I got the Live at the Hollywood Bowl album for Christmas, and I finally listened to it to-day. I discovered something about "You Can't Do That" that should have been obvious when I listened to A Hard Day's Night every week a couple years ago: the "down"s in the lines "I'm gonna let you down" and "I think I let you down" have descending melismas. I referenced the studio version and found that each "down" in "I'm gonna let you down" is sung to the phrase C Bb G, but the "down" in "I think I let you down" is just C Bb. However, in both instances, there's a musical representation of the "down-ness."
Yester-day I learned the bass part in "Hello Goodbye" (although there are a few notes I'm not that confident about and I learned it only up until the tag). I don't think any of the verses are the same because McCartney puts a lot of variation into his part, so in order to be accurate, I had to notate the whole thing.
After practicing it, I noticed that one phrase sounded familiar to me. It's the phrase that links the chorus to the next verse (although it's different between the second chorus and third verse):
Excluding that first half note, the notes here have the same intervals (and at least a similar if not the same rhythm) as a phrase in George Gershwin's "Someone to Watch over Me," specifically the line, "There's a somebody I'm [longing to see]." I don't think I've come across anything that says that the Beatles even knew about Gershwin, much less quoted him, so I think this melodic similarity is just a coincidence. Still, I thought it was interesting.
When I listened to Beatles for Sale a couple days ago, I noticed that the electric six-string part in "Every Little Thing" is just two phrases and (I think palm-muted) chords at the end. That seemed pretty easy to figure out, so I did that yester-day, but then I also got the entirety of the twelve-string part (which I'd tried to figure out months ago with no success). I knew about half of the piano part (the four notes during the verses) although I don't remember quite when I learned it (I knew it last April at least), so I figured out the other part too. There's timpani at the same time, so I'm not entirely sure those notes are accurate (I might be playing the timpani part instead, although it's entirely possible that the piano part just doubles the timpani).
I referenced The Beatles Complete Chord Songbook for the chords, although I didn't follow exactly what they have. Like I mentioned before, I think they try to incorporate other elements of the arrangement into the guitar chords rather than just listing what was played in the original recording.
I'm not sure if I have the last half of the twelve-string solo right as far as where I played it on the fretboard. The top two pairs of strings on a twelve-string guitar are tuned to the same note where the other four pairs are the same note an octave apart, so depending on where on the fretboard something is played, there's a difference in sound.
I figured out the chords for "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" to-day. It's just a three-chord song in E major, and since the chords are all I know, I'm not going to record it. I just wanted to note that I learned them and - more significantly - that I referenced Carl Perkins' original and found that it's in the same key (or, rather, that the Beatles' version is in the same key as Perkins').
