured out where the four short notes (the eighth notes) hit the vocal line. Once I memorized the vocal line (thank god Jacob's Ladder only has one verse), I found the syllables where the four short notes occurred, or whether they happened in the spaces between vocal phrases, and memorized the pattern that way. For instance, the four notes appear on the "ding" in "brooding" and next on the word " bruised." After a while it became second nature and I didn't really have to think about it too much anymore. If you know of another way of doing it, please tell me.

In closing, add keyboards and pedals to the mix and you got some serious choreography going on for Geddy. Geddy's bass lines are a major signature of the Rush sound and I have to give him credit for not dumbing down his vocal or bass lines to better suit the other.

JT