Friday, June 03, 2011

One For My Baby




Today is, among other things, me tying up a couple of loose ends.

A while ago I did a couple of posts where I mentioned the song “One for my Baby, One More for the Road.”

I Hear Dinosaur Music. It’s Beautiful Music.

Modern Romance In The Noir

I included a YouTube clip of the song, but it has always bugged me a little that I didn’t play the song myself.

Then, also a while ago, I did a little film, “Dinosaur And Woman: A Puppet Show.” That film used a bit of the melody from “One for my Baby” with me playing it on keyboard. Again, I didn’t do a video of me playing the whole song myself. (But I did explain in a later post that my keyboard playing in that film got me thinking about synthesizers a lot, so that post has been on my mind a lot.)

I like this song. Mostly, I think, because it was one of the songs played by the robot musicians of Dr. Phibes’s clockwork orchestra:



Now I want to say I HATE people who drink and drive—NEVER drink and drive!—but I like this song. I plan on using little bits and pieces of the song in future posts so I decided to buckle down and do a post of me playing the whole song.

This is such a classic that I bought the sheet music.

For someone like me with little—if any—musical ability, looking at the sheet music for “One for my Baby” was at first pretty intimidating. Right away you notice it is written in two keys. My sheet music starts in E-flat, then modulates up a third to G. And, in both keys, there are some half-steps in the melody so there are accidentals in both keys. But when you look closely at the music, it’s not all too hard. It’s mostly four or five little melodies put together, with one section stated first in E-flat, then repeated in G, with more stuff added. On guitar it’s pretty straightforward, even with the key change and the accidentals. On keyboard, well, chord shapes are more convoluted on keyboard than on guitar so although I can play this on keyboard, I decided to stick to guitar for the video. It’s hard enough, for me, to put all this together on guitar. Each section is straightforward, but putting it all together, into one performance, that took some doing.


I should have let the puppets do it!












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