The Regular Friday Post
Rando Lyric: And we got the sky to talk about
Welcome to The Regular Friday post!
ED: I needed to get out of my own head with some of my recent posts of songs I liked a lot or played a lot or whatever. Something different today, a purely instrumental song, featuring an acoustic guitar part that isn’t really the focus.
Last week’s rando lyric isn’t there because today we’re doing something different!
We’ll be featuring the purely instrumental song “Bryter Layter” written and performed by Nick Drake . It was recorded in 1970 at the Sound Techniques studio in London and released in March of 1971 as Track 1 on Side 2 of the album “Bryter Layter” by Nick Drake on the Island Records label.
Note the Wikipedia article discusses Bryter Layter as written and recorded by Mr. Drake for a BBC broadcast, later it was recorded for the album.
Produced by Joe Boyd
From: Wikipedia Link: Bryter Layter
From: Genius Link: (Album) Bryter Layter
Ed. Both sources provide interesting discussions about the musicians who backed on the Bryter Layter instrumental only track as well as others who contributed to the entire album…
Ed. I believe (without searching through several years of Michael Acoustic archives) that I’ve featured Mr. Drake before, but I don’t recall the song or when.
From Wikipedia: (Ed. a sad but too often repeated story…):
“Nicholas Rodney Drake (19 June 1948 – 25 November 1974) was an English singer-songwriter. An accomplished acoustic guitarist, Drake signed to Island Records at the age of twenty while still a student at the University of Cambridge. His debut album, Five Leaves Left, was released in 1969, and was followed by two more albums, Bryter Layter (1971) and Pink Moon (1972). While Drake did not reach a wide audience during his brief lifetime, his music found acclaim and he gradually received wider recognition following his death.
Drake suffered from depression and was reluctant to perform in front of live audiences. Upon completion of Pink Moon, he withdrew from both performance and recording, retreating to his parents’ home in rural Warwickshire. On 25 November 1974, Drake was found dead at the age of 26 due to an overdose of antidepressants.
Drake’s music remained available through the mid-1970s, but the 1979 release of the retrospective collection Fruit Tree allowed his back catalogue to be reassessed. Drake has come to be credited as an influence on numerous artists. The first Drake biography in English appeared in 1997; it was followed by the documentary films A Stranger Among Us in 1999 and A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake in 2000.”
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Some Stuff
A Song To Play:
I chose this song for this week because it does something we do perhaps maybe more often than we do ordinarily. At home or wherever you practice, you may be playing songs and simultaneously singing lyrics to some song you want to learn or master. When we play with a group at a jam session for instance, it’s more often us playing while someone else sings. One way to prepare for that is to practice instrumental only songs. If everyone pretty much is on the beat, you’ll sound great. If you’re supporting a vocalist you kinda have to adjust to their tempo and phrasing - which may be very different from what you had learned on your own or with only other instrumentalists. So it’s good to devote a little practice time to an instrumental only song, where you’re concentrating on the timing and beat of the music, but without a vocalist to adjust to. Your mileage may vary.
4/4 common time, a pretty quick 120 BPM, original appears to be Key of Fminor (with a non-diatonic Gminor, would just be a G chord diatonically in the Fminor key), chord diagrams below this chart:
From Chordify Link: Bryter Layter
Original chords (no capo):
Capo on 3:
Through the magical capo device, if you capo on 3 it’s still in the more or less key of Fminor and you’re playing what will sound like the same original chordal tones, but using more familiar chord shapes (D, C, Em and F). I know this capo business can be difficult to grasp at times. It effectively “shortens” the strings (here at the 3rd fret) which causes the tones to require different chord shapes than the originals, but still the same tones. Players of other instruments will look at you oddly because unless they’re piano players they mostly don’t play chordal music on one instrument. Other instruments (woodwinds, brass winds, strings) play single notes at a time and achieve chordal music when playing with others who can play the other notes of a chord. Guitars and pianos are capable of playing multiple notes at once (or so closely together they sound like multiple notes).
What if you left the capo off and just played the notes in the score just above (the “capo on 3” version)? Well, the notes would not be the same and it would sound different than the intervals in the original, but it would still be recognizable as this song, because it is the same song, only in a different key - here, the Key of DMajor. Which might fit your voice better than Fminor anyway. Or not.
I know we have a lot of new followers/subscribers (thanks again to Dave The Scholarship Coach) and some of this may sound like gibberish, but in the coming weeks I’ll reprise some of my music theory posts that may help make sense of this!
The “ME!” Section…..
My song is out- Link: “>Long Road Back<”click on this link for streaming options, then scroll down for links (or just click on these links) to Amazon, Apple, Pandora, iTunes and even Spotify
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Disclaimer Section
This Substack is free, I receive no compensation of any kind from companies or products I mention (except when you click on one of the links above for my song - then I might make 0.003 cents - yes 3/1000ths of a cent… just sayin…). Some linked or quoted material may be copyrighted by others, and I credit them. I rely on the “Fair Use” doctrine for educational purposes (Link: Fair Use). *I do not use AI for any of the text that’s found here, things I embed or link to (such as some images) might…
-Michael Acoustic
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In memoriam of the crew members of this aircraft lost over Iraq this past week
"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings”
High Flight by John Gillespie Magee Jr. Link: High Flight
Michael Acoustic
“It’s never really final - you just run out of things you can bear to change…”