Raven said:
He used multiple pianos. The vocal line and rhythm/lead (where there is a single rhytm/lead line) may have been done on one piano, or the bass and vocals, but there's definitely more than one piano there. If you want to learn to play it, though, you don't need vocals, and bass isn't entirely essential. And besides, most guitarists (I for one) will use whichever leads or rhythms are most prominent when playing by myself-you can just learn the main guitar sections for each song, and maybe a few of the harmonies-for myself, working out harmonies is much easier on piano than guitar (most of it is just dropped a 3rd or a 5th or an octave, anyway), but that's probably cos I'm new to guitar...
I disagree with some of those statements. For starters, the bass
is essential, especially for bass-heavy songs like Iron Maiden. However, I think that basslines, when translated to piano, sound better when played in a piano-like idiom. Rapid repetition of the same note sounds good on an electric bass, but doesn't work as well on piano. In fact, it's one of the things that I don't like about the piano tribute album. While it's not exactly disastarous, it could have been done better. For example, rolling octaves sound great on piano.
(Useless interjection: do you have any idea how hard it is to write a coherent post while listening to Frank Zappa? The man was brilliant, and his music virtually
demands close attention.)
Rolling octaves is a technique where the pianist takes two notes one octave apart and alternates between them at high speed. When done well, it sounds almost like thunder. One of the greatest examples in the piano repertoire is the first movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata - listen to the moment about one minute when the tempo changes from slow to fast. When I mess around on piano and play rock songs, I often use rolling octaves to make the bass more interesting.
Another option is
Alberti bass. This can be done cheesily, making it sound like a bad Mozart imitation, but with care it can also be done well. However, because it is so closely associated with classical music, it should only be used sparingly in rock. One prominent example can be found in a Billy Joel song, "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant": listen at about the 6:12 point, just before the reprise of the opening lyrics.
(And before you knock Billy Joel as lousy music, he was a great piano player and songwriter back in the 70s, when that song was recorded. In fact, it's easily his best song in my opinion.)
As for saying the lead vocal melody doesn't need to be played - that depends upon the intention of the player. If I were aiming for a pure piano version of any song (that is, with no singer) I would consider the vocal melody to be
mandatory. With a lot of rock songs (including Maiden), take away that melody and all you've got is a repeating riff which can get boring.
In my opinion, working out harmonies is actually much harder on piano than guitar. The construction of a guitar lends itself to easily learning to play specific intervals from any position. If you know how to play an A major scale in the fifth position, then you also know C major - just move the exact same finger positions up three frets. On piano, every scale has a distinct "shape" and requires different fingerings. In other words, I can easily play a major sixth above any given note on the guitar just by knowing a fingering without knowing the scale. On piano, I have to know the scale first, and then determine the fingering. This may admittedly be easy for experienced piano players, but it's much harder if you're coming from a guitar-based background.
In short*, I don't consider it to be a handicap to learn right and left hand parts separately and then combine them. For one thing, that's the way I've always learned piano pieces. Secondly, looking at them separately allows me to modify them more easily if I want to have an arrangement that sounds like it's built for piano in the first place. Overall, that was my major source of disappointment in the piano tribute album. The musician who did it followed Maiden too slavishly. He should have put more originality into his arrangements.
In fact, that's my biggest complaint about most covers. Sure, it's amusing if you can cover a song note-for-note. But why do it, unless amusement is all you're after? I'm not saying amusement is bad - playing a perfect cover is fun for the band doing it, but that's about all. I'm much more interested in covers which substantially alter the original version. For example, on Dream Theater's cover of the Number Of The Beast album, the only song which really interested me was Gangland. Or with my own band, the covers which I find most fun are the ones which we put our own stamp on - such as our death-metal-style version of "Tainted Love", or our reggae/blues version of "Purple Rain".
*Too damn late. I abandoned the concept of a "short post" several paragraphs before this. In fact, at this very moment, I'm disappointed that I've run out of things to say. I've got another 15 minutes before I have to leave, and I was hoping to fill all this time with writing one post of unholy length - what us oldtimers sometimes call Loose-Cannon-long. Although, given the trends I've observed on this board in recent months, perhaps our standard for excessive verbosity should be referred to as Iron-Duke-long. That guy can really get on a roll when he's in the right mood. It's probably all that higher education. I bet his posts would be shorter if he wasn't accustomed to writing dissertations and those kind of things. It's a problem that all historians have - they just don't know when to shut up. I mean, right now I'm reading this book about the history of the US Civil War, and I'm up to page 700, and the author hasn't even gotten around to Gettysburg yet! That author should get to the point. After all, Gettysburg is the only thing normal people care about. That's why Iced Earth did those songs. If all the rest of it was so interesting, how come Iced Earth didn't write a song called "Antietam"? I bet it's because there aren't many interesting words that rhyme with Antietam. Ham, ram, spam and of course damn. But in these modern days, the word "damn" just doesn't have sufficient shock value anymore. In fact, I don't know if any words at all really shock anyone. Certainly "fuck" doesn't, and it's supposedly one of the worst of them all. What we need is some new curse words. Someone needs to invent a word that sounds like nonsense, and then we all need to agree on a disgusting, perverted, repugnant meaning for it. But are there any unnamed perversions left out there? Since the advent of the internet, every perversion imaginable has been given a website and a name. You kids today have it easy. I remember when I was a kid, if we wanted midget porn, we had to hike thirty miles in hip-deep snow, uphill both ways. And when we got to the midget porn store, we were lucky if they weren't sold out and we had to settle for clown porn. And anyone who has ever compared the two knows that midget porn is infinitely better than clown porn. I mean, the clowns have to dress up to look that way, but the midgets have their strangeness built right in. But now, if you kids want midget porn, all you gotta do is Google for it. This culture of getting what you want when you want it isn't healthy for rock and roll. Rock music is supposed to be about dissatisfaction. That's why the Stones song is such a classic. That's why the Twisted Sister song "I Wanna Rock" is so great - it implies that rocking is actually a struggle**. Which of course it is, if you do it right. Easy isn't good. You gotta be able to hear the blood and sweat and tears and effort and pain in the music before the music is great. That's why cover versions ought to be different from the originial. Just learning the original arrangement takes no brains. To make an analogy with cooking, it's like a home-cooked meal which requires hours of preparation vs. McDonalds. Learn the cover note-for-note, and all you're feeding to your listeners is the musical equivalent of a chicken mcnugget. It causes your listeners to develop unhealthy tastes in music. This is the primary reason why rap music is almost always bad. All they know how to do is sample old songs. That's why rap music is fated to fade away to nothing some day - eventually, they'll run out of songs to sample. And since they don't know how to write their own grooves, they'll drown in a stinking pool of their overwhelming ignorance. I'm not speaking out of prejuidice here (in the literal sense of pre-judging). I've listened to a lot of rap in my time. And 98% of it is sampled crap. Most rappers are music's equivalent of Cro-Magnon Man - temporarily successful, but on an evolutionary dead-end. And like anything else in this world, music which fails to evolve is fated to die. Oh shit, I just noticed I was supposed to be out of here ten minutes ago.
**Actually, upon further review of the lyrics to said Twisted Sister song, I found that the lyrics don't completely support my claim above. Only the first verse implies that someone is trying to stop the protagonist from rocking; and even then, the protagonist simply answers firmly in the negative and rocks anyway. So it would seem that this song wasn't a very good one to support my thesis. In fact, if anything, it supports the antithesis, in that the immediate negation of the antagonist by the protagonist suggests a protagonist who is not willing to work and struggle, but rather demands what he wants, when he wants it (in this case, the want being "to rock"). Why then did this song come into my brain when I was writing the above? Maybe it's just because I'm a big fan of Twisted Sister and I think Dee Snider's lyrics are great. Juvenile to be sure, but great nonetheless. Or maybe I just think that because I myself was a juvenile when I first heard Twisted Sister. It's strange how nostalgia can color one's memories. One's state of mind at the time a memory is formed has a huge effect on the factual accuracy of the memory. For example, I used to work at a bakery that was about a fifteen-minute drive from my apartment. But back in those days, I was smoking marijuana all the time - from the moment I woke up in the morning to the time I passed out at night***. So my memory of how to get to work was affected by drug use, and only worked when I was using drugs. I visited that town a couple years after I quit drugs, and tried to drive to that bakery. I got lost! A place I drove to every day for months on end, and I couldn't find it with a clean brain. There's a moral to this story somewhere. Is it "don't use drugs"? Nah. Don't ever work in a bakery!
***That's a reference to a fact that most people don't know about hardcore drug addicts and alcoholics. We don't really "go to sleep" and "wake up" like a normal person. We just pass out and come to. The goal is to push your body's ability to handle weird chemicals to the breaking point, then break it, then pass out until you can do it again and again and again and again. It's a monotonous life, but we try to convince ourselves otherwise by saying that we're "partying". But it's not a party. Real partying involves socializing with other people, and hardcore addicts don't do that. Their social circle gets smaller and smaller, eventually consisting of nothing but other addicts and drug dealers. Part of the reason for this is that normal people don't like hanging out with hardcore addicts, who tend to destroy the lives of everyone they know. But a more interesting part is that addicts like to be around those whose addiction is even worse than their own. That way, they can point at the other guy and say, "See, I'm not so bad. I'm not as bad as him!" Not surprisingly, many addicts won't even consider stopping until they get so bad that they can't find anyone worse than themselves to point to. You may have heard of the excessive drug abuse engaged in by the Toxic Twins: Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith****. When I first joined Alcoholics Anonymous, I met a guy from Boston who had been so bad that he was the guy who Joe Perry pointed to and said, "At least I'm not as bad as him!" Now that's an impressive level of drug abuse.
****Aerosmith is an interesting band name, from a linguistic perspective. It begins with two vowels. Off the top of my head, the only other bands who also meet that criteria are Audioslave and the Eagles - assuming that you don't count the "the" as part of the band name. That's a debatable point. I mean, if you're ever unlucky enough to be subjected to hearing an Eagles song on the radio*****, they never say "That was Eagles..." - they always say "That was THE Eagles." It seems some form of article is necessary. I'm also intrigued by case where an unnecessary article is inserted. For example, I've seen old rock posters where Pink Floyd advertised themselves as "The Pink Floyd". Where the hell did that "the" come from? But somehow it makes the band name more exotic. I used to play in a bar band which tried that trick. Our name was Cosmic Fate, but for one gig we advertised ourselves as "The Cosmic Fate". We used to play a lot of Ozzy-era Sabbath songs. My favorite was always "Hand Of Doom", which is easily the most underrated song on the Paranoid album. A beautiful ternary structure: slow, fast, slow. Just like a lot of Maiden songs. Tempo changes rock. They make any music more interesting. That's why piano players love the Pathetique sonata's first movement - it goes from slow as molasses in January to faster than a frog in a blender.
*****Speaking of radio, I was looking around at random Iron-Maiden-related journal entries on last.fm, and I saw one where a person said they recently discovered Maiden because they heard "Hallowed Be Thy Name" on the radio. Makes me wonder where that person is from, because I've never found a radio station that would touch that song with a ten-foot pole. But if it's happening, maybe there's hope yet for popular music. Not much, but some.
******I don't actually have anything more to say. I just wanted to see how small I can make the typeface before it becomes entirely unreadable. But why should I need something to say before I post? That hasn't stopped me yet, at least not in this post. However, I usually don't take that sort of attitude onto this forum. That's why my post count is fairly low, for someone who's been here for over 3 years that is. I don't usually say anything, unless I think I've got something interesting or important to say. It actually takes a great deal of effort for me to spam this forum. I sometimes wish more people had that characteristic. But then again, maybe a world full of thoughtful people would be less interesting. So therefore, I advise everyone - spam away! And if I, as a moderator, ever reprimand you for it, don't try to bring up this post as a defense. I'll long since have forgotten about it. You err, I apply discipline. That's the way it goes around here. ... No, wait, that isn't the way. I haven't disciplined anyone in a while. Perun does that nowadays. You err, The Holy Inquisitor applies discipline. I only stir the pot.
), but I sing the lyrics in my head. If you're going for the full experience, then I would agree that a vocal line is pretty much necessary to play the full song.
