1979

I've got a couple of songs to record but I'm not making the time for it, still over-committed. But there is always time to have heard a song on the radio and thought "I think that one could work". Normally I like to do songs nobody else has done, but when I looked this one up it had been done plenty of times. Oh well. Smashing Pumpkins, 1979. Classic alt rock from 1995. Some arrangements I saw were a bit over the top, I wanted something easy.

Fell straight into a bass-on-1 snare-on-3 style boom chick/finger slap, sadly, that's my default style. I try to get an additional bass note on beat 4 (which requires concentration), not just on 1 all the time. Especially when beat 4 is down a tone, or a fourth, or something interesting. But this song is mostly three chords - D, G, Em.

Billy Corgan played this song with the guitar tuned down a semi-tone, I don't do that sort of tuning. But what I am happy to do is Drop D and then put a capo on 1. So the D shape chord become Eb, same as the original song. And I still love Drop D even when it is Drop D up to Eb :-)

The song almost didn't need arranging. Play the cool Dmaj7 to D shape (I love maj7) - but in strange but cool inversion - bottom note is D (I'm talking no capo) and the next note up is C#...that's major 7th but normally you wouldn't put the C# in the bass. But it really works. Up to the G, remember the 6th needs that extra two frets.

Then it's just the melody on top which is pretty easy to pick/flick your way through.

It's mostly ready to record, and it sounds really good for not much effort in learning. I think it will be a recommended-for-beginners type of song. Slight bit of stretching in places for the left hand but otherwise easy, the hard part is in the right hand. Like all good fingerstyle :-)

I put a mic in front of me and recorded a demo...Apologies for the strings being totally dead (I've got plenty of new string sets but I don't want to spend the time breaking them in.) This is a very cutdown demo, just the main concepts.

1979 demo: