GBS music geekery

[annathepiper]

Today's exercise in writing procrastination comes to me courtesy of being madly, passionately in love with the title track of Something Beautiful*, even this long after buying it. Definitely one of those I Must Learn How to Play This Song sorts of GBS ditties. So today I started trying to tab it out. Things of interest observed for the guitar-playing GBS fans on my Friends list:

The song is in the key of F, near as I can tell, and you have to play it with the third fret capoed. Which punts all the chords into the key of D. I'm pretty sure that the intro is two repetitions of D-D-D-A.

The first verse got a bit challenging for me, at least on the first two lines, which are all that I've chorded out so far. I picked out the complete melody line on my guitar, though, which helped. But it also led me to try to figure out what weirdo chord goes in the middle of each of these lines--and thanks to a bit of music geeking with kathrynt and past familiarity with what the lovely and talented Mr. Doyle does in terms of chord selection in his songs, Emsus4 finally popped out as the chord I want. So for the interested, the first little bit of "Something Beautiful" seems to come out something like this...

    B       A    A            A    G    G F#     E
(G) Hey (D) you, you (Emsus4) lost your only (A) friend

    E   A     B        A     F#   F# G            A     G    G F#     E
(G) You can't be- (D) -lieve your broken (Emsus4) heart will ever (A) mend

The letters in parentheses are the chords. The letters over the lyrics are the notes hit on those words.

Comments

[wingedelf.livejournal.com]

Wheeee!

You might want to check the journal of ravenlaughing- she'll be moving here shortly from Denver and would like to be able to assemble a bunch of folk to sing and play along with some music i'm thinking you'd really be into. And she's way cool people to boot.

I'm definitely going to give it a go.

[annathepiper]

I'll be playing with the rest of the song over the next few days, I think. I Googled around a bit and couldn't find it tabbed out anywhere on the Net, despite the number of GBS fan sites with tabs. Besides, I groove on just trying to figure it out myself. :) If you get a chance to play with it, tell me if you think it sounds right. I'm not a hundred percent sure of the D-D-D-A on the intro, either.

And I do love this song so. I love playing Alan's slower ballads in general, but this one and "Clearest Indication" really are my favorites of those!

Thanks for the recommendation on ravenlaughing!

[suzene.livejournal.com]

You are a lovely, lovely music geek amd have just been friended. XD

[annathepiper]

*beam* Yay! Glad to have you aboard!

[silme711.livejournal.com]

♥!
Sounds pretty good to me! I love this song so very much.

[annathepiper]

It is so very lovely. I'm looking forward to figuring out the rest of it. I'm not entirely certain yet, but I think there may be a Dsus4 in the next line of the verse, too! (Alan does seem to love his sus4 chords in his ballads.)