Currently I'm working on an instrumental medley of two Beatles songs, "Yesterday" and "Now and Then." I've done this before with "Blackbird" and "Free as a Bird," and with "Lucy in the Sky" and "In My Life." The latter four I combined into a "Beatles Suite" that I performed live in March. Once "Yesterday" and "Now and Then" are worked out, I plan to expand the "Beatles Suite" with them.
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I'm not aiming for a strict cover of these songs, but rather to do something personal with them. The melodies are the guiding force, so I begin by playing them in all registers, back and forth between them to cultivate some commonalities that might help a medley. It's in the early stages with these two songs now, so I'm just trying to gain some fluency with the melodies, and grabbing a few notes within reach to hint at the chord progressions. "Now and Then" is a bit haphazard, but I prefer the pruned down Lennon demo to the full-blown virtual Beatles version. To me it feels like the song was not ready to demo. It's more like a journal of ideas, with places that seem like he was meandering, or searching for something. While I respect that and what was done with it recently, I also see this as an invitation to try something new with it, especially within the context of the medley I'm doing.
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I'm not a full-time musician, so all of this is just for fun. I have a live performance lined up for early September, so the plan is to work on this new medley with the above rig for a month or so, getting the songs fluent. That typically involves using some pedals for inspiration. The guitar I'm planning to use has a built in compressor and phaser, so that renders the board-bound pedals redundant. Some kind of delay is essential, at least for me, so I'm going through my delays to find one that speaks to me for this medley. I tend to use a different rig for each performance, which to me is part of the fun.
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Finding a delay that speaks to me for this project serves a dual purpose, as I'm looking to downsize the collection by culling some of them. Today I tried the Ibanez DE7, which was not very inspiring. But part of the practice routine for the coming month, while internalizing the melodies for the two songs, is to play around with these delays. I just got started on this project, so there's a ways to go. Once the melodies are fluent and I've worked up some chordal accents and settle on a delay, I plan to return to the previous two Beatles medleys and figure out how to add this new one to them and expand the suite. The ultimate goal is to arrange a twenty minute suite of six tunes, as part of a forty minute live performances. Once that Beatles segment is comfortable, hopefully by August, I'll then rehearse the entire performance for the September set, which will tentatively include my previous arrangements of the Kinks' "Tired of Waiting for You" and Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man."
For now, I thought it might be interesting to share some of my work flow for these kinds of projects, which I generally do a couple of times a year. I hope you found it enjoyable. Thank you for reading.
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