music  |  pärtially in its right place

This page is a guide to learning the piece Pärtially in its right place on a tapping instrument such as the Chapman Stick or the acoustic Dragonfly DFA.

It's mostly an exercise that demonstrates an example of constructing fingersticking patterns from a set of block chords across the bass / melody side of a freehands instrument like the chapman stick. But, it works ok as short minimalistic piece.

Of note is it's slow/simple enough to examine easier than busier patterns that you usually see for fingersticking.

Another piece of mine, Eucalyptus is another example of fingersticking which is a little more free flowing

Musescore score + tabs

The Score (and tabs) to go along with the diagrams below is available ♪ here ♪

This piece began by me coming across a youtube video that had a piano player playing a short chord sequence of chords in a Radiohead song.

I not familiar with radiohead really, and I didn't even know the name of the song (at first), which turned out to be Everything In Its Right Place.

I liked the way the sequence moved from a (root) I C Major chord to a IV F Major chord. So, I put the sequence into musescore just to experiment with it a bit.

There is some debate as to what the key signature is of the original song. My construction does not have much relation to the orignal source so I just left the (initial) notated key signature as C Major

The chord progression

The progression:

| CMaj | D♭ | E♭add2 | G♭Maj♯11 | FMaj |

Is the beginning of the piece

As you can hear from the clip below, it starts with a stately slow tempo that, along with the harmonic flavor of the simply stated chords, linked together with a common tone in C, evokes a minimalistic feel, reminiscent of Arvo Pärt

The chord shapes

The arpeggiations

The arpeggiations are just the inial chords simply arpeggiated from low to high,bass side to melody side. the act as a nice transistion into the interleaves.

(One way) of developing a fingersticking pattern

• observation: each bass/melody chord has four or 5 notes
• allocate a 4 eighth note 'pulse' to each chord. This gives a gentle rythmic acceleration to the previous chords / arpeggios
• observation: the bass portion of each chord is 2 notes a fifth apart.
  • Those two notes can in a way be though of as two open note strings on guitar.
  • Your bass side (left hand) can be thought of as your fingerpicking 'thumb' doing some Travis picking. with an infinitely adjustable capo on those strings.
  • This is somewaht fanciful concept, but it does give you powerful way of thinking how you can project the bass + melody side into a getting the rhythmic and melodic features found in fingerpicked string instruments.
• Following thru on the observations of the bass side notes one can alternate (or as a next step interleave) the two bass notes with (or three) melody notes for each chord. For the five note chords we combine two notes as 2 sixteenth notes into one of our eighth note rhythmic slots.

The alternations (fingersticking)

Simple travis picking style fingersticking.

The interleaves (fingersticking)

Optionally, alter the simple travis picking style fingersticking. Extend the sixteenth notes to eighth notes (filling in the rests in each hand) so that the eight note fingersticking "slots" interleave/overlap. You can mix and match the overlapping also of course.

The modulations

C (I) → F (IV) → G (IV)

Experiment

You can try your hand at doing differents ones from C as a practice exercise as well as mixing up the order of chord , arpeggio, alternations, and interleavings that you do.

'Fingersticking' is a term coined by Jeff Pearce and adopted by Emmett Chapman. It is a playing style reminsicent of guitar fingerpicking accomplished by arpeggiating and/or interleaving notes tapped by the left (bass) and right (melody) hands

Travis picking.