A True Story

warning: may get long and rambly.

It all started one fateful Wednesday, nigh on three weeks ago. I was practicing music, and decided to listen to a couple songs before I finished. 
This story is concerned with one particular song that got played,

Summer Belongs To You from Phineas and Ferb. *cue horns*
This song being played is nothing out of the ordinary, I had been (and still am) listening to Phineas and Ferb music recently*, this is important because it was now playing on the speaker, which, since I had been using it for bass, had the bass turned up, so I could hear the bass line, and oh, what a bass line.

I was excited and looked up a cover, so I could hear the bass line clearly**

Later, it being Wednesday, I had a music lesson, so I asked my teacher if he could get the tabs for the song, there was only chords, but I still had two avenues of approach I could take.

1. I contacted the guy who made the cover as I saw he had tabs and people were asking for and receiving them, to do this I had to make a Facebook account, then since I had to message him I had to download Messenger and make a Messenger account, and then after I politely asked him for the tabs, I waited a couple of days before I looked deeper and realized you had to pay for them using PayPal. And that was just too far, I wasn’t going to figure out how to make a PayPal account and send money using it, let alone the fact I’m only 15 and don’t just buy random things whenever I feel like it, so I was forced to take the second avenue.

2. If all else fails, use the cover to try to decipher what is being played and write it down.

But I’m getting off-track chronologically, Wednesday night, I was lying awake in bed and couldn’t get to sleep, and so naturally, I was thinking quite a lot. My thought process actually didn’t start with the days events, rather it started with something that made me think that we needed to find a song we could all play together (we being us kids who played instruments), then I thought if we did, and we wanted to do it for a recital, I’ve already discovered that you can do the recital both in a group and solo, then I thought, well what song would I do solo? And whenever I think that I always have to think about the difficulty of the song I want to play, because recitals are a way to show how your skills have grown, so you want it to be challenging you, and that is when it hit me.

“You know what I find challenging?” I thought to myself “Singing and playing at the same time” now that would be a good way to show off my skills. You all already know what song I thought of, Summer Belongs To You, perfect in more ways than one, from what I had heard the song had a great bass line, but also a simple one, the perfect combination for singing and playing, I already knew it had great vocals (what Phineas and Ferb songs don’t?), and the topic of the song is perfect as I would be doing it for the summer recital, and finally, one set of lyrics, “Life is full of music so you oughta dance — The world’s a stage and it’s time for your debut” and to a lesser extent “don’t waste a minute sitting on that chair” and “don’t miss the beat just get into the groove” apply quite well to the situation, as all the recital performances happen on a stage in front of a bunch of chairs for the audience. 

I knew it would be quite difficult to pull off, but I thought to myself “I have at least a few months before the recital, so lots of time to practice, and if I could pull it off it would be amazing!”

That concludes the story, but don’t go yet, now I will tell you how it is going, I’m about halfway through the “transcription”, which is actually quite difficult, and the chorus might just be too high for me to sing, but I’ve hardly worked on it, so we’ll see, but even if I couldn’t sing while playing it, the bass line is actually quite difficult and so wouldn’t be too bad for showing skill. I’m still excited about it, just not as unreasonably excited as I got/tend to get during the night.

I hope you enjoyed this blog and follow to see more like it, nah I’m jk about that.

*they have amazing music, if you like music you should check it out https://open.spotify.com/playlist/47I2M8JnSi9YnTZPvlUage?si=5hUSUHGyTBqIqauoF2eEYQ&pi=u-o2V8UoJgTkW
** You can hear it clearly no matter what you use to listen