There is a really awesome song by the Beatles. There are several, in fact, but one of them is called Blackbird. Check out its majesty.
http://www.youtube.com/v/xkejcsvdpuQ
The above recording includes very pronounced bird sounds at some points, but notice the more subtle, chirping sounds throughout the song.
I figured I might learn something about the guitar by trying to play this beautiful song, so I obtained tablature for it from the internets. Now, as you know, there is a good chance that anything you find on the internet is crap, and guitar tabs are certainly no exception. For Blackbird, or any song of comparable complexity and awesomeness, you will find a healthy mix of transpositions, alternative [wrong] voicings and versions that bear no discernible resemblance to the intended song. Learning anything from internet tabs is largely an exercise in separating the sense from the nonsense. More often than not, no single file is entirely correct.
The first three beats are pretty obvious. It goes from G to Am7 then back to G (with D on the B-string). This figure starts the intro and the verses, under the lyrics “Blackbird singing in the dead of…” The guitar part under the word “night,” though also in G, is much higher pitched. The prevailing theory on how to play this transition required moving from x-2-x-0-3-x to x-10-x-0-12-x. Fret 12 on an acoustic guitar is just about as high as you can get on the neck without a cut-away. A long, fast, move like that is generally a bad idea for several reason, so I figured it could not be right. I tried various fingerings of G on various strings, muting and moving in different ways, but nothing seemed right. Even identical notes, when played on different strings, sound a little bit different.
Moving from 2 to 10 is really a problem there because of the speed of the picking pattern. You cannot move your fingers from the previous notes until the end of their beat, and you must have all of your fingers in place for the following note at the beginning of its beat. There is no way to cheat on this one. Furthermore, if you lift your fingers too quickly, the strings will ring open, meaning you would then have to mute the A and B (but not G!) strings with your right hand. Then, the action is much higher at fret 12, so you have to come straight down on the strings very precisely, very quickly, or you will get a rattling sound from an adjacent string.
The only alternative is to slide your fingers along the strings all the way. Sliding, even after you have muted the strings, produces a raspy, scratching sound as your fingers move along the low strings’ wrappings. For a short slide, it is not much of a problem, but if you move that far, that fast, you end up with a very noticeable, high-pitched squeek–like a short chirp.
So I guess there is less on the bird track than I thought.
Watch this denizen of YouTube play it. He does the long slide slowly, letting the ringing notes change pitch as he moves his fingers. Even so, you will hear little chirps as he plays the rest of the song.
http://www.youtube.com/v/EFiqFfzDhvk
I knew The Beatles were a pretty big deal. I knew that much of their music was more complex and structurally different that what was commonly played at the time. Still, I was astounded. The song is about a bird singing, and the chirping sounds are a byproduct of the way it is played. How awesome is that?
