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Jason

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[Aug. 15th, 2012|10:07 pm]
Jason
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Things I have noticed today:
(1) The four disgustingly satisfying chords in the verse of Radiohead's "Exit Music (for a film)" and of "Stairway to Heaven" have the same structure: vi III7 I II. (Am E7/G# C/G D7/F# for stairway, Bm F# D E for exit music)
(2) I am impressed how many people on the internet have transcribed stairway's second chord as a G instead of the E7 that it seems to me like it has to be for the walking bassline to work. Really? Am I crazy and hearing something that isn't there?
(3) Rigging up a tiny nodejs server to watch for local filesystem changes and automatically refresh a webpage whenever you change the css or templates of it every time you save the file is the best thing. I U+2665 small, useful bits of software.
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Comments:
From: wjl
2012-08-16 06:28 am (UTC)
You're probably not crazy; guitarists don't care about theory, only the chord shapes. Well, Internet guitarists, anyway..
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[User Picture]From: jcreed
2012-08-16 11:38 am (UTC)
Well, if they had showed the right fingering but gave it the wrong name, I would totally understand, but I was finding things that had no explicit fingering shown and just listed the flat-out wrong, wrong-sounding, wrong wrong wrong chord.
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[User Picture]From: jcreed
2012-08-16 05:53 pm (UTC)
Yeah I guess maybe?

I'm talking about the first google hit for "stairway chords":
http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/l/led_zeppelin/stairway_to_heaven_ver3_crd.htm

Which doesn't even say G/B (if people thought it was a walk-up Am-G/B-C), but straight-up G.
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[User Picture]From: jcreed
2012-08-16 06:09 pm (UTC)
But fifths have their place, though :) I still remember the moment I started trying playing parallel fifths on the piano and how jarringly different and more \m/-ish it sounded --- I think at this point I had already listened to a little Bad Plus (who definitely do do power chords deep down low on the piano part from time to time in their pop/rock covers to get the right texture) and had a lightbulb-going-off moment as to how simple it was for them to get that sound.

Anyway it goes to show how flouting a standard rule of the genre that came before you (against parallel fifths and octaves) on purpose over and over again can be effective.
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[User Picture]From: jcreed
2012-08-16 08:37 pm (UTC)
Yeah I figured I was preaching to the choir on that count.
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