So Aldrine did a fantastic tutorial for Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds back in 2017. I was thinking about naming this thread Aldrine In The Sky With Diamonds, or Lucy In The Sky with Aldrine, but since I actually need help, I thought I'd play it a little straighter.
This really is a terrific tutorial, with only one hard part: a pulloff in the fourth measure of the intro that I'm still not consistently hitting, but I know it'll come with practice. Aldrine really does nail this. Here's the playalong (rather than the full tutorial that I linked to above):
Here's the thing that's really bugging me: there's a line that shows up twice in the prechoruses, and it's got a very distinctive slippy, slide-y movement at the end. The first time, it's "Towering over your head". You already sang it, right? You can't stop yourself. The "hea-aaaa-add" is practically three syllables, and definitely three notes. Then the second time through, "Waiting to take you away", and same deal. "Awaaa-aaaa-aaay" has three syllables, three notes.
The notation for that whole line is F to Bb....and I'm tellin' ya, even if that's what the Bug Boys wrote down, that ain't what's happening. There's no movement in that line, and I need the movement. There needs to be something after the Bb, and honestly, something probably needs to come between the F and the Bb.
It's not just Aldrine, either. This is pretty much what I see almost everywhere (Ultimate Guitar, Ozbcoz, Chordify, etc.) Every now and again, a sliiiiight variation, like Stewart Greenhill's F7 to Bb6, but still missing the movement.
I sometimes find that guitar or piano tutorials can fill in the gaps, and I thought I got a hair closer with a piano arrangement that goes
...until I realized that the most common first-position F/A for ukulele is played as a regular F (the A being supplied by the open A string), and still no movement underneath the three-syllable "head". So no help at all.
I do understand that the voice is what's doing most of the work here, and maybe I shouldn't sweat it. But I do! It's keeping me awake at night! While I do sing most of the time, I don't sing all the time (much to the relief of everyone in the vicinity), and I'd like to find a way to get closer to the mark here. I'm certainly open to any insights from the fingerstyle crowd, who I find are in general more inclined to go for accuracy over ease. (I'm all high G if that matters, which for this song mostly doesn't seem to.)
Anyway, fingerstyle or strummed, I'd sure to love to hear how any of you folks are doing these lines. The previous threads I found here were mostly people looking for tabs at all, long before Aldrine posted his in 2017, and none of them have helped me get any closer. Can you?
This really is a terrific tutorial, with only one hard part: a pulloff in the fourth measure of the intro that I'm still not consistently hitting, but I know it'll come with practice. Aldrine really does nail this. Here's the playalong (rather than the full tutorial that I linked to above):
Here's the thing that's really bugging me: there's a line that shows up twice in the prechoruses, and it's got a very distinctive slippy, slide-y movement at the end. The first time, it's "Towering over your head". You already sang it, right? You can't stop yourself. The "hea-aaaa-add" is practically three syllables, and definitely three notes. Then the second time through, "Waiting to take you away", and same deal. "Awaaa-aaaa-aaay" has three syllables, three notes.
The notation for that whole line is F to Bb....and I'm tellin' ya, even if that's what the Bug Boys wrote down, that ain't what's happening. There's no movement in that line, and I need the movement. There needs to be something after the Bb, and honestly, something probably needs to come between the F and the Bb.
It's not just Aldrine, either. This is pretty much what I see almost everywhere (Ultimate Guitar, Ozbcoz, Chordify, etc.) Every now and again, a sliiiiight variation, like Stewart Greenhill's F7 to Bb6, but still missing the movement.
I sometimes find that guitar or piano tutorials can fill in the gaps, and I thought I got a hair closer with a piano arrangement that goes
...until I realized that the most common first-position F/A for ukulele is played as a regular F (the A being supplied by the open A string), and still no movement underneath the three-syllable "head". So no help at all.
I do understand that the voice is what's doing most of the work here, and maybe I shouldn't sweat it. But I do! It's keeping me awake at night! While I do sing most of the time, I don't sing all the time (much to the relief of everyone in the vicinity), and I'd like to find a way to get closer to the mark here. I'm certainly open to any insights from the fingerstyle crowd, who I find are in general more inclined to go for accuracy over ease. (I'm all high G if that matters, which for this song mostly doesn't seem to.)
Anyway, fingerstyle or strummed, I'd sure to love to hear how any of you folks are doing these lines. The previous threads I found here were mostly people looking for tabs at all, long before Aldrine posted his in 2017, and none of them have helped me get any closer. Can you?
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You're right, of course. The first section starts at 44 second into the tutorial video (ie, the one you can see in my first post).
Singing the way John sang it, hitting most of the notes, feels mostly in reach...assuming I can get y'all's help finding the missing chords!
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). Keep ‘em coming!
