My wife has always been a huge fan of Bruno Mars. This week’s cover’s choice of song was hers. I could still remember way back during our college days when Bruno Mars wasn’t a household name yet. He was coming over to Malaysia and his concert tickets were well within the RM200 ($50) range. My wife suggested that we both go but during that time, us being students, and my not knowing how to recognize talent, choose not to go. Now, I’m forever haunt by that decision. Thankfully my ever-forgiving wife has moved on from it. I guess my way of making it up to her is to play whatever song by Bruno Mar’s that she intends to sing!
This song is one of his earlier works, dating all the way back to 2010. The chord progression consists of just 4 chords, in the same sequence throughout the whole song, verse and chorus. So when sometime is repeating itself over and over again, both the performers and the audience would quickly become bored if there was nothing else to spice things up. In order to make things interesting, the arrangement included a tempo change and also in terms of the style as well.
If you asked me, I would be the first to deny that I’m a guitarist. I basically just strum chords. My guitar skills were just enough to pull through for the first half of this performance. I plucked for the verse of the song and proceeded to strum to add a bit of intensity for the chorus. We made sure that we kept the tempo at a leisurely pace to maintain the relaxing feeling.
As you can see from the above, there were a lot of styles to choose from. We knew that we wanted to build up to an upbeat tempo. After going through the Pop & Rock category (I wasn’t too adventurous by going into Jazz/World as this is actually my first time attempting a recording with a keyboard with sequence), we decided on a style called “Jazz Pop”. I’ll liked the fact that it had the bass drum on each beat to give a driving feel to it. You could actually see my wife setting the tempo for the second half of the song. It took quite some practice with that and also helping me with my guitar.
The voice we found it quite hard to find something that we liked, especially for the bass part as they were either too short or too soft. I ended up transposing the keyboard 12 semitones (an octave) lower and also maximizing the LH voice to hopefully produce something that would serve as the foundation of the music arrangement. As for the sound for the chords, I went to my tried and trusty EP (Electronic Piano). As much as I loved the acoustic piano sound, I guess the EP would be more suitable in this modern, uptempo music. You be the judge.
All in all, it took us exactly 20 takes! It's nowhere near perfect, but it’s the closest we could get before going insane. Definitely, pray that we get better as we go along, and in turn produce better quality stuff for your listening enjoyment!