Song structure analysis and terminology | Page 6 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Roll the eyes and continue @Oudis, it makes not a dent in my enthusiasm.

One of the formative influences on my guitar playing (such as it is because I’m more of a bassist) was learning fingerpicking styles and it’s one of the things that interest me about the changes in the Beatles songwriting when first McCartney and later Lennon learnt to do this. Blackbird and Julia are the prime examples here. Julia is pretty close to a bluegrass style but is harmonically far from that and Blackbird is an awesome chromatic piece that noone I know can replicate because of McCartney’s half-strumming style. I find it fascinating that both songs are heavily chromatic.

Julia has that nice hanging F#m that finally resolves to A, it’s a study in chromatics and relative minors with a bonus chromatic turn in the middle eight with a rare minor 9th and reproduces that hanging chromatic pause as a way of resolving the final verse. It’s in a major key but you wouldn’t know it.

Blackbird always feels like a harmony textbook to listen to. It makes heavy use of the III, even flattening it to turn back to the II in the middle eight, and there’s a nice symmetry in the chromatic slide up the G scale in the verse and down via a flattened VI in the middle. This song was apparently inspired by Bach’s Bourrée in E minor and it has a touch of the baroque about it

Wow that Etude is quite the dead-ringer. But McCartney may well have picked up the voicings from attempting the Bourrée as @PeterWeatherby suggests, or perhaps its a completely different piece he’s misremembering, because as close as the Etude is, he’s got the idea of the repeated sections and the little recap in the middle from somewhere else. Good point on Paul’s fascinating memory, @Joe Another song that comes to mind is Alice’s Restaurant which begins with a similar progression and is a fingerpickin’ ragtime tune that was around before the White Album and has a small but significant chromatic F#dim7 progression.

Another McCartney guitar tune is the OMG-why-didn’t-I-write-that Mother Nature’s Son with the clever relative minor intro taken from the refrain. This is a more standard strum with almost all the chromatic D chord bits you can do on a guitar but instead of a chromatic progression it flips from major to minor sevenths after a nice I-VI-II-V turn that exploits the scale, with a little figure that he probably pinched from somewhere, and only on the last chord does it “resolve” to a major seventh. As noted elsewhere, McCartney didn’t have a massive presence on the White Album but this Blackbird and Martha My Dear (note the similar use of a II-based harmonic turn) are the big melodic takeaways.

PeterWeatherby said

ewe2 said
it flips from major to minor sevenths after a nice I-VI-II-V turn 

You’ll have to remind me — I’m running through all the chords in my head and I don’t recall that progression occurring in “Mother Nature’s Son .”

Apologies, got my chords mixed up, its a I-VI-V-II-V turn (not sure whether to ignore the flattened V and googling it seems to bring up a confusing array of opinion). I tend to look at chord progressions from a bassist point of view so sometimes I’m more literal with it than a guitarist might be.

PeterWeatherby said

Hmm, I’m still not connecting. I think I’m getting hung up because there isn’t a II chord used in the song — unless you’re referring to the “V of V” secondary dominant (E major) that falls at the end of the line “mother nature’s son“? I guess that would look like a II from a bass player’s point of view, so maybe that’s the disconnect.

Ah yes that’s exactly what I meant. From the point of view of the scale, that’s indeed what it looks like. I do get confused between the difference between the two. I guess it’s because the E major resolves to A is why it’s a V of V not a ii. Tricky stuff, I’d never realized that chord progressions could be classified according to their harmony like that! That’s the sort of thing a bassist should know, when stuff is going to resolve! (I do know intuitively, just not in a formal sense). For those of us who are a bit wobbly on the theory, I’ve found http://covertogether.com quite helpful to follow this discussion.

Those are all great examples, particularly because I was listening/playing along with all three of them today. You Won’t See Me is a real walking bass workout, and it suggests the idea of the secondary dominant, although I don’t know which came first. And I didn’t know that about Lucy and ADITL. The wildest progression for me is that one in YNGMYM of diminished sevenths, but I don’t know the Roman numerals for it except that it starts in C and resolves to A (C-A Eb-C Gb-Eb A-Gb A-Gb-G-G# A), so I suppose it modulates to the next section “one sweet dream…” A friend and I played it, he’d learnt all the guitar parts and it’s a tricky one!

(I can’t make this look good in html without a lot of trouble and pre tags don’t work, sorry)
Now this would seem to be used to resolve back to the tonic after the bridge:

[D]Ohhhh
V-of-V
[G]One day,[Fb7]you’ll find[C]that I have gone[D]
V, IV, I, V-of-V

But this illustrates the kind of confusion you can have: Go and look at Alan Pollack’s notes on this song, and look at the bridge section. Isn’t that confusing. Why isn’t he calling it a secondary dominant there if it’s in the key of C?

And now the [D] time has come and [F] so my love I must go [C] [C7]
ii, iv, I, V-of-IV
And though I [D] lose a friend [F] in the end you will know [C] [D] Ohhhh
ii,iv,V-of-IV, ii

He does when it’s the verse. Is he treating the initial D there as a Dm? No, he’s treating it like a ii in the key of C major.

Note also that he marks the passing chord:

But [C] tomorrow may [e/b] rain so [D] I’ll follow the [C] sun
I, iii, V-of-V, V

And that’s the trick used in Martha My Dear , except starting with the VI instead of the I.

Oudis said

Silly Girl said
Secondary dominant, huh… I learned a new term today… that’s fab. 

Indeed, I thought there was only one dominant chord for each scale… Can anybody explain what a secondary dominant is? And sorry for so many questions…

The short version is that it seems to be the major fifth interval of the fifth interval above the tonic, so in the key of C:

C G D
I V V-of-V

If you know your circle of fifths, take the next clockwise major key and the key after that is always the secondary dominant. Additionally the secondary dominant resolves back to the previous V so G resolves to C, D resolves to G. My confusion is about the fact that I don’t pay enough attention to whether the scale is major or minor and see ii everywhere instead of V-of-V