Tuesday, September 1, 2009

A Modest Proposal

First of all, Clara Chung won the ISA concert. Hooray for more UC Irvine representation.

Anyway, I heard this song on the radio:
And a few things came to mind:

ONE: The song is incredibly pop.
TWO: The song uses a ukulele which is strangely popular recently.
THREE: The chord progression.
FOUR: The lyrics song go about like it's a love song from the whitest guy on the planet to a black girl.

Contest Details after the cut!



But mostly, I want to talk about the chord progression. If you listen to it, you'll feel like you heard it before, and it's beyond just ukulele covers of that Jason Mraz song.

They call it the "50s Progression." And it goes I-V-vi-IV. If you don't know what that means, know there are 8 notes in a major scale and that lowercase means a minor chord. But basically, the song's real chords are E-B-C#m-A for the Intro, Verse, and Bridge. The chorus is a change to A-B-(E-B)-A-B.

To say the least, the song couldn't be more easy to mess around with unless it was only a one chord song.

Four Chord Wonder Covers

To say the least, I wasn't happy with the covers on youtube. So, what I'd like to hear are different manipulations of the song. Do something different with it using your general knowledge of music.

I'm not just saying grab a guitar and webcam and play the song. That's boring. No one wants to hear that. I want you to actually do something with it.

And you don't necessarily have to cover the song. If you know how to manipulate audio, please do see if you can do so if you don't wish to cover the song.

Basically, I want to see if you guys can make a song better when it's pretty clear that the original artist hasn't tried.

Hopefully someone will try this out. Haha.

1 comment:

Charmaine said...

I'm curious to see what you would come up with too, haha.

And yay for Clara winning!!

I like this song, btw.