We're Getting "Meta" Today
What I Want To Talk About
Last Week’s Bonus Round: “"With a Little Help from My Friends" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, from their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and sung by drummer Ringo Starr (as Sgt. Pepper band leader, Billy Shears), his lead vocal for the album. As the second track on the album, it segues from the applause of the title track.
Lennon and McCartney finished writing the song in mid-March 1967,[4] written specifically as Starr's track for the album. McCartney said: "It was pretty much co-written, John and I doing a work song for Ringo, a little craft job."[citation needed] In 1970 Lennon stated: "Paul had the line about 'a little help from my friends.' He had some kind of structure for it, and we wrote it pretty well fifty-fifty from his original idea." But in 1980 Lennon said: "This is Paul, with a little help from me. 'What do you see when you turn out the light/ I can't tell you, but I know it's mine...' is mine."[5] It was briefly called "Bad Finger Boogie" (later the inspiration for the band name Badfinger),[6] supposedly because Lennon composed the melody on a piano using his middle finger after having hurt his forefinger.
Lennon and McCartney deliberately wrote a tune with a limited range – except for the last note, which McCartney worked closely with Starr to achieve. In The Beatles Anthology, Starr explained that he insisted on changing the first line – which originally was "What would you think if I sang out of tune? Would you throw ripe tomatoes at me?" – so that fans would not throw tomatoes at him should he perform it live (in the early days, after George Harrison made a passing comment that he liked Jelly Babies, the group was showered with them at all of their live performances).[7]
After it was released in the United States, Maryland Governor and future Vice President Spiro T. Agnew lobbied to have the song banned because he believed it was about drug use.[8]” Credit: Wikipedia
I used this as the Bonus Round this week because a little sleuthing revealed the 2-5-1 (ii-, V, I) chord progression we talked about last week was present:
F#m B E
Would you stand up and walk out on me.
Credit: Ultimate GuitarSo, no 7th chords, but triads in the progression. The song is in EMaj, so the chords:
ii- (supertonic) is F#m, the V (dominant) is BMaj, and the I (tonic) is EMaj.
As we talked about, this chord progression, and especially the more jazz influenced progressions in 7th chords (ii-7, V7, IMaj7) add a subtle “coolness” when a chord progression is getting a little repetitive and boring.
For this week, I want to get a bit “meta”, not in the current social media way, but more like this:
“meta” adjective: 1. (of a creative work) referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential
I ran across some interesting stats the other day. The average coffee drinker consumes 2.4 cups of coffee per day, and coffee at work takes up around 27 minutes of the workday. Extrapolating (somewhat generously), I get about 10 minutes on average to drink a cup of coffee. Credit: Coffee stats
Kind of interesting, in a “so what?” sort of way. But I applied the numbers to this SubStack. If you use the SubStack App, you’ll see an interesting stat: “x Minute Read”. I try to stay around or under 10 minutes “read time” - enough while you’re having a cup of coffee to maybe learn something or enjoy the occasional picture of my cat, but not so much that it’s taking up too much of your day.
So let me tell you what this is NOT. It’s not a pitch to go paid. “Michael Acousric” is, and will always remain, free to read, but also to SHARE!
That’s the real pitch here. I love to engage with my readers, and we’ve been growing pretty steadily, with minor plateaus and valleys in subscribers. I’d like to make use of the new Chat feature SubStack introduced yesterday (that I posted about then:,
but it’s only available to subscribers. My engagement stats indicate a lot of my readers “drop by” by finding me on Google or another search engine, or through other SubStacker’s links or engagement. That’s great, and I’m more than happy to reach readers who aren’t ready to subscribe, but want to drop in to see what this week’s Bonus Round answer is, or read about guitars and playing guitars, jamming, recording, performing, songwriting or the other topics we cover here. I also understand the annoyance of an email notification on Thursdays and Fridays, and so I highly encourage everyone who can to move to the app for iOS and Android for just that reason. The Chat feature, iOS only right now, but soon for Android and hopefully for the SubStack website (I couldn’t get a definitive answer to that question when posed to SubStack support, but they did say they would refer it to their “Product Team” - we’ll see… I know they’re busy too). I’d like to engage more in a give and take with readers, and the Chat feature seems like an interesting way to do that. Time will tell, I suppose.
So, bottom line, every post I publish has a series of SubStack generated “buttons”: “Subscribe”, “Share”, “Comment”, etc. What I’m really asking of my readers is to think of that one (or more) friend or acquaintance or whatever, who is, or is thinking about, or is frustrated with, being or becoming a guitarist, musician, singer, performer, doing home studio recording, songwriting, or understanding a little about music theory, or anything else we discuss on here, and then to hit that “Share” button and send it to that person.
Since I’m not paid, stats for me are only interesting from an “engagement” perspective, not cold, hard cash.
Help me engage with you, or someone else who needs an answer, or a little nudge or encouragement, or just some “how do I start?” help by sharing, subscribing, and engaging here or on the new Chat feature. If I don’t have an answer or reference, I’ll find it or someone who can provide the answer.
/Thus endeth the rant!! Thanks for letting me pontificate in a “meta” way a bit today.
Some news - I’m hoping to have an interview with an interesting gentleman I met in a sort of random email exchange up very soon. I’ll let you know!
Bonus Round:
Cheers and keep playing!!
Michael Acoustic