Saturday, August 4, 2018

"When I'm Sixty-Four"


For more than a year, I've been working (now and then) on figuring out enough parts for "When I'm Sixty-Four" to make it worth recording.  Last July, I figured out the bass part for the verses and the tubular bells.  In April, I learned two of the clarinet parts at the beginning (it wasn't until recording this to-day that I realized that the same parts are repeated at the end), and over the course of the last few days, I learned the rest of the bass part (the bridges) and a bit of piano.  While recording this, I thought the clarinet phrase after the line "Sunday mornings go for a ride" (~1:19) sounded easy, so I figured that out too.

I never wrote down the two clarinet parts I learned, so I just filmed those in order to have some record of them.  I don't think the piano part is entirely accurate; mostly I was just playing along for fun.  The tubular bell sound on my keyboard isn't that great, so for my recording I actually used vibes.

The Beatles recorded "When I'm Sixty-Four" in C major, but sped it up a semi-tone, so for all of the parts that I recorded on my keyboard, I used the transpose function so I could play in C major and have it come out as C# major.  I did play the bass part in C# major though.

Here's the notation for the tubular bell parts.  I put them in C# major, but it's easy enough to disregard the key signature and play them in C major:

At ~0:58:


At ~1:54: